I’ve played with groups in similar ways before, but using emojis as the improv cues is a pretty clever twist!
We used a Max patch for our timer. It was pretty simple: we used the [lcd] object with a scaled counter and rectangle drawing messages to make a wiper across the bottom of the screen. Once the wiper went all the way from left to right, it would reset and the next section would begin. All the timing was stored in a [coll], with some text blurbs that would pop up as well, describing the section as reminders (who performs, how they perform, etc). This was all sent to a full screen jitter window on a laptop on stage. It worked well for the performers and the audience had no clue!
Max lends itself well for these kinds of things, but it doesn’t seem to support emoji’s as text, so you’d need to keep a folder of JPEGs or whatever of all the emoji’s you’d want to use.
There’s many ways to layer the emojis on top of visuals. I know how to do that pretty easily in Max, but I also make my visuals in Max, so that may not be the best approach in every situation. For the most flexibility, you could try to setup a scene with OBS to layer and combine various video input sources (hardware or software).
Re random or pre-selecting emoji pairs: I could totally see it go either way, but I’d just make sure you program some kind of self-awareness into it so you don’t happen to get the same pair twice in a row or similar pairs consecutively. (Unless that doesn’t matter to you, then by all means!)
For example: I made this simple but fun interactive generative harmony machine for part of my capstone project last year. To build an actual sense of harmonic rhythm, I made a table of probabilities based upon traditional harmonic progressions (adding in secondary dominants and modal interchange as well) that considers the current chord being played, and can proceed in harmonically-logical ways.
Granted, making a table like that for over 100 pairs would be really tedious and sounds not fun. If you had maybe 20 favorite pairs, and mixed these guaranteed good pairs with totally random ones, that could lead to interesting results!
