Ruratae

Always wanted to play with virtual physics-based objects in a playful way? Andrew Stewart Allen is a programmer, researcher and composer based in San Diego. His recent work is mainly focused on researching and programming physically-informed real-time interactive audio systems. His system Ruratae, which he also wrote his dissertation on, is exactly this. Ruratae is a collaboration of him with visual artist Susanna Var, who created the unique visual style and UI.

For some reason, procedural audio is still not widely used. In software and games, the same sample is often loaded and played, making for quite static behaviour. Procedural audio can make a simple interaction seem like a living, breathing thing, even if it’s just another tidbit of code. George Lucas, Danny Boyle, etcetera, they’ve all been known to say that sound is a very important part of a film. In interactive media, interactive audio has been scarce, which is a shame. The effect is very clear in Ruratae, where the smallest change makes for a totally different sonic beast!

People like Drew are pushing the boundaries and opening up lots of new possibilities with something like Ruratae. Being able to create your own instrument from scratch in a virtual world, according to physical rules, with no DSP knowledge whatsoever is a very interesting new take on audio in games and other software. If you’re a Windows user, you can try out Ruratae yourself!

As Drew is not only a technical guy but also a composer, we’ve invited him for the Five Sound Questions next week!

Sonify... Wi-Fi

With the coming of “the cloud”, and other services which rely on wireless internet, we’re living under the impression that Wi-fi is constantly around us. However, if you travel a bit like me, you’ll still often find yourself looking for Wi-fi. Furthermore, even when it’s around, the very fact that it’s wireless sometimes makes it a vague technology.

In the “Sonify…” series, we look at different ways of sonifying data. This time: Wi-fi signals. Phantom Terrains is a collaboration between science fiction writer Frank Swain and sound artist Daniel Jones. Swain has been slowly going deaf since his teens, and he’s been thinking about using hearing aids in different ways.

Phantom Terrains works by receiving a wireless signal on a hacked iPhone and sending the sounds to Swains hearing aids, connected via Bluetooth. After a few months of testing and experimentation, they’ve released the first audio of their sonification. Wi-fi is a very rich signal, almost as rich in data as our own physical surroundings. In urban life, it is almost constantly around us, so Jones made sure it sounded like something which would not be too intrusive, and could be around you all day. Distant networks are heard as a gentle clicking, which ticks more frequently as the wearer gets closer.

I think the fact that one could create an application where you’d be able to choose between different layers of sonified data is very promising. What other signals would we be able to sonify?

Sonify... Wikipedia

Sonification, and especially data-sonification, is still an underused technique. I’ve been quite interested in sonifications, and have heard both very useful, as well as utterly rubbish applications. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around which sonifications work, and which don’t.

In the “Sonify…” posts, I will post about different ways of sonifying data. This time: Sonfiying Wikipedia. Listen to Wikipedia by Hatnote is a sonification and visualisation of changes being made to Wikipedia. Hatnote is Mahmoud Hashemi and Stephen LaPorte, both interested in “Wiki life”.

“Listen to Wikipedia” sonifies changes from Wikipedia-articles in real time. Bell sounds indicate additions, and string plucks indicate subtractions to an article. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit. It’s worth noting that Wikipedia is maintaned by both bots and humans, and it’s only through these web experiments that we can see or hear that labour force.

What do you think? Is this a good sonification of the data of Wikipedia?

Sonic Movement

As cars become more and more silent, the question “what should cars sound like?” becomes more and more relevant. Already back in 2009 this was a question with the then evident success of the hybrid car, see this post.

We’ve also seen the project Play the Road recently - which is focused more on making music than making the city a nicer place.

Sonic Movement however, is a collaboration between Semcon, who have been developing automotive solutions for quite a while, creative director Fernando Ocana and hybrid designer James Brooks, and music/art duo Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst. The project aims to make the car sound in harmony with the rest of the city, which is a great aim, if you ask me. Like they state in the video:

“While our cities are in continuous visual and tactile evolution, our sonic landscape is primitive and disordered. With the dawn of silent electric vehicles comes a need for pedestrian warning sounds. This represents an opportunity to reflect upon the noise of our streets today and fantasize on what the future of our cities could sound like.”

I’m particularly amazed by the way they were able to tackle safety, took the surroundings into consideration, and made it musical. Would love to hear this in action, and to know more about the underlying technicalities!

Play the Road

There’s some music I associate with traveling by car. I don’t own a car and travel by public transport most of the time, so it’s mostly based around memories of sitting in the back of my parents’ car, listening to Phil Collins, Crowded House and the like. But I do ‘get’ what people call “driving music”. Some music’s just better suited to drive to.

Volkswagen played on this concept, taking driving music further. Collaborating with dance music artists Underworld and audio specialist Nick Ryan, maybe best known for his 3D audio game Papa Sangre, they created an app which reads different data streams from a smartphone which are then used to generate the music. So when you’re slowly driving along a country road on a rainy thursday morning, the music’s going to sound a whole lot different than if you’re speeding down the motorway on your way home that night.

I think it’s good to see technologies like this that have been around in more open-source efforts like MobMuPlat being used by R&D departments of bigger companies to bring new experiences like these to a broader audience. The app isn’t commercially available yet, but they are inviting people to “play the road” themselves.

DrumTime & the perfect metronome sound

Most sound designers probably won’t get very excited when they’re asked to create a metronome sound. No sticking microphones onto fancy cars to record their roaring engines, no impressive out-of-this-world explosions. But I guarantee you, that metronome sound will reach the listeners ears many times more than those sound effects! After I started selling minimalist ringtones over 1.5 year  ago, I started focusing my sound design on simplicity and effectiveness. From that perspective, creating the perfect metronome sound for the newly released app DrumTime offers a nice challenge. 

DrumTime is a Mac App created by Siemen and Felix of badRabbit, a small startup located in Amsterdam. It connects to MIDI enabled percussion devices (electronic drum kits, drum modules), analyzes a drummer’s input and gives visual cues about the timing. The metronome is flexible - it can be set to every beat, or less if the drummer is getting more confident and needs less guidance. 

The design of a metronome sound to be used with drums only comes with a few requirements to keep in mind: 

• There should be the least interference with the sound of the drums as possible. The sound should not get masked by whatever the drummer is playing;
• This means a broad spectrum has to be present in the sound - a drum kit covers a large part of the sonic spectrum and its sounds contain a fair amount of noise;
• That said, the sound should still be pleasant to listen to during an extended practice session. So it’s all about finding the right balance between loud, clear and present on one hand and subtle and pleasant on the other;
• There should also be a clearly distinguishable tone in the sound, so the first beat can be indicated with a higher pitch. This might not sound like a problem, but while focusing on the other requirements it is easy to forget about the tonal aspect of it. 

With this in mind I started working on some examples which could be tested in the app. After a pre-selection three sounds were chosen, of which finally one proved to work best during ‘field trials’ with drummers. I received feedback like “good frequency spread but muffled, it lacks tone. Hurts a bit when played loudly”, or “during the sound the glass tone sweeps down a bit, it sounds wacky to us”. After some more testing it was the wacky one which got revised and made it to the app. You can get an impression of it in the introductory video below, and you can read more about the app on the DrumTime website.

Years

A record player playing slices of wood looks good, doesn’t it? But what does it sound like? It all comes down to the analysis of the year rings in the tree. This installation called Years was created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, and creates an interesting, calming piano sound track. 

Silophone

Remember Tank-FX? Here’s another one in the same category, and this one has been around for more than ten years already! For those of you who don’t know it already, this is the idea: go to www.silophone.net and upload a sound file.

The file will be send to the speakers in a huge empty silo - the Silophone - somewhere in Montreal, then the sound gets broadcasted back to you via the website. Sadly that last part didn’t work for me, as the stream didn’t seem to work. 

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Vuvuzela Filter

Today I spoke with a colleague about the removal of the sound of those vuvuzelas during the world cup football broadcasts. It should not be that hard to build a vuvuzela filter, as the majority of the humming (that sounds like a swarm of bees from a distance) is tuned to B-flat. Of course, I was not the first one thinking of this. 

Many TV-watchers complain, but who are we to ban this African tradition? Adding a filter should not be very difficult, and indeed it is not: the German Tobias Herre created a simple tutorial on how to set up a multi band equalizer in Logic Express to filter out the unwanted frequencies. Be sure to check out the included sound examples. The vuvuzelas are completely gone!

Read the article (translated from German by Google) here.

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The First Recording Ever Made

The phonautograph invented by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

Have you ever heard the first recording ever made? Today you can. It was French inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who created a machine called the phonautograph, which made it possible to capture sound waves. 

The phonautograph transcribed sound rather than recording it. A hog’s bristle was used to inscribe a sound’s waveform on lamp-blackened glass and later on paper. The sound waves were focused using a barrel like the one shown on the picture above. 

The first recording of sound which was actually directly playable was done on Thomas Edison’s phonograph, the predecessor of the gramophone, the device we have been listening music on until the late 1980’s

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