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I’ve an iOS app I wrote a while ago which provides the functionality of game audio middleware (something like FMOD I guess) basically for sounds placed at locat
by Cybotron5000 5y ago
I’ve an iOS app I wrote a while ago which provides the functionality of game audio middleware (something like FMOD I guess) basically for sounds placed at locations in the real world: tracks the users’ location and orientation relative to all the sound sources and spatializes the audio based on that. You can make and layer together sounds that follow coordinate paths, sounds that ‘wake up’ at/after times, are triggered/stopped by proximity, do sample accurate playback at different pitches/volumes for each ‘grain’/chunk (as far as possible on iOS devices), randomise order in a couple of different ways/follow looping playlists for variation and so on. It uses standard ideas nicked from game audio to save on the download/disk/memory size of sounds (though there is obv. trade off with CPU/RAM and perhaps other OS stuff going on I don’t understand). It’s basically kind of an amateurish game audio engine overlaid on the ‘real world’. It’s likely got loads of holes I haven’t detected/am unaware of in the code, probably poorly structured/commented/badly named functions/variables and so on as I am primarily a guitar teacher/music producer/sound designer for
my ‘day’ job and it’s the first thing I’ve written in Swift/really just an experiment to see if I could get it working, but I’m kind of wondering what to do with it/what it might be useful for… I made a fully functioning demo. that is a historical recreation of an area of the city I live in with lots of evolving/generative sounds in it: eg. horse’n’cart trotting past, blacksmith, pubs, trigger zones for a narrator voice/music playing back ‘2D’ etc etc …I don’t really know what to do with it now… I think it might be sim. to ‘Microsoft Soundscape’, but I’ve not actually tried their app yet… Do you think anyone might be interested if I put it on Github? (…never used Github, though I used SVN/other CMS as a sound designer on games before… though I know it has a social component…) I guess it’s trivial for most ‘proper’ programmers to make something sim. as it just uses the Apple native API/swift functions (sorry if this is not the correct terminology)/as low level as they go on the sound stuff anyhow, nothing custom?… The sound ‘definitions’ are all XML/.plist basically at the moment, so it’s not user-friendly for sound designers/musos/general public, though I could make some sort of graphical front end that generates the xml for it and uploads sounds etc, though I know nothing about network coding and it looks scary!!
I guess Apple could come out with some superior system tomorrow… Anyhow, if anyone reading this is at all interested/has any advice (even if it is to get knotted! :P) that would be gratefully received… Apologies for the overly long and spammy post…
- germinalphrase 5y agoSounds cool to me. The ability to select your preferred ‘layer’ or collection of sounds for that environment would be good. I imagine a Wikipedia for real world locations could resonate with a lot of people.
- Cybotron5000 5y agoThanks! Yes, you could basically select from various downloadable ‘audio experiences’/layers for that area… The localized user-contribution based audio wiki/encyclopedia type-thing is an interesting idea... Even people telling stories or guiding people around an area… I did think about how users might be able to upload content to a location for others (like an audio grafitti-ish type thing), but I imagine the moderation/networking/storage part of it would be tricky to get right…
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoYeah definitely put it up online with a license to get folks to look or contribute to it!
- Cybotron5000 5y agoThanks Karrot_Kream - much appreciated! …I’ll try and do some research about the best way to go about that/tidy it up some/update it for iOS 14 first… (think it was last built for 13)
- MaysonL 5y agoReading your HN profile, sound like you might find office hours.global interesting…
- Cybotron5000 5y agoThank you - I just had a quick glance at the website and signed up (…not sure what the averages are I’ve been rating myself against, but anyhow… :) …very interesting - hoping to have a better look into it soon…