loopdon
26-03-2007, 08:59 AM
http://gersic.com/soundborb/screenshot.jpg
Sound Borb is an audio ambience generating system. The generative nature of Sound Borb's audio engine means that once you hit play, the ambience you're listening to will never end. It will never go to the next track. It will never loop. If you want to listen to the ocean, you can listen to the ocean from now until your electricity goes out. Various ambiences are available for download on the download page, and you can also create your own and post them for download on soundborb.com, if you're so inclined.
Parameters are kept to a minimum, so as to make Sound Borb easy to use. Just load an ambience, and start listening. You can adjust the overall volume, the intensity (how much activity is occuring in the sound), and the happiness of the ambience. Or you can set the intensity and happiness parameters to auto, and sit back and listen.
Sound Borb is currently free to use non-commercially.
The idea behind Sound Borb is to create an easy to use system for playing back generative / stochastic (i.e. different every time you hear it) ambient music and sound designs. Generative music has been around for some time, but one problem with it is that it's generally impossible to distribute it in a generative form...it can be recorded, but by being committed to a recording, the generative nature of the music is lost. Sound Borb is an attempt to fill in that gap a bit.
The intensity and happiness parameters are based on a paper by Louis A. Schmidt and Laural J Trainor entitled Frontal brain electrical activity (EEG) distinguishes valence and intensity of musical emotions. Put simply, Schmidt and Trainor claim that it's possible to measure the emotions that a person experiences listening to music by monitoring (with an Electroencephalogram) those emotions in two dimensions, valence (which is just a big word for positive v. negative) and intensity. Sound Borb turns this study around a little bit, and instead of measuring effective emotions, it attempts to induce emotions by allowing for the control or randomization of those two dimensions. To keep things simple, I used the word happiness instead of valence, but the principle is the same.
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http://www.soundborb.com/
Sound Borb is an audio ambience generating system. The generative nature of Sound Borb's audio engine means that once you hit play, the ambience you're listening to will never end. It will never go to the next track. It will never loop. If you want to listen to the ocean, you can listen to the ocean from now until your electricity goes out. Various ambiences are available for download on the download page, and you can also create your own and post them for download on soundborb.com, if you're so inclined.
Parameters are kept to a minimum, so as to make Sound Borb easy to use. Just load an ambience, and start listening. You can adjust the overall volume, the intensity (how much activity is occuring in the sound), and the happiness of the ambience. Or you can set the intensity and happiness parameters to auto, and sit back and listen.
Sound Borb is currently free to use non-commercially.
The idea behind Sound Borb is to create an easy to use system for playing back generative / stochastic (i.e. different every time you hear it) ambient music and sound designs. Generative music has been around for some time, but one problem with it is that it's generally impossible to distribute it in a generative form...it can be recorded, but by being committed to a recording, the generative nature of the music is lost. Sound Borb is an attempt to fill in that gap a bit.
The intensity and happiness parameters are based on a paper by Louis A. Schmidt and Laural J Trainor entitled Frontal brain electrical activity (EEG) distinguishes valence and intensity of musical emotions. Put simply, Schmidt and Trainor claim that it's possible to measure the emotions that a person experiences listening to music by monitoring (with an Electroencephalogram) those emotions in two dimensions, valence (which is just a big word for positive v. negative) and intensity. Sound Borb turns this study around a little bit, and instead of measuring effective emotions, it attempts to induce emotions by allowing for the control or randomization of those two dimensions. To keep things simple, I used the word happiness instead of valence, but the principle is the same.
----
http://www.soundborb.com/