Meet the SoundController

Background

Today's flash driven campaign sites are not only visually very impressing, but the sound also play a great part. As the complexity of these sites grows, the management of audio/music grows with it.

The situation

When looking at many flash productions of yesterday and today, the sound and music still lacks the functionality that really lifts the experience for the user. That's why most of us are still looking for the "mute sound" button, when entering a site.

Challenges.

As the web experience is a non linear one, the sound also has to be dynamic. It won't do with a single loop that you can turn on and off, and a couple of mouse sounds.
The audio should follow the interaction of the user as if is was a soundtrack to a movie, constantly changing and developing.
The audio should follow the interaction of the user as if is was a soundtrack to a movie, constantly changing and developing. Even if there sometimes exists an ambition to implement the sound and music in a good way, it often means a great deal of files and headache for the people involved. Adding the task of explaining how all these files should be delivered the stress levels rise even higher.

SoundController to the rescue

SoundController is just a fancy name for our proprietary sound engine. It is created for us as sound-and music makers so that we can be as creative and professional as when we deal with sound in linear media such as film or radio. It lets us mix and control the audio of the site in real time, even if the site consists of mixture of different techniques such as video and 3D etc. It also enables us to create the musical soundtrack that adapts to the user in a musical way, the soundtrack develops as if the user were the bandleader. And all this is done without sending files to busy developers, it's all managed on our side.

This is how it works

  1. The developer connects to our engine that is hosted either on our servers or, if you want it to be loaded in your architecture, on your servers.
  2. The site developer adds events, a single row of code, where a sound is needed or a change occurs in the site.
  3. We use these events to start, stop, mix, change the sounds,
  4. When everybody are satisfied with the result, we deliver the assets for deployment.
Live Demo!

Features
  • Lightweight - The core engine weight is under 60 kB.
  • Remote management - You add the events, and we do all the other work.
  • Asset management - We can divide our sound assets in as many pieces as you want, and load them when they are needed.
  • Adaptive music - The system handles both vertical (mixing of layers) and horizontal (adding musical pieces after one and other) composition. All in time, and perfect synch with the beat..
  • Beat Event - The system can send an event for when the next beat will occur, to sync the visuals to the music.
  • Sound in Movies - Keep your films silent! The system supports audio in films, FLV's or movies in time lines, it doesn't matter..
  • Custom functions - We can adapt our system to handle specific functions for each need.

Latest interactive work
The Window

The Window

I never thought that we would do this, but we have actually made a case film of one of our own projects. I guess that the film says is all, please have a look.

And don’t forget to try this (the experience is best live outside on the street) and share your creation in the gallery after you’re done!

Try it yourself: www.plan8.se/w

Or check our the work of others: www.plan8.se/thewindow

Nordlys

Nordlys

Create your own Northern Light using your facebook profile. We will then use the data such as age, gender and so on to create a dynamic experience. So the music is built from the data you submit! Neat!

Check it out: www.mynorthernlights.visitnorway.com/uk/

Bonnier - Nice To Meet You!

Bonnier – Nice To Meet You!

In Hornstull in Stockholm they are building a new shopping mall during the next two years. This means that people passing through this area will have to go through a construction site everyday. To make this a more pleasant experience we helped create an interactive forest for new meetings in the area.

In the long tunnel section of the construction site 24 speakers were installed in 4 different zones, each playing a different “forest ambience” depending on how many people were passing by aswell as the time of the day.

Then 5 video projectors were installed each connected to a Kinect. When standing in front of the projectors you can interact  with the forest by moving your body. You can also create a meeting by standing next to a friend in front of one of the screen, the meeting flies away and ends ut as a leaf in the interactive forest.

Each meeting gets a unique number, you can use that number to tag your meeting on the site made for the experience, using facebook.

We did all the music and sound design. Bot above all we did the logic behind it all. The music is created using data such as time of the day, interaction, twitter mentions and so on… This ensures that the music is constantly changing and that it is dynamic but yet musical.

Check it out! www.nicetomeetyou.me/