For my final project, I wanted to do something that created sound and was interactive. I had recently stumbled on Pluchik’s Wheel Of Emotion on wikipedia, and found the list intriguing because it was simple and complex at the same time. It allowed for a huge number of combinations, but the ingredients were very simple: 8 basic emotions, and 8 advanced emotions. I began to think about the human experience as an infinite spectrum, and in my project I wanted the participant to have infinite discoveries at his or her disposal. A problem I have with interactive text is that there are usually very few possible outcomes, especially compared to the huge range of choices we make and paths we choose in our real lives.

In order to create the sounds I used in “composition one”, I recorded short clips of sounds I created using a synthesizer. I used a Y-cable to convert the synthesizer’s mono RCA output to an 1/8” plug and plugged directly into my computer’s input. I used the freeware Audacity (available for download here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) to record the sounds. I then used the program to help me add empty space at the end of the sound clips, creating sixteen twenty-three second long files. I saved the files as very low bitrate mp3s so that they would be extremely quick to download, as this was important to make my piece effective. I uploaded my sounds onto www.archive.org, and the pages my files are on can be found here: http://www.archive.org/details/CompositionOne, http://www.archive.org/details/CompositionOnepart2, and at http://www.archive.org/details/CompositionOnePart2-b.

For the embedded sounds, I used the open source freeware XSPF Web Music Player (available for download here: http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ ). It’s the same music player that Archive.org uses. It was a little complicated to use because it required me to edit the code of a playlist file for each sound page and it took me a bit to get it working perfectly, but I did it. This FAQ helped me out a lot.