You’re Voice is beautiful. It bridges the gap between artistic technicality and self-expression through its soothing chords and mesmerizing visuals.

For creator Andy Cabindol, his voice has been through viola performance for the past 8 years, but after starting his freshman year at NYU, he felt a piece of his identity missing. By designing and developing You’re Voice, Andy filled his previously empty passion for music, and also hopes to help others fill their musical gap or find their own musical voice.

Explore You’re Voice by waving the controller like how your inner child would; express your musicality through controlled hand movements.

My design process started with curiosity both technically and artistically. I reflected on the recent tools and techniques that I learned during my first semester at IMA. I also thought about how I was feeling emotionally, how much I progressed since moving to NYC.

I felt a piece of me missing which was how I used to play viola nearly every day back at home. That’s when I knew I had a final project idea.

I wanted to create a piece that fills my musical passion, allows others to fill their musical passion, and potentially invite others that don’t have a musical background to explore and find their artistic voice for themselves through a mesmerizing visual and audio sensation on the screen.

I planned on creating an experience similar to playing a viola. Users would move their hand horizontally to control articulation, and change strings (in this case, move their hand vertically), to shift across different pitches.

To achieve this, I utilized the Oculus Quest 2 for its Touch Controllers which were capable or reading the controller’s velocity, position, and more! However, I initially did not plan on using the headset.

My development process was split into two main steps: audio and visual. I decided to develop the entirety of the project in Unity since it could process data coming from the Oculus as well as produce stunning visual effects.

I started by understanding how to read data coming in from the Oculus. I followed tutorials by Fist Full of Shrimp on YouTube where he provided templates of Unity VR scenes. I downloaded and used his template as the base for my project.

AUDIO

I eventually learned how to read the controller inputs from the Oculus Touch Controllers and mapped the values to volume and pitch control of an audio source in the scene. The audio clip, at the time, was the note A playing on repeat.

I then changed the audio clip to a chord of notes (multiple notes in harmony with each other) to make the sound experience more soothing and relaxing. I also added a volume floor so that there is sound playing at all time.

VISUALS

I have always been fascinated by this YouTube video by Chris Courses showcasing flow fields, a visual effect produced by sections of different velocities and directions. There was something so soothing and peaceful watching the field flow effortlessly across the screen, so I decided to recreate it in Unity-or at least, something similar.

I was most interested in the “swarm” effect for is similarity in the perlin noise flow field. After playing around in the Unity Editor, I was able to achieve an effect similar to the perlin noise flow field. In short, a camera is placed in the center of a sphere of particles.

The attributes that I needed to control were intensity (brightness and speed of particles) and alpha (how much of the particles are being shown). The intensity would be controlled by the y-position of the controller and the alpha will be controlled by the absolute value of the controller’s velocity magnitude.

I wanted the user to influence the direction the flow field in some way, so after messing around with some of the attributes, I found one called “gravity”. This attribute influenced all of the particles to flow in a certain direction, not just down.

I mapped the x and y velocity of the controller to the x and y gravity of the particles respectively to achieve the final effect:

During my initial round of user testing, some users voiced their thoughts on utilizing the VR headset to view the VFX. So, I quickly developed a second version of You’re Voice that allows users to virtually be in the experience and not just on a screen.

Since this was only my second time working with Unity, it was super rewarding seeing how much I learned within a few weeks. Getting into the technical side of YouTube–watching hours of videos in seek of inspiration and tutorials–was definitely the most in-depth I have ever been for a project. What started off as a few ideas swiftly converted into a tangible experience that I can share with others.

If you would like to recreate this experience at home, I have provided a download to both the screen version and VR version of You’re Voice. You will need

• Windows PC capable of running VR

• Oculus Home Software

• Any Oculus headset with Touch Controllers

• Steam VR Software

1. Connect Oculus Headset to Oculus Software

2. Run Steam VR

3. Run “You’re Voice.exe” or “You’re Voice VR.exe”

4. If you’re running the screen version, make sure to keep the headset running by putting an item in front of the headset wearing sensor and position it to be able to view your movements

Download You’re Voice‍