After the explosion with Prodigy.
The chill out with Airlock
The still rocking Soldout
Here is our new release: Erasure.
Even if you don't like the style/track (it might happened ), thanks to my french buddy Marc Em (audiogame), once again the interface really rocks. It is somewhere between Fantasia and Star Wars

Actually people here at HA helped me on this. Each leaf being linked to a sound, I wanted to create a movement of the leaves according to their own respective sound. Flash being unable to "analyse" an audio content, I started to think about a solution. On this topic, ChiGung (thx man) is giving me the core code of a program (adapted by me) that will generate the flash code able to create exactly the peak of the sounds for each leaf (I hope you are still following me if you didn't, you probably didn't look yet at the interface).

Also, thank you Garf for your support.

Oh I forgot, as usual, no DRM, just encoded in lame 3.90.3 aps directly from the 24 bits master.

LMK buddies

Wow. Amazing. I know a flash programmer who is quite impressed, too.

Too bad I don't like the music! I think I'll buy the Soldout song instead .

A very interesting initiative. Keep up the good work!

haha, i dont think there'll be a text-response pro
-or Miriam Edition

The flash looks nice but my Lappy is too slow right now to work it properly.
My favourite sound is Soldout.

'cheers marcam

I recieved few questions about the payment.
Sms payment is possible but exclusively in Belgium (for the moment). However, Sms payment is very expensive. With Paypal, the payment cost is around 0.45€. For sms payment, after a set up fee of 500€ (just for the Belgium!) and a monthly fee of 100€ (again just for the Belgium), we have 2.30€ of costs (on 4€)...

For the music, rock band are a little bit more shy with this, but we should have the indie/rock band Ghinzu soon.

Cheers,

Marcan

The interface is great, if a bit too dark. I was also impressed with the "Soldout" interface which has greatly improved upon the original concept idea.

Personally I'm still undecided if I like the whole idea of this customizable music. Especially on the Enigma track, almost all options sound good and it is very hard to decide. They all fit together very well - compliments! I myself would not like to be the one to choose. That is the responsibility of the artist imo, to make the right decisions and create one good song that (he/she thinks) is better than all the other options. I also wonder if the Enigma song as a whole would not be more interesting, if different options were to be used in different phrases of the song. Have a more dreamy phase at the beginning with the "robot" voice and soft twinkle-twinkle sounds and move to a more down-to-earth style along the road.

Just my thoughts.

edit: Ahem, of course I mean Erasure... not Enigma

Just an idea - you could probe the interest of post-rock bands("Godspeed You Black Emperor!" and Co.), because they are usually more close to electronica/idm and therefore maybe less technophobic.

- Lyx

Thx

I guess you talked about Erasure (rather than Enigma). Actually all the options are quite interesting. I made the mix for the 45,000 versions; I can tell you it’s harder than choose .
Also if you want to explore, you can use the random button (the bird).

I agree with you in the sense that the artist has mad all the possibilities and has approved the mix. But people don’t need just one interpretation. Actually a live performance is different each time it’s played (unless you prefer a playback concert).

If you want to hear the original track, you can put all the options to the first (except the voice to ‘pure’) and you have it. Personally, I don’t think it’s the more interesting version and without this concept you wouldn’t have the possibility to hear the others.

Absolutely. I thought about that and technically it is easily doable (it’s already done on a demo). We finally didn’t do it on this for two reasons. First we already had 45,000 different versions; if we added these variations, we would have billions and billions of different versions. Second, it is more complicated to show it on the interface. However, when people will get used to the concept I will do it. However, if you want, it’s easy to do it. You can buy different versions and edit the different parts by yourself


What is interesting Gecko, is that you start to say “Hmm, not sure…” and finally you are saying “Hmm I’d like more variations…”.

I tried Marilyn Manson but I didn't succeed to reach him... However he could be keen of this.

Manson isn't post-rock :) Post-rock sounds a bit like a mix of rock and ambient plus lots of experimentation and effects. I guess the term "experimental ambient-rock" should paint the right image in your head how it sounds like.

However, post-rock is more like a growing niche-musicstyle, so the size of your audience would be smaller. However, the audience will also be more open to your model, because they're already used to experimental stuff ;)

A general observation of me is that you seem to want the big acts and popular music. But the artists and fans who would be most open to your model are in the fast growing niche-musicstyles. Matter of priority and goals i guess.

- Lyx

Well, Prodigy is well known but I was perfect for the launch. Airlock and Soldout are'nt big acts. I try to mix known and less known artist.

Thats because prodigy have always been open for new and experimental stuff anyways And i agree - they were a good choice.

Yeah, I meant Erasure . I allways get them mixed up even though they are of course totally different.


But an artist on stage will still make context based decisions. Take one of Germany's most popular and long lived punk bands: "Die Ärzte". On stage they will often play their songs in a totally different way and with changed lyrics. However they, being the artists, decide what sounds good to them and what fits together to create just the mood they want to communicate. All of a sudden you have them playing rumba rhythms or string up a banjo. I am no musician and I feel hard pressed to make a decision on what actually fits together. It might sound good to me now, but a week later I might start noticing some dissonant flaw or clash of moods. I want the artist to make this not happen.


Yeah, that is totally reasonable. The options right now are overwhelming. Especially the amount of unique variations, while for example the Airlock track had some forward/backward options, the Erasure track has many more different "instrumentations" and melodies available and it still fits together. I think this is truely an achievement.

On the other hand it is kind of scary. I allready discovered the randomizing bird (another cool idea). However I only noticed what it did, by looking at the leaves. The song as a whole didn't sound any different to my ears, only after closer inspection. I don't know if this is a tribute to the great integration of the individual variations or the music is just so "generic" (a frightening thought).


Hm, yes, but I'd like the artist to create this variety within one song and perhaps create a few different mixes (call it "4am mix", "early bird mix", ...). I expect the artist is better at choosing something, so that everything just falls into place, than I am.

Wow! This is damned cool! I'd love to be able to have music that I could control in this fashion when I'm DJing. That's likely well outside of the scope of this project, but it sure beats the options I currently have... i.e. adjusting a mixer knob to cut bass, or treble, or at best, adding some kinds of flanger or reverb effects.

If I could cut instruments, or adjust the intensity of different parts of the song, one could have a lot of creative flexibility when mixing different songs together for a dance set.

[edit]
It does seem a bit expensive... about $5 CAD for one song?!

Ah hell... I'm a sucker for neat music technology. I just had to have a copy of my custom ambient-ish version of this song. Now it's stuck in my head!

"Doooooon't saaaay you love me!!"

What I like here is Gecko and Supacon saying the opposite

Gecko, a live performance is an interaction between the artist and the public. This is another kind of interaction between artist and the public. Don't forget, the artist compeletely control the result here. Public just has the choice.
Now when recordings appears, people complain cos it wasn't a live performance. However, huge album from artists like Beatles or Pink Floyd wouldn't exist without recording techniques...

Supacon, technically we can add everything we want (actually, we can control all VST plugins), it's just a choice of the artist to let people do it.
Also what you talking about is more dedicated to DJ. We have different ways to deal with this.
1. Special interface for DJ.
2. The possibility for the DJ to choose and download some separated elements
3. DJ makes some variations and put it on the interface.

Me too.
At the beginning, I wasn't keen of the track, but after I have worked on it, I must admit the tune was stuck in my head too .
Also, there is few versions that really worth it.

Actually, you were priviliged.
Now Erasure is officially announced and it’s heating here…
more than one transaction every minute...

Hey,

Good work Marcan, as usual. I like it...

Merci Kurt.
Our anglophone buddies should learn few important french words thanks to the interface...
Oh and I see you already retramsmit the information, thx

Talking about it, I think about a spectral analysis for the next interface.
No joke. Do you have some good lines for a spectral analysis?

No joke, but that was a good joke.

@Miriam - I see from your big grin you can take haye joke
@Marcan - There are free but usualy very mathematically based 'transforms' available. If one of my experimental cyclic-signature extraction routines comes alive - Ill probably be doing cartwheels in here showing it off
....
of course for animation, you could always filter the soundtrack into different frequency bands using -lame.exe (encode and decode) even, and then generate the responses for the files split into different frequency bands~

edit: speling

Hey ChiGung, I knew I can count on you (and Miriam thx for the fun )
Lots of new project in the pipe. One of them is more "artistic" and I would like to work with colors... but it's not yet signed off...

hey, I like the interface as well but have problems with the size of it. it isn't displayed correctly on my linux-fiefox 1.0.1, I guess - everything is very small, Airlock is okay though (especially the sound, man!). I am currently not able to test those pages on a windows machine with IE but it would be nice to optimize it for mozilla-firefox, if possible.

I don't get it. It works fine for me on Firefox... on windows though.
neomoe? on which interface do you have a firefox/size problem?

I tested Prodigy, Airlock and Soldout. have a look, here.


edit: typo

neomoe, everything seems fine on airlock.
Also you told me that airlock was ok.
Don't you have a screen for those that aren't fine?

as you can see on the picture, it isn't optimal. the font isn't well readable, don't you think. yes, I will upload another shot later.


edit: ckecked the pages on a w2k-machine and everything is displayed fine on firefox 1.0.1, so it's a linux issue. nothing to worry much about imo.

Ok I see, I didn't know whether it was the quality of the screenshot or the flash itself.
Thx neomoe
It seems you have a personal version of the interface

well... ahmm.. thank you!

I couldn't resist

it's always the same with minorities

have a look at the upload-section
for more screenshots of audiogame.

Ok I got it now, it sounds like the problem come from the font. The images are fine for you or is it also weird?

well, don't know. I dunno how the images should look like. you are right - it's the font.

have a look at a screenshot which I made after reinstalling firefox. it seems to have improved by this. so - it was definitely a firefox issue.