##Project Proposal##
Our idea for our project is to create a program where the user draws on the screen and the program generates music based on the drawing. We will be exploring user input, interactive drawing, interpreting information on the screen, and music generation for this. At the minimun, we would like to have a program where the user can place "stamps" in different colors or shapes with the placement representing pitch and the color or shape representing a type of sound. The program would then generate music as if it were reading the notes on a staff. What we really hope to do is have a program that can somehow interpret any drawing as music without using as rigid a structure of placement. A stretch goal would be to upload in image file and have the program generate music from that. This might involve extracting the major shapes in the image.
Lydia anticipates that figuring out what user-defined types we need to create will be the most challenging part of this project. She is excited to learn how to generate music with the program. Jane thinks that figuring out how to quantify and interpret the drawings on the screen will be the hardest part of this project. She is interested in learning how to process images and find the major features in them.
We plan to use pygame to deal with user interaction and most likely the music generation as well. We're going to have to use the drawings on the screen as input data for the program, and we're not sure whether we should store the location, color, etc. of brushstrokes as they're created, or actually process the screen like an image. We might be able to use something like openCV to process the drawing, but we'll have to do more research to find the best tool.
By the check-in on Friday, we want to have some of our basic classes written (the canvas and marker, for example) and a plan of the classes that we will need. We also want to have a roadmap for the project laid out with the different goals and tasks for completion. We will have at least the next few tasks assigned to one of us. We will have the libraries that we are using installed and make sure they have the functionality that we need.
Our biggest concern for the success of this project is the challenge of translating drawing data into music data. There is a relatively straightforward way as described above, treating the canvas like a staff, but to have the more freeform use that we want will be more complicated. We're not sure if we'll be able to process the drawings in the way that we want.