Adactio: Links—Tagged with sound

Spotify – dConstruct 2022

If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.

Notes on synthetic speech - Tink - Léonie Watson

This is a fascinating deep dive by Léonie on the inner workings of speech synthesis. She has quite a conundrum: she wants fast playback, but she also wants a voice that doesn’t sound robotic. Unfortunately it’s the robotic-sounding voices that work best at speed.

If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend listening to (or reading) the accessibility episode of the Clearleft podcast which featured Léonie as a guest giving demos and explanations.

Centuries of Sound

An audio mix for every year of recorded sound, 1859 to the present.

Currently up to 1936.

Sight and Sound: The Cinema of Walter Murch on Vimeo

I enjoyed this documentary on legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch. Kinda makes me want to rewatch The Conversation and The Godfather.

CTS - conserve the sound

An online museum of sounds—the recordings of analogue machines.

JavaScript Systems Music

A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.

Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)

You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.

One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.

Why strong sound design is critical to successful products - O’Reilly Media

From Designing Products with Sound by Amber Case and Aaron Day:

Sound eases cognitive burdens.

Sound is also a powerful brand differentiator.

Sound is emotional.

Finally, sound impacts productivity.

But also:

Not every product needs sound design.

UI Sounds: From Zero To Hero | Icons8 Blog

Following on from Ruth’s piece, here are some more thoughts on sound in UI from Roman Zimarev, the creator of icon sounds.

He makes a distinction between notification sounds and interaction sounds, as well as talking about sound identity in branding.

Form Validation with Web Audio | CSS-Tricks

An interesting idea from Ruth—using subtle sounds to augment inline form validation.

There aren’t any extremely established best practices for this stuff. The best we can do is make tasteful choices and do user research. Which is to say, the examples in this post are ideas, not gospel.

Poco Apollo

Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.

SolarBeat

Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.

Hypnotic.

ARP Observatory (@ArpObservatory) | Twitter

In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.

Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.

ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.

Open Access at ESA

Images, videos, sounds, and 3D models are now available from the European Space Agency under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license.

Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia

Listen to the sound of Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.

RadioEight

This is rather lovely: explore a network of nodes, each of which contains the audio of a child describing a dream.

Inspired by the concept of an 8th continent to which all children belong, RadioEight is an interactive soundscape dedicated to the hidden world of dreams.

THE WALK OF LIFE PROJECT

The thesis: any film is improved by playing Walk Of Life by Dire Straits over the ending.

The proof: this website.

(this is absorbing and brilliant)

Link tags: sound

42