For the Independent Project assignment you are asked to design and create a
digital artifact in the technology of your choosing.
The project should have some interactive elements, and consider some of the
issues in visual culture we discussed during the semester. Projects can include
visual, sound, and text materials.
This assignment will be presented in class at the end of the semester. Presentations
must discuss some of the visual and interactive design challenges you encountered during the development process, as well as the issues in visual/digital rhetoric addressed in the work.
The goal of this project was to create a navigable soundscape of the Plaza level of the Lenox Mall in Atlanta, Georgia. The interface consists of a large map, a small map, and an avatar. The arrow keys move the avatar around the large map, while the small map provides a view of the entire floor. Placed throughout the map are several sound sources that start, stop, and adjust their levels based on their proximity to the avatar. The result is a seamless audio representation of the mall.
The quality of movement was very important to me in this project, as I wanted the users audio experience to be as smooth as possible, and therefore the movement of the avatar had to be equally smooth. In the end, simply assigning the avatar an angle and velocity, tying the arrow keys to these values (along with some other tinkering, like adding "friction") and using some simple trigonometry turned out to work very well.
I deliberately kept the interface very simple, so as not to detract from the audio experience. I wanted the user to move around the space based on audio cues, not visual ones. Translating visual cues into audio form presented some interesting challenges, as I had to place the audio samples in such a way that the user did not feel lost. At first, I was against even having the white boundary lines on the map, but it eventually became clear that they were necessary.
One of the main technological difficulties I faced was dealing with the ambient sound. I wanted the ambient sound to always be present, but not overwhelm the sometimes quieter samples from the individual stores. My original approach of manually placing "source" movie clips onto the map did not allow this type of control, so I had to move to a purely code-based approach. Currently, the clips are all placed via ActionScript at the appropriate coordinates as soon as the movie starts, and as you move through the mall, the sources adjust themselves, sum their respective levels, and the ambient sound will fill in any remaining audio space.
Flash also limits the number of sounds that can be playing at any given time to 8. As a result, rather than having all of the samples playing all of the time, I have to start them before the user enters their radius, and stop them when they leave. Since there are no areas on the map where more than 5 (8 minus music, introduction, and ambience) sources intersect, this worked nicely.
Although the form of this project changed dramatically several times before production started, the goal was always to distill a heavily visual, universal experience to an audio form. In the US and abroad, malls have become a defining characteristic of all suburban areas, and anyone who has spent any amount of time in a suburb has probably spent some time in a mall, making it a "universal experience" akin to watching a movie, or driving on the highway. But when one is only given specific elements of a familiar experience, he is forced to pay closer attention to those parts. I hoped that this narrowing of attention would, in turn, highlight some of the interesting qualities of the visual aspect of the mall experience.
When I began recording the samples that are used in this project, I had very few specific ideas about what these qualities would be, but in wandering around the soudscape, one quality that became clear is the extent to which advertisers (in this case storefront designers) must find some way to make your shopping experience seem less chaotic. Despite the fact that I took steps to make the audio experience feel more chaotic, this wasn't very difficult, as being at the mall is already somewhat overwhelming. The job of the advertiser, then, is to appeal to the consumer in such a way that blocks out the rest of the ambient noise and makes the flood of choices seem like only one. Based on this observation, it is interesting to reconsider the experience of walking though the mall, if you take part in this process, basically hopping from one consumer fantasy to another, in an attempt to avoid being overwhelmed by the surrounding chaos.
The background music, (Yippie by Mouse on Mars) gives the piece a slightly more chaotic and deviously playful mood, which is how I tend to think about the shopping experience - the advertisers playing the role of the evil game master, tricking you into actions that you believe are beneficial to you, but are actually to his own ends. However, it also provides a certain amount of cohesiveness, which was lacking because of the size of the map and the gaps in some areas.
This project requires the Flash plugin.