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.