Featured Project
Piano Breakdown:
A FLASH Project by
Nick Garcia
http://www.noodlefix.com
One of Ari Danesh's FLASH lectures was on buttons and sounds, in which we learned how to write basic Actionscript behind buttons so that when you press them, sound files would play. When you think about it, that's just like how the piano works; you hit a key, a note plays.
That's how I ended up doing the PIANO BREAKDOWN for my FLASH project. My thing was, how hard is it to draw piano keys in FLASH and write Actionscript behind them, so that onPress, they would play "do-re-mi..."? Not that hard, I thought, except that I was planning on replicating a full seven scale piano, like ones that you see in hotel lobbies and Grammy awards. Writing actionscript for 88 buttons can be daunting, I know, but I also couldn't imagine piano any other way. Anything less, I felt, would be disrespectful to John Legend.
The project was not so much complicated as it was time consuming, and what's interesting is that half the challenge was outside FLASH. The first task was to find sound files of piano notes, and since not one site on Google offered, I had to connect my digital piano to my laptop, put post-it notes on the keys (also turned out effective for naming conventions), played and recorded each note thru a sound software a classmate recommended.
After recording, I edited each sound file by deleting the dead air before and after the sounds. This 1) saved file size, and 2) made the FLASH piano keys more touch sensitive by eliminating the time between pressing them and hearing the notes. This turned out especially crucial in chords, where I wanted to make sure that the notes played simultaneously.
I imported the sound files into FLASH, giving each one a sound identifier. Once that was done, I created two buttons in the shape of piano keys, one white and another black, and laid down a combined 88 instances of these buttons on the stage. The Actionscript was written so that each instance of button, onPress, would call on a sound identifier to play its respective sound. I applied the same principle with the chord buttons, except that they were programmed to call on three or four sound identifiers to play all at once.
The biggest headache was constructing the demo page, which turned out more tedious than I'd expected. Halfway through miming Carey's We Belong..., I was cursing myself for even including the section, but just like the 88 keys, I knew it had to be done, for what's a piano without a tune? The main goal of this project was to make the piano more approachable; to encourage viewers to become pianists themselves by giving them an illustrative and interactive environment. I felt that a demo would give the classic instrument relevance to contemporary music, which I think was a good way to stir interest in most of us who otherwise equate piano with Mozart.
Ultimately, this is about helping us viewers connect to the instrument. That's why I made sure that the graphic design would reflect just the true nature of piano: elegant yet strikingly simple, bearing that stark contrast of black and white which allowed the piano to reveal its true colors more through sound. That's another valuable lesson about FLASH — we'd think it's all about visual frills and animation, yet this project is an example of how the program can also be used for participative music. That, to me, is its most rewarding accomplishment.
