A Different kind of Tone

Today was yet another Saturday working on Sphericles. Our previous (and really first productive meeting) was mainly getting things physically set up  and introducing the basic functionality of UE4 - especially the flow charts.

Getting to work today, now that I had known how to manage things better, was a lot less painful and a lot more fun. Now that we had a crude rudimentary model of, well, a crude rudimentary model of what we wanted, it was time to start applying what I learned by messing around in UE4 to help create what Sphericles is supposed to do.

Last week, chime sounds were played on contact with the spheres, but we want something a bit more dynamic than chimes. The idea is to get different kinds of tones to play for different kinds of spheres. At first, I tried to see if we could just change the pitch of some standard tone, but this didn't really lead to much distinction as I had hoped. I tried also to see if there would be any luck in procedurally constructing sounds from within UE4. No luck. I just decided, at that point, that the easiest solution would be to produce all notes as their own tones and mix and match notes to create chords from within a UE4 Sound Cue. Generating tones in Audacity, I was able to recreate all 12 the notes centered around A440Hz:

C, C-sharp, D, E-flat, E, F, F-sharp, G, G-sharp, A, B-flat, and B

Finally, I assigned an audio cue to randomly mix two tones to produce a chord to play for each sphere. Attenuation was assigned so that sound volume depends on distance from the audio source.