Isolationism

Gavin over at Machine Lake makes some interesting observations for the possibilities of environmental/ambient audio from perspectives besides my own (my interests are primarily for entertainment purposes as well as a sleep aide and treatment for some mild forms of depression), focusing on modern practical and branding applications.

While he does observe in another post that “Boodler can listen to a network socket for messages and alter the soundscape accordingly,” he suggests that the Peep Network Auralizer project is more practical (Peep watches your log files and plays certain sound effects to aurally represent an event).

I personally investigated Peep myself (thinking, boy wouldn’t it be cool to hear emails come in) but there were several aspects of it that I found undesirable or unsuitable for my purposes:

First, it is designed entirely to auralize network events based on log files on your system; it could make for very dull listening if you don’t have a lot of (or widely disparate types of) network traffic. Besides, do you really want to jump every time you hear an email come in when it’s probably going to be spam?

Second, the audio design ‘out of the box’ is less than impressive. I liked the natural-sound approach, but the quality/fidelity just isn’t there; I can hardly listen to a 10 second sample; I can’t imagine leaving something like this running all the time (which would be the point for it to be useful).

Last, and perhaps most importantly, I found the software’s design to be too limiting: It strikes me that perhaps one might want greater variation in how sounds are generated, which a static environment simply cannot provide.

The good news is, Boodler can do everything Peep can and a whole heck of a lot more: Because it is designed to listen on a port for specific events (which themselves are nothing more than plain text received via a telnet connection), you can have Boodler respond to a lot more than just tailing log files on the local server.

Imagine embedding a callback script in a remotely-hosted web site: When a user visits a page, a script is executed which sends an event to your Boodler agent: a cricket starts chirping and continues singing for a few minutes. Itf the site visitor clicks another link, that cricket keeps chirping—If they leave (or vanish), that cricket dies out. You could easily use other variables to decide how the cricket sounds, too—the chirp frequency might increase for a user in closer geographic proximity to you, or take on a different sound altogether for a user who is signed in as opposed to a guest.

There’s no reason to stick to directly networked events either; a cron job and a little script could make easy work out of parsing the weather forecast and playing back some form of audio indication of what to expect before you even get out of bed in the morning, for example. There’s also nothing stopping you from combining as many agents as you dare, even altering sounds as the time of day (or some other variable) progresses or changes, allowing for the simultaneous presentation of not only informational content but entertainment as well.

Gavin and I definitely agree on one thing: There are a lot of possibilities for this type of audio generation that have been largely overlooked despite the technology to pull it off having been around for some years now. Here’s hoping more people start thinking like Gavin and figuring out novel new ways to make use of these powerful tools.