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Senior Thesis – Preliminary Thoughts & Ideas

Senior Thesis was always something I wanted to enter into knowing full-well what I wanted to accomplish. Being someone who has skills in a range of areas – cinematography and video editing, audio recording and production, digital painting and illustration as well as physical design and creation, I have felt overwhelmed in the broadness of options I have to produce a singular final project. 

Should I focus on a skill I’m proficient in?

Or should I reach for something I have no idea how to do?

After many sleepless nights and anxiety-filled brainstorming sessions, I think I’ve come across an idea that has sparked my interest unlike any that have crossed my mind thus far – guitar pedals. While building guitar pedals from scratch is quite a popular hobby, I have never dabbled in the craft or found much interest in them at all despite being an active guitarist for over 11 years.

I keep coming back to an encounter I had recently while buying a homemade guitar pedal (quite legitimately one of the only pedals I’ve ever bought) from a true DIY man, “I never really bought any pedals growing up because none of them had the sounds I wanted, so I just made them myself.“

My jaw dropped, man is he right.

My first goal is to learn how to build a guitar pedal from the bottom up – understanding electronic components and how they work and alter sound, soldering and wiring the printed circuit boards, creating unique enclosures using digital fabrication and branding the product to be my own. 

Once I generally understand the mechanics and intricacies of guitar pedals, I want to push the limits. Although this second phase is still in the pre-production stage, I would like to integrate features that have never been used before with an effects pedal. Whether that means adding proximity sensors that modify the tone depending on how far the player is from the pedal or having the pedal interface with your phone, I want my device to be unique to both the guitar gear world and Interactive Multimedia. 

As this process continues, I can also focus on certain aspects of the build to exemplify my talents. For instance, if I have more difficulty than suspected with the electronics portion of the build, I can focus on creating interesting and exciting enclosures that spark attention to my skills in design and laser engraving. Reversely, I can focus on creating the most distinctive tones and features a guitar pedal can have, utilizing microcontrollers such as Arduino to make the pedal more interactive. 

I am very excited and a bit nervous to see where this goes, but alas, I have an idea and I am going to run with it.

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My Thesis Project: Brainstorming

In class, we were asked to provide three ideas, so it seems to me that I should report those as my first post to the thesis class blog! Naturally, I had done plenty of thinking about my own thesis over the summer (and even before then), so I was definitely prepared to talk about two ideas in particular. Though, the “crazy” idea — perhaps we can substitute “particularly ambitious”? — had been floating around in the back of my mind a bit, too.

First Idea: Most Likely

Essentially, it is a web-based application for creating your own cross-stitch patterns. I was inspired by the obvious connection between this style of embroidery and pixel art, since each stitch is made in rows and columns. However, there are limitations of trying to represent a cross-stitch pattern as pixel art. For example, a program for pixel art will be unable to mix colors within a single pixel (as some patterns may call for), nor is it able to do any outlining between the pixels (the way backstitches are sometimes used).

A natural extension of this tool would be the ability to customize a pattern based on a digital image. While there are tools that can convert your image into pixel art, which usually also recommend which thread colors to embroider with, no program that I have found online factor in the two shortcomings of pixel art.

Basically, this thesis would be a major design and development project, with a focus on user interface (UI), computer vision, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Second Idea: Alternative

This was actually my first idea for a thesis project. It would be a revisiting of one of my early IMM projects: a game using abstract art to convey a message about the pressure to assimilate. The original venture was in p5.js (not p5.play!) and was never completed. The idea seemed to me the perfect way to come full circle as a college student. From my first coding class, to my final project as an undergraduate!

However, I am starting to question whether a career in game development is right for me. There are some serious cultural issues in the video game industry, such as working extreme unpaid overtime in periods of “crunch.” As a survivor of the Downingtown STEM Academy, I have learned the value of sleep, pacing myself, self-care, standing up for myself/my needs/my boundaries, and keeping sane. Basically, if I don’t go into game dev, why should my thesis project be a game?

I do, however, still consider this a legitimate alternative since there are clearly valuable skills to be learned by tackling my game as a solo project.

Third Idea: Particularly Ambitious

This one is hard to describe, but basically I want to consider accessibility in VR for people with limited vision by instead focusing on audio design. This would be less a game and more a toy/experience, as a person dons a headset and is tracked in their space. As they approach certain auditory stimuli, the [surround] sound may grow more intense. Some items would be interactive. I would want to include some tactile feedback as well, such as a gentle breeze.

It’s a more underdeveloped idea, but I consider it ambitious because I would probably have to learn to model, rig, and animate most of the objects in the scene. While I do want to expand my skill set through this project, I would much rather focus on my ability to problem-solve using code.

If you got this far, congratulations! This has been good practice building a post. Remember to check out the “Thesis Projects by Student” page and bookmark my category (Robin Friedman) for future updates.