I learned more about Max in this assignment. I find it easy to use this software, as long as you spend time on it and is willing to learn it. In the creative process, I learnt a lot. As I worked on study 6, I found it important to reflect on the work of others. Keep the merits of other people’s work, and at the same time, improve the weaknesses of their work to make it more interesting and attractive. My study 6 is based on the Amy’s study, when I create my work, I have to learn about what element she used and how to use that element. Through this creative process, I learned a lot about the skills and techniques that I never learnt before, it has exercised my ability of creating, let me recognize the importance of the reflection in the creation. Besides, I think it is also important to reflect on my previous works. Because reflecting on the previous work may give me new ideas so that I can create better and more surprising works. Before I make the study 8, I think a lot about my previous work. I want to make the sound project better. I do not want to only use boring lines to show our sound. Them I decided to make our sound can used to build some buildings. Finally, I succeed and make a game which is using sound to control the buildings can be built on the screen. So rebuilding my previous work is not a bad thing, it helps me think differently, create differently, encourage myself to challenge and demonstrate my skills for improvement.

When I finished these three works, I found there are a lot techniques can be used to make interactive art. As a good interactive art, it may not need very flexible techniques to support it and it only can encourage people to join in and thinking about it. As this time’s requirement is sustained interaction, the project needs users focus on 5-7 minutes, thus I wondered in which way can make people sustainedly focus on and enjoy my work. I think the best technique I have learned is voice control. This technique is well reflected in my study 7, which using sound to control whether the building is built or not. I think users are happy when they experience my game. When they use their voice to build a building, they must be happy and have a sense of achievement.

Compared with my previous works, I think all three works are excellent this time. It is not mean that I did not work hard on my previous works, but I really like my three works this time and they are really can interact with people. I have to admit that they are very interesting and attractive. In addition, I was no longer completely dependent on the teacher this time, and I tried to complete my study by myself without the help of the teacher. My study 8 is a sound mixer similar to b-box, which sounds cool, but actually is not complicated. I used online tutorials to learn how to make a sound mixer, which eventually worked, to my desired effect. I think the most successful thing for me is not how excellent my works are, but my ability to learn independently and solve difficulties without escaping. More importantly, these three works proved my ability to create interactive art. I’m proud of myself.

For these three works, I believe I have some improvements, but there are still some parts I can improve. When I created my study 7, I could feel my weakness in operation, and I lacked technical knowledge. These difficulties forced me to turn to my teacher Camille for help. Although we finally solved the problem of the sensitivity of sound recognition of the computer , but the problem of my program loop was not well solved. In the end, I could only make a simple button and put a message next to it to let the user to manually restart the game. Camille told me that if you can’t get your computer to work well with you, you can think of ways for users to make up for your work. I think this point is very correct, and I will remember and apply it to my future creations.

I want to explore the music project. I have never explored the aspect of music in this software before. So I had no idea where to start. I started looking for tutorials online, and after watching many of them, I finally got the idea and started making it. I gave up the idea because there were many students who had made production about piano before. So I’m going to make a sound mixer, which sound mixer sounds like a b-box. I found some interesting audios in Max’s sound library and put them into my work. I used two elements Stereo and CYCLR to realise my idea. For the CYCLR part, people can change the speed to make the sound listened differently. I think it is pretty interesting. I tried to put in more music to get better results, but I failed. Because it’s hard to find music that sounds very harmonious. Eventually I gave up on the idea and chose four harmonious music’s for mixing, which sounded good.

Study 7 must take an idea, concept, or technique used in a previous study, and develop it further. So, I wanted to develop my previous ideas about sound. In the previous work, I wanted to shape the sound. So people can see their voices on the screen. In the previous work, I just used a variety of lines and the color changes of the lines to show the changes of the sound. Maybe it’s a little boring. So in the new work, I wanted to make it more interesting to interact with people. My idea is that people can talk, and when they have a certain level of voice, the building is going to go up, and up, and down, until the whole building is built. But on a technical level, I had some problems. I turned on the building floor switch and used sound to control it, but the switch didn’t seem to be sensitive enough to make it difficult to build the building. Cammille tried a lot of times for this problem in class, but it could not be solved. I did know what can I do to make this better. So in the end, I have to change a little. The final one is when you clap your hand, the building can be built one floor by one floor. Maybe this one is not good, but I already tried my best to do it.

In the study 6, we must discuss and reflect on the work of another student in class. When I experience all of my classmates’ work in class, I like Amy’s work best. In her homework, you only need to use four different keyboards, up and down, left and right, to control the movement of characters, so that you can avoid the pursuit of monsters behind you. It’s a simple game, but it’s really fascinating. So I made some changes based on hers. I changed the background into a maze. I think that’s going to give people a much clearer sense of purpose when they are experiencing the game. At the same time, I wanted people to be able to change the speed of the character’s movement by changing the height of the voice. When I was exploring how to use the change of voice level to control the movement speed of the task, I encountered some problems. I could not find a particularly suitable variable, that is, when the variable reached that point, the movement speed of the character would change. Eventually, with the help of the teacher Cammille, the problem could be solved better.