Week 5 Blog Post, Balas/Everett/Levin

1.  Our first direction is to stay more acoustic and use contact mics to manipulate the noises of unlikely objects and create a performance with that acoustic material.
Pros:
This is a more intimate performance, and the acoustic sounds give a more organic feel. It would also be easier to fit this to a concept, where we can choose sounds in line with an idea.
Cons:
This is less visual than the others, and isn't a super original idea. The sound also won't be as "pretty" as a more processed approach, because contact mics tend to be very mid-y and harsh.

2. The second direction is to use waveforms found in percussive sounds to create sampled instruments that work with more acoustic rhythmic sounds to create a song.
Pros:
The sounds will be interestingly varied, and has an interesting rhythmic/melodic dichotomy. It's also easier to manipulate the sound digitally, so the noises will be more pleasing. There are also interesting things we can do with the visual, showing how we are using the waveform.
Cons:
This may be less intimate than the purely acoustic sounds. It is also less performance based directly, and may be hard to distinguish from a normal synth performance.

3. The last idea was to use the voltage generated by the contact mics to control the lighting in the room. We can do this directly with LED's, or use a more arduino based approach to control larger light networks.
Pros:
This is visually very interesting, and we can do a lot of cool things with the digital lighting.
Cons:
This is technologically complex, and the amount of time required to set this up well may not be worth the amount of interest it adds to the performance.