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Launching Interactive Systems
We will be working collaboratively on a live project with Glasgow Central Station to create a compelling creative proposal for Glasgow Central Station Tours. This is a real world opportunity to work as a creative team and present to a client.
Our starting point with this project is:
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What considerations should we have as designers of interactive information systems?
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How can we deliver contextual content in a staged and understandable way?
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What are the design affordances and special cases in creating media for public consumption?
Site Visit
The site visit was my first time in the space. It really opened my imagination to what could be in an installation like this. The rest of the group seemed enthusiastic and we started coming up with some ideas on the spot. I have a DSLR so I took that with me to the site visit to take some decent quality images and videos should we want to use them from fake simulations in the presentation.
After the site visit we went back to the studio to discuss some of the points Jackie had made and split ourselves into groups. We decided on 4 groups and each person put themselves forward depending on their skill set. I volunteered for sound since I have a fairly decent knowledge and background in sound. The graphics team were in charge of all visual design elements like editing, projecting, type and filming. The sourcing group was in charge of research, collation, gathering materials and creating any additional props we needed. The tech team was in charge of creating the technical interactions for example any motion sensors or arduino work. Finally the sound team was in charge of creating various soundscapes to display for Jackie through a multi channel speaker set up and create sound and triggers for within a Unity scene for Jackie to explore.
Interactive Systems
All Categories
These are the edited videos I thought could be used for tracking and compositing.
Sketching
After we had discussed our groups we each went off to brainstorm what we were thinking of creating. We also had a meeting with Paul on Friday where he discussed his ideas for the space since it will actually be him and various other professionals making this. He spoke about ghostly figures, floating projections, DMX controlled smoke machines, lighting and general eeriness within the space.
Going forward in my group I had to consider his ideas and how sound could come into play. I thought about the term musique concrete. Coined by French man Pierre Schaeffer around 1948, musique concrète is a musical composition consisting of raw sound material. To the ear musique concrete is not all that musical or melodic but rather focusses on what could be considered 'mundane' sounds and brings rhythm quite often to the forefront of the piece. Schaeffer's first piece, Etude aux chemans de fer (“Concert for Locomotives”), used this technique and the audio was recorded from a train station in Paris where he had recorded 6 steam locomotives. I think this technique will serve us well when creating a bass layer for the rest of the sounds to play over.
My next idea was to include what is known as 'foley sounds'. Foley sound is the practice of creating custom sounds post production. How this type of sound is made can normally be broken down into 3 main categories; footsteps, movement and props. The term is named after one of the most recognised sound effect designers Jack Foley. This technique was widely used in the 1920's with live radio broadcasts, sound effect artists would have to create live sounds on air as the show was broadcasting. This technique meant designers had to think on their feet and use a variety of props to create desired effects. I think this technique could be utilised for any video work we do in this project and it means the sound team can have sounds ready to go instead of having to wait on the graphics team or work in conjunction.
Research
I continued with these terms and began researching examples of musique concrete. Below are some video examples, two being from Pierre Schaeffer himself. Even the score of a musique concrete piece is wildly different to normal sheet music since key, tone and melody are removed from the equation. I like how simple sounds can transform a soundscape and musique concrete I feel will actually aid the story telling process for the space since we can add things like footsteps, chatter or water dripping etc.
I watched this great video about these Hollywood sound effect artists and how they create foley sounds for film. The thought process is ingenious and props were a huge part in this. It got me thinking about what objects I could use to create sounds. I know for an installation you have to be careful what sounds you use and whether they are free to use etc. So for this I wanted to keep it simple and hassle free in terms of copyright so all of my sounds were created in this method using instruments and props then edited in a DAW meaning they are all my original sounds.
Jackie mentioned about the space being unsafe at the time and how ghostly presences could be felt. This made consider 'sound psychology'.
We can't undervalue the impact sound can have on a) the physical space and b) how people feel within that environment. Ambient sound can create a backdrop for what emotions we would like our users to feel within the space. I started looking at some installations that explored these ideas and although these examples do not directly relate to our brief I think it shows the impact sound can have with user interaction and user mood. One of my favourite examples was created by Dutch and American artists Simone Doing and Max Puchalsky, where they were commissioned to create a soundscape for University of Wisconsin Health Systems for UW Hospital’s surgical waiting room. The hospital had mentioned in the brief they wanted the space to feel more calm and welcoming so the sound designers looked into the psychology behind how certain music, keys, instruments and tones can physically calm the human body. This is doing the opposite of what I'd be wanting to do on the platform and instead I'll be using minor keys and bass tones to create a sense of eeriness and danger.
Plan
As a group we came up with a timeline and a plan of what needed done and when it needed done by. We didn't want to all record the same sounds so as a group we decided what kind of sounds we would go away and focus on. This strategy allowed us to create over 60 sounds as a collective and combine these in multiple soundscapes to avoid a lot of sound repetition. Natalie was going to focus on train noises, Verena was to focus on station noises and people chatter and I was to focus on the musique concrete sounds like the rumbles and bass.
Process
This floorplan was made of space for all the groups to use and we all mapped out where we thought we could use. In terms of sound because we will be using a multi channel setup this would allow us to play the whole soundscape through the speakers while also isolating certain sounds to specific regions of the space depending on what installation was there.
To the floorplan we then added where we would like to put our speakers to give the best sound coverage across the space. The blue circles with the lines are speakers. We used this floorplan to map out where we wanted to trigger sounds in Unity. The triggers are labelled 1-7 and these correlate with the wav file names.
Neil did a 3D scan of the space so we used that as a floorplan as well. In Dimension I added where we were thinking to put everything. On the model it is colour coded and labelled. You can access the model by clicking the 'model' link below.
Matt - Trumpet
Natalie - Coal
Verena - Chatter
This a snippet of sound from each person and the kinds of sounds we were working on. In the end we totalled between 60-75 sounds with over half of them being sounds we created ourselves.
Since we had such an extensive sound library we had to figure out how we were actually going to present this to Jackie. At the meeting on Friday everyone seemed on board with a Unity scene so we knew that we would need at least 1 soundscape for that. The graphics team wanted to do a physical demo for Jackie as well so we thought to utilise the multi channel setup and do a speaker setup to pair with the projections. This meant we needed a second soundscape. Lastly the sourcing team had worked with the graphics team to create a video that would be projected onto suitcases. For the video mockup they wanted sound so that required a third soundscape. We ended up making 5 in total to give variation and choice.
How I Made My Sounds
To make a few of the sounds I utilised my musical background. Some of the sounds are made with this old piano, my trumpet, drums and various guitars. At the second creative meeting Paul raised some concerns about it being too musical, to combat this I used the instruments more as bass layer chords, edited their EQ and added various effects. This allowed for the foley train sounds etc to come to the forefront of the track.
I originally used Logic Pro X to compile and edit the sounds. In the audio fx I used effects like ChromaVerb a nice smooth reverb and Space Designer which you could effect how the sound reverb differed depending on the space, for this effect I normally liked the concert hall room or the airy room. Below are some screenshots of key points in the edits.
We decided the best and most effective way to export the sounds was as individual .wav files. This meant we could record individual sounds, edit them in a DAW of our choice and export the edited sound. This avoided us having to edit sounds within the final soundscapes and meant that the edits we made remained constant.
File management was fairly important for this. I worked off an SD so I could move the files across machines and have everyones sounds ready to be compiled into unified soundscape.
Working With Groups
The tech and graphics team started working with some footage of a 'Victorian woman' on the platform. For this they wanted sound over the top that linked into the video. Verena took this one on and used the library of edited sounds that we had uploaded to the Google Drive to create two sound tracks for each video the teams had.
I was keen to do a physical sound installation with the multi channel interface to help some of the projections come to life so I took a lead on that. We worked as a group trying to set up the MOTU interface and we managed to install all the software and drivers and get the lines hooked up. We needed some guidance since none of us had used the MOTU before so we came in another day where Neil gave us a 1-1. This was the initial setup with just two speakers.
We also wanted to try the sound booth out so we as a group got inducted to use it. The computer was out of order but it didn't really matter since we had an audio recorder with its own SD so we could download to our laptops.
This was us making some foley sounds to go over some of the scapes we already had.
Setting Up Multi Channel
The multi channel setup could work with Logic but Neil suggested using Audition. I'm not going to lie this was frustrating since everything was ready to go on Logic then I had to spend another day or two switching to Audition. With that being said I managed to navigate my way across Audition having never used it before and separate specific tracks into channels. I exported certain sounds as groups to be played through certain lines instead of individual sounds being exported. This was easier for me to manage since in a single soundscape I could have been dealing with up to 60 separate regions.
I had to change all the sounds and outputs from stereo to mono so it could be played on the 5:1 mix. All my bass and chords I wanted to come out of the centre channel with voice audio and train noises coming from the left and right. The surround was things like chatter and water drops to really engulf the user in the space.
This is where I kept the Audition file that had the exported group sounds that could be isolated to speakers.
This is where I kept the exported final Audition file that had each track assigned to a certain speaker. I could play this file through VLC and it would work for the 5:1 mix.
This is the original Logic file where the original composition with all the sounds were.
This is where I exported the sounds as mono sounds. Within this folder I also had the exported mono sound groups that I could then just drag into a track region in Audition.
Final Export
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