Sound Media 2 – Week 01

Classwork

Although I’ve had Pro Tools 8 installed on my computer since K.Rudd sent me the stimulus cheque in March, I haven’t really used it much. In fact, aside from poking around at the new plugins, it’s been doing little more than taking up space on my hard drive. I’m much more comfortable playing with Ableton when sketching out a quick sound or two – it’s simply a more enjoyable experience. However, when I was forced into the linearity of the Pro Tools sequencer in class, I must say that PT8 seems to have raised the bar with it’s latest update. Aside from having a Logic-esque facelift (which has also just received a facelift of its own: a “Pro Tools killer” according to my Apple-employed friend. With their decision not to support PPC Macs anymore, it screams “Apple: business as usual” to me), there are a few workflow related enhancements in PT8, which should go a long way to making this semester a smoother one.

Without getting too bogged down in software packages, the freedom we’ve been offered this semester is pretty exciting. I’m likely to combine major projects from Sound Media and Multimedia Authoring this session, and with the prospect of being able to use the sound studios at COFA for multi-channel mixing, I might finally try my hand at some pseudo-surround sound, installation work. Fortunately, my tutors are open to me being a total nerd and stepping outside the boundaries of software and linear sound.

Research

OSCulator is a small application that I’ve been eyeing off for a while now. Unsurprisingly – as the name suggests – it deals with Open Sound Control (OSC) and will come in handy when I’m trying to hook up disparate programs – like Processing and Pure Data – with the Wii remote that I’ll be putting to use in Multimedia Authoring. Without much luck, I’ve been toying around with OSCulator sitting between Processing and Ableton.

With my limited knowledge of OSC, I’m having some trouble getting things to work from scratch. However, it looks as though the Wii remote is supported extensively and has a bunch of presets to make life much easier. So for now I’m going to sit back and wait for my Wii remote to arrive.