Postmortem

My concept for this prototype was to create a sound toy inspired by the sort of chaotic feedback systems often featured in noise music. 

I knew starting off that simulating these kind of effects digitally in Unity would be extremely difficult if not impossible, so that was not my goal. Instead I aimed to create a basic feedback system, build some simple but strange mechanics into it, and hope it sounds interesting. 

The result ended up being heavily physics based, using a chain of springs and some balls to dynamically add and remove delay components from a simple feedback system. I'm happy that it's functional and can produce interesting sounds and I think it's fun to play with at least for a bit, but due to the finicky and volatile nature of both feedback systems and Unity spring physics, I struggled to get it to a point that I really feel is satisfying. While it can momentarily create some interesting sounds, it can't maintain them in the way a richer feedback system would, and I think the input controls lack the capacity for fine tuning and precision that is often useful when manipulating these kind of systems. 

I'm definitely interested in exploring this general concept further. Being able to quickly and dynamically adjust a signal chain - and map different systems and interactions to those adjustments -  as in this prototype is a special affordability of digital audio in a game engine, and I feel there's a lot of room for exploration.