Imagine what would happen if you walked down a path and came upon a bare tree. A small bud catches your eye, you reach out to touch it and suddenly a musical sound emerges while the bud magically opens up into a beautiful flower. Your curiosity leads you to touch another bud, and then another, each with a different sound. The sounds envelop you.
This is Gardening: a new innovative VR experience using an interactive system to generate original music through the concept of gardening. After being immersed in a natural landscape, you will be able to choose where to make flowers bloom along with corresponding musical notes. Those flowers will bloom over and over at randomized intervals, resulting in evolving harmonies. Your very own composition.
This is a magical musical journey.
Whether you have musical experience or none, the Gardening experience allows you to step into a world of nature where you will have the opportunity to create beauty while generating music at the same time.
Tap flower buds.
Enter the Gardening world and see barren trees with green buds. You can hear the sound of the ocean, and the color of the sky is synced to real-time—if you play Gardening during the afternoon, it’ll be a bright blue sky, versus a dark sky if you play at night.
Hear them bloom.
The sounds you hear are limited to the specific notes in a pentatonic scale (either C, D, E, G, or A). You could play any combination of these notes and not have to worry about if it sounds “bad”—jazz musicians love to use this pattern of notes to improvise because it sounds cool in any sequence!
Listen.
Each note will repeat at randomized intervals according to an algorithm. This is what makes Gardening a VR generative music experience: generative music is music created by a system. It plays on the interaction from your inputs with computer-generated randomness to make endless music that is always changing. Listen to how your rhythms and harmonies evolve!
How can I experience Gardening?
Gardening works on the Oculus Quest and Quest 2. Currently, it is not on the App Store,
but if you are curious to experience it, please email Sarah at sjychen2@gmail.com!