Sonic Breakout

Software	OO language with sound libraries, possibly MIDI
Covers	HCI, gaming, sound interfaces
Skills Required	Programming, good understanding of music, ideally good understanding of MIDI
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ???? Programming ???

Brief Description

The aim of this project is to develop a computer game that involves the user reacting to and anticipating a sequence of tones produced by the game, and producing his or her own matching or complementary tones.

The form of the game will be dictated by which of two not-very-compatible goals you have for it.

A game for blind people, or for sighted users who want a game to play in circumstances when they don't want to rely on their eyes, for instance when they don't want to get motion sickness in a car or bus.
A game for musicians and music students to develop their instrumental skills and their ability to recognise sounds, understand particular chords and progressions, and produce particular notes and sequences on their instruments, while having fun.

The game could work by having note sequences that depend (1) on how a 'ball' moves through space from high notes to low notes, and from near to far (which could be represented by loudness, or by stereo position, which would be easier from left tor right), and (2) on how the users moves his or her 'bat' from low to high. If that weren't hard enough, the game might be made more complicated by the ball hitting obstacles other than the bat or the boundaries, or breaking bricks.

Variants/Extensions

This project could be taken very different ways according to the basic choice of input device.

PC with keyboard. Using a computer keyboard would enable the use of very standard input technology at the cost of making a game that wasn't portable. Using a computer screen would also allow graphic displays of what was going on sonically, perhaps using harmony space to illustrate chord progressions.
Smartphone App. A game that relies on sound wouldn't need a very big device or the ability to see fine detail on a small display. Developing a sound-based game for a smartphone would however require understanding how to program touchscreen interfaces or ideally understanding how to use APIs for gesture inputs.
MIDI Keyboard. A game that used the full power of a piano-style keyboard or another device that generates MIDI output would enable the player to have full control over the range of sounds they produced. This power could be exploited by requiring the user to produce particular chords or note progressions to succeed, which might make for interesting challenges in recognizing what a piece of 'music' is doing, or more entertaining exercises for developing the motor skills needed to play an instrument.
Acoustic Instrument. A different set of technical challenges would be involved in programming a game that could use a microphone input to pick up the sounds the player produces on an acoustic instrument.

Instead of a game based on the idea of matching and anticipating moving tone sequences to keep the tone sequence in play, come up with a game based on an entirely different spatial metaphor for sound progressions.

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