Sarita Chen – Looking Outwards 7

My post this week for Information Visualization is about an experimental musical landscape for mobile devices called Carolina. The application was made in collaboration with the musical artist Kimbra (of whom I am a big fan, which is a large part of why I chose this particular project). The app was made alongside her album release The Golden Echo. The application, which is for the Android, uses guitars, base, mellotrons and vocals for the sound aspect.

The app is actually more than just an app. It was developed as a packaged website, as the creator, Jono Brandel, developed and debugged the app with Google Chrome.

The app is divided into two parts:

• The introduction, which functions as a starting point to introduce users into the app and as a loading screen while the song loads.
• The visualization, which is the actual graphical aspect.

What I admire about the project is first that I think the application itself is a pretty cool idea. I’ve always been a fan of very spacey world like designs, and that is exactly what this app aims to create. I also think that the graphics fit Kimbra’s music pretty well, and the fact that this is an app that one can easily download to their Android and enjoy is nice.

The visualization is created using three.js, which is similar to p5.js in that they are both Javascript libraries used for animation and creative purposes. The visuals are triggered by different parts of the music.

(Pictured above are examples of the app. The visuals are supposed to replicate the music taking you on a journey.)

I think the creators artistic sense is clearly shown in these works, as his other works seem to be a lot of interactive, visualized projects.

You can download the app from the Google play store here.

Here is the coding and a more technical explanation of the code and creation process.