This week focused on a group tutorial session alongside the continued development of my digital instruments. I particularly valued the group tutorial, as hearing other students’ ideas and approaches prompted me to reflect more critically on my own work. One suggestion that stood out was incorporating strumming interactions and vibration feedback into a guitar instrument. This directly influenced my decision to further develop my second instrument, a guitar neck, in order to make the interaction feel more realistic and engaging for users.
Before implementing these enhancements, I needed to establish the core guitar functionality. I found this process relatively straightforward, as I was able to reuse and adapt logic from the piano instrument developed in earlier weeks. This reinforced my understanding of how reusable components and shared logic can significantly speed up development and improve maintainability in future projects. However, the most challenging aspect of this stage was sourcing suitable audio assets. I found it difficult to locate free guitar sound clips that sounded cohesive and as though they originated from the same instrument.
To resolve this issue, I used GarageBand to record and export my own guitar sounds, ensuring consistency across all six strings. This decision not only improved the overall audio quality but also influenced my visual design choices, as I drew inspiration from GarageBand’s interface. This experience highlighted the importance of audio quality in interactive projects and demonstrated how external creative tools can be effectively integrated into a creative computing workflow for future development.
