Project Nimoy : The Concept

Listening to Monday Jazz (#113 by Duende Beat) while I write this and totally diggin' it.

The basic concept of the project is this - take a basic image that consists of colours on a basic greyscale, assign a musical note to each of the tones, then use any instrument to play the song of your work.

I expanded on this concept. I've always been interested in the rhythm of gameplay you feel when you're playing a sidescroller and know what you're doing - when to jump, when to dodge, when to fire. I've wanted to tie this into music, not really knowing how. I still don't, but this project seemed like a good place to start.

So here's the image I chose:

Nothing says geek cool like Nimoy chilling on his '64 Buick in a Starfleet uniform.

From that I pulled a small image, the Starfleet logo on his shirt and a bit of the surrounding fabric to get some different tones.

I dropped that into Photoshop and painted over the image to make the tones more distinct:

Now we assign a musical note to each of the tones, based on this scale:

Draw an imaginary line through the horizontal axis. As the background image scrolls, different tones will be in contact with the line. We then play those notes as the background music.

I'll be using FamiTracker for the music, so this will make more sense when I get into that.