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For previous Flash on the Beach posts in this series, see On the Beach (part 1), On the Beach (part 2)., and On the Beach (part 3)

The second afternoon session had Jared Ficklin showing us how one can visualize sound in nature and code. Jared began the session with demonstrating how sound physically manifests itself to give us an idea of the sort of properties of a sound wave you could apply to code. Jared used some braniac style practical examples to help us visualize this; for instance he blasted out some music into some artificial smoke to demonstrate sound waves moving through the air.

Rubens Tube

Jared then took us through a Rubens Tube ‘fire’ example. This experiment essentially involves a tin foil lines PVC pipe, with a hundred or so holes drilled in and a speaker at one end matching the diameter of the pipe. At the other end of the pipe is a connection to a propane tank, feeding propane gas into the tube. After lighting it up, a mild and steady oscillation of flame appears through the holes in the pipe, whilst blasting some music or sound through the other end causes the vibrations in the tube to allow more gas through in some holes on the pipe, and restricting it in others, forming sound wave int he flame. Since the experiment involves open flame he was not able to demonstrate a live version, so he played this video:

Needless to say it was a lot of fun to watch, and served as quite a nice visual way to visualize the amplitude of different frequencies in sound.

Visualization in Code

Jared used flash and AS3 code as a bridge to demonstrate how some of the properties inherent in a sound wave can be translated into code and applied to various visual properties in flash. He showed us some of his own visualization ideas, and also some quite impressive and rather original ideas from Annika Hamann. Here Annika uses properties of the sound such as amplitude and frequency to affect the animation and timing cycles of various flash animated cartoon characters. Jared demonstrated how you could easily affect flash properties such as movieclip position, scale, alpha, tint etc with influence from sound data.

AS3 has made it more simple than ever to extract various sound data from a sound wave using the SoundMixer class. You can see a first experiment I have attempted myself after being inspired by Jared’s fire example on my blog post here. It combines some particle system experiments and affecting the movement of the particles with the beat of the audio. You can easily extract the data from a sound wave into a byte array in AS3 like this:

---


var PLOT_HEIGHT:Number = 200; //size of area to animate in
var snd:Sound = new Sound();
var req:URLRequest = new URLRequest("your track url");
var channel:SoundChannel;
var bytes:ByteArray = new ByteArray();



snd.load(req);
this.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, enterFrameEvent);
channel = snd.play(0,3);



function enterFrameEvent(event:Event):void {
SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(bytes, true,0);
// left channel
for (var i:Number = 0; i < 256; i++) {
val = (bytes.readFloat() * PLOT_HEIGHT);
}
}


---

The sound mixer’s computeSpectrum function stores the audio data as normalized floating point values between -1 and 1 for a default range of 512 into the byte array on each on enter frame event. The above example code will do the first 256 values for the left channel. You can then cycle through this array and pull out the values as you see fit. If the second parameter of the computeSpectrum function is set to true than the function will perform a Fast Fourier Transform to convert it into its frequency domain before storing the values. Anyway I don’t want to fill this with details on computeSpectrum but for more details there is an excellent tutorial here.

Stephen Hawking’s Universe

Jared showed us an experiment he had been working on at the end of the session, where he streamed an audio recording of one of Stephen Hawking’s Cambridge University lectures into one of his flash experiments. The idea of the algorithm is that as the audio recording progresses a line is traced zig-zagging upwards across the screen with the x and y changing based on the variances in Stephens voice, and after each sentence it detects the pause and draws a star, with the brightness being dictated by the length of the sentence. Jared then showed us how he had created a (Stephen Hawking’s) ‘Universe’ of stars against a black space backdrop. It was very impressive an another interesting original way of visualizing sound, in a manner far removed from the usual Windows Media Player and iTunes standard visualizations. Jared then impressed everyone again when he demonstrated how fellow Flash on the Beach speaker Mario Klingemann inspired him to make it interactive, in that you can click on a specific star and it’s associated sentence plays out!

Anyway, Jared has posted a nice video of the process on YouTube:

A few of us from Collective London attended the IPA Social Evening Seminar on Tuesday Evening this week to listen to and participate in lively conversations and talks regarding various questions, topics and principles about Social Media. The debate was largely centered around some the ‘Ten Social Media Principles’ as identified by some of the present luminaries in the group in response to the IPA’s own Social Media Futures report which was launched earlier this year.
The intended outcome for these conversations was largely to get Social Media ideas and debate into a more dynamic and practical space, rather than a theoretical one by sharing experiences, case studies and successes stories, and initiating conversations based on these questions and principles.

Social Media Principles

The first part of the evening had Mark Earls, Neil Perkin and Amelia Torode discussing ideas and topics in relation to some of these social media principles.

So briefly, Mark kicked proceedings off with some ideas linked to his principle of ‘People not consumers’. He spoke about the idea of connectedness in a social media space and how this relates to the bigger picture of understanding human behavior in this environment. Mark used the idea of how humans learn to copy and imitate from the age of 42 minutes and how a power structure and relationship change can happen in this multiple connected space. He identified the success of Lauren Luke’s YouTube channel (56 million views, 280,000 subscribers) as an example of some these ideas.

Neil Perkin briefly discussed the ten social media principles and used a nice analogy of how traditional advertising can be thought of as a firework, in that it’s a costly way to briefly gain as much attention as possible for a short space of time, whereas using various social media platforms to achieve goals can be likened to that of a slow burning but growing bonfire which increases its reach and visibility over a longer period of time. He then spoke a bit on his principle of how ‘being authentic, not persuasive’ is key for earning attention.

Finally Amelia Torode began by briefly discussing her principle of ‘technology changes, people don’t’. She used the example of creating a real time character in a social space and how this can then lead, perhaps unintentionally to create a brand world and a personality for this, not in a traditional sense but rather utilizing different social media platforms as a place for this to sit. Amelia used the successful Compare the Market Meerkat (Aleksandr Orlov) character and his extremely popular Facebook fan page to demonstrate this idea. Amelia made the point that Meerkat campaign was not a social media campaign but how the changing technology enabled this brand world to manifest itself in this manner. As an aside, Aleksandr now has over 27,000 followers on Twitter and more than 585,000 fans on Facebook.

Discussion

The second part of the evening involved the speakers and some unwitting (but willing) volunteers to host a conversation on a topic or question that they feel could be salient on pushing some of the principles into a more dynamic and lively space, with the intention that people could drop in and out of different conversations depending on their own sense of personal interest. I attended, along with my fellow Collective colleague Dan Hall on the conversation based on apparent client skepticism with social media.

Some of the points raised in the conversation included the need to educate the client on how allocating some project budget on a social media segment could benefit the project, as often it’s hard for them to see the benefits, particularly as it’s difficult to gauge any apparent level of success and ROI on a social media solution and that they could simply say why should I spend this on the possibility of getting a couple of thousand fans on Facebook when I could buy twice as many people elsewhere.

Another point was simply that often when selling in an idea to a client how the now ever present social media bookmarks are simple just stuck on somewhere as an afterthought (because everyone else is doing it), without any thought on what they would actually mean to the project, particularly in understanding who then maintains these social media accounts in the following weeks with status update and so on.
Often a social media solution isn’t really practical – Tesco was used an example in that would they really want people talking about various fruit and veg on facebook fan page, whereas something like the imminent release of FIFA 10 is far more suitable to drum excitement prior to its impending release, as demonstrated by their good use of twitter on the FIFA Earth, Football Twitterverse campaign.

Red Fox

The evening was rounded off with the conversation hosts offering some of the more pertinent points of their respective conversations to the entire group, before moving onto the pub for some alcohol fueled social media debate, and more importantly to indulge in some tremendous Fullers Red Fox ale.