SoundEffects is a new international peer-reviewed journal on sound and sound experience, bringing together a plurality of theories, methodologies, and historical approaches applicable to sound as both mediated and unmediated experience. The journal primarily addresses disciplines within media and communication studies, aesthetics, musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, and sociology for a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to sound.
The call for abstracts for the first issue is currently out, focusing on the question of the epistemological potential of sound. How does sound provoke and influence the way in which we experience the world? How can we talk about the phenomenological, bodily experience that sound produces?
More than ever, everyday life is mediated by a multitude of digitized and mechanically reproduced sounds. In Michael Bull’s words: “Waking, walking, driving, working and even falling asleep are all done to music or some other acoustic accompaniment” (Bull, 2003). Never has urban life been noisier. Yet within philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic frameworks, the world is still mostly conceived of as a visual reality. Sound produces meaning in numerous ways, both through the phenomenological, bodily experience of sound and through emerging and changing discourses of cultural practice. Responding to this condition, contemporary sound research must reflect upon the various ways in which the world is experienced through sound.
After the post yesterday I have received some questions and suggestions about looking into TouchOSC. Thanks for the feedback! Back in the days when the blog was hosted using Zope, I got bugged down with spam comments and pingbacks to the degree that I just disabled the whole lot. When revamping the site as a Rails app I didn’t even bother to develop a solution for comments, so it has become pretty much of a monologue…
Anyway, TouchOSC is one of several iPhone/iPad applications available that can communicate with Max using OpenSoundControl. It is a nice application, and could e.g. be used to to mimic the Monome. Part of what makes TouchOSC attractive it the fact that it offers possibilities for customizing the user interface.
Another interesting app offering the same, using standard Max objects to build the interface, is c74.
But when it comes to the kind of interface that I am currently working on, they both fall short. As the screenshot illustrates below, TouchOSC has a GUI widget for controlling two-dimensional positions. But the widget is only able to cater for one point, and one would therefore need to have several of them next to each other. That limits spatial resolution. But more important it greatly reduce the intuitive visual feedback on how different sources relates to each other.
The OSCemote app is getting closer, with genuin support for multiple points within the same interface. However it is not able to keep displaying the positions on the screen once the fingers are released.
If the features for 2D-positional data of the two applications could be bridged, that would make for a nice addition to both of them.
And while I’m on the feature request bag, I am also wondering what Stantum (previously JazzMutant) will be up to next. IMHO the software developed for the Lemur would make for an awesome iPad app. Just take a look at work Mathieu Chamagne was doing several years ago:
PS: The fancy framing of the screenshots is curtesy of the handy iPhone Screentaker application.
Over the last few days I have been developing solutions for using the iPad as a multitouch device controlling auditory scenes. This will have a very practical and immediate application: At my studio at the art academy I have currently rigged 6 speakers according to the setup required for ICCI 360.
However the desk and laptop is positioned outside the ring of speakers, and with the rather challenging acoustics of the studio it is sometime difficult to sit at the disk and properly hear the effect of the spatial positioning of sources that I am performing. With the iPad, I will be free to move away from the desk and step inside the circle.
Late last week I got a solution working based on Fantastick. This is a straight-forward and well-documented solution. I found the Core 2D drawing functions to be slow, but OpenGL ES rendering is snappy. Starting of fromt he help file, and adding some FTM and MnM magic I now have a working and responsive soltuion for a multitouch cousin of the ICST ambimonitor object, as illustrated here, while busy wrapping the patch into a Jamoma module:
Here is a short demo video of it in action while I’m busy spatialisating all 11 voices of the famous 4’33" piece:
The only potential downside of this solution is that it depends on image files being downloaded to the app from the internet. If the internet is unavailable in a performance situation, it’s a bummer. This is the reason why I yesterday worked on a solution for controlling web sharing from Max, so that the image files can be hosted locally.
Accidentally I discovered another possible strategy today. The Avatron Air Display app turns the iPad into a second screen. As seen below, this makes it possible to use ambimonitor itself on the iPad. Screen updating on the iPad is sort of slowish, and it is not mutlitouch, but the report back to the main Max application of updated position seems fast and reliable, so with the added monitoring possibilities offering of actually having spatialised sound, this would also work quite well as a rapid prototyping solution.
A long term goal will be to be able to create this kind of apps myself, custom-tailored to my particular needs.
Today saw a new functionality added to Jamoma. The jcom.webservice component enables controlling and monitoring Web Sharing, the service enabling the computer to function as a web server, from within Max and Jamoma.
It does so by internally calling an AppleScript that behind the scene opens the Sharing control panel, get the setting for Web Sharing, and change it if required.
One potential use is with the Fantastick app for iPhone and iPad. The app enables images to be downloaded from the web and used to build multitouch user interfaces, communicating with Max over the network.
An obvious challenge when depending on web downloads for a performance interface is the possibility of web access being unavailable in a performance situation. If the images instead are hosted from the computer running Max, they will be remain available, provided that a local wifi network can be set up, and Web Sharing is enabled on the Max computer.
