This chapter is to better explane how to interact with NOTE. In particular here is explained how to make an audio item and the reasons of some choises.
The section about sound recording, editing and drawings animation was one of the big challange in designing NOTE.
To desing this part of the software we focused our attention on two problems. The first one is to give to the user a quite complete tool for audio editing. The second is to make it as simple and playful as possible, trying to avoid to make a silly toy but in order to obtain a useful tool which doesn’t scare people who are not used to do this kind of work with audio.
AUDIO RECORDING & EDITING:
The aim about this section was to let the user to record and edit quickly his ideas by giving an interface which keeps only the most important tools used in professional softwares for audio editing.
The reason of this choise is due to give the opportunity to the artist to make his little sound constructions rather than only record a sound and wait to be at home to work on it, as he already do using audio recorders.
NOTE represent the sound wave by drawing the envelope of the wave form. The envelope is the rapresentation of the volume’s changes in time.
This rapresentation was chose because in order to save space and keep a clean area to work rather than have a more technichal approach which is too much than what is needed to make a quick editing.
To edit sound NOTE offers few simple tools which are normally used in all the professional software for audio works.
Cutter: if this tool is selected the user can scan his audio track by moving his finger over the audio wave. Then when he find the piece he like he has to move quickly down the finger, as it was a knife, to cut the audiowave.
Pitcher: this tool is used to change the pitch of the audio record. By changing the pitch the user changes the frequency of the waveform, so he can obtain musical notes from the same record.
Pencils: to change the colors of the audio samples in order to avoid confusion during the editing.
Rubber: to cancel audio records.
DRAWINGS ANIMATION:
After the editing the user can save his work by drawing something on his page. So the sound will be rapresented by the drawing, and the drawing can be animated in order to have a visual feedback when the sound is playing.
To do this animations we didn’t thought about a complete set of tools. Anyway we suppesd an interaction ruled by the position of anchor point and drags by finger.
For instance, if I have a square I can set a special anchor point on one of its corner. Then when I drag the finger the square can only rotate on that corner, and so on.
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