IDAT210 - Project Evaluation

My project the ‘Sound of Social Networking’ has been an interesting exploration into generative sound and communication. The project was originally aimed at meeting five keywords as follows:


• Generative Art

• Digital Performance

• Dadaist poetry

• Social Networking

• Sound/Music Production



In terms of my project and generative art I feel there is a close link as the audio and visuals are generated from the text provided by Facebook users. This therefore also makes the process part of my project quite strong. My project can also be considered a digital performance, as it is live updating and so a performance, and the means by which it is created is all digitally based, particularly in terms of the generative element. I have also managed to meet the social networking and sound production keywords for my project as these are at the centre of how my project works. The link with Dadaist Poetry however is not as strong. The process within my project could be considered part of this, but there are not many instructions or randomised elements to project. The final outcome of my project; the audio in particular, has a Dadaist quality about it due to its rather abstract nature, but this does not necessarily make it Dadaist.

There are a number of elements to my project which could be improved in the future. Firstly the audio produced is very monotonic, notes being the same length and volume as each other. However there is other information that can be gathered by the RSS and so this could be used to improve the musical nature of the project. There is also the element of access, both to data and to the project application itself. The application should be able to access any data regardless of the RSS format so that it can be used for multiple feeds rather than just the one that I have developed. This way it would be more functional and open for interpretation than it is at the moment. It would also be good if the application was adjoined to its data source online so that contributors can see how what they write effects the audio produced.

In terms of meeting the original process of communication that I originally had planned I feel that this project fell a little short. Conversation was not developed or emulated that well in my project, but instead other developments were discovered. My project has the ability to represent instantly the most used length of word at any given time, and displays communication musically, in the form of a type of written score. It also demonstrated an interesting openness of thought and how this can lead to themes, such as emotion in the textual content gained.

Overall I am happy with the project that I produced and have, through development, discovered a number of interesting features and possibilities of my project that I did not originally plan for, but that in my opinion make my project a success.

IDAT210 - Development Possibility: Webpage Music

After creating my finished piece for my project it occurred to me that there is another step that the project could take which would re-align its general concept but would also be a good and interesting development. This idea is centered around the idea of 'webpage music'. Due to the way that my project works it is easy to use the same system for any RSS feed url, and so it would be easy enough to make the project dynamic so that users could provide a url which is then turned into audio.  In this way music could be created for any RSS feed that the user provides.  This generalisation to any RSS feed means that the project would be more focused on the concept of any web feed being turned into sound and so the project could be classed as a webpage music generator, developing the sound of the internet, rather than simply a social networking page.
Being that this development should not be too difficult I decided I would try to create this version of my project as shown below:

However upon creating this I did come across a problem with this set up in that the system I was using was looking for the titles of posts rather than the content.  This is ok when using the Facebook posts as title and contents of the posts are the same, but in most RSS/ATOM feeds they are different, such as with these blog posts.  Therefore when using the system this way users would only get a musical representation of the titles of elements, and not the content.  As well as this I also tried the system with a standard RSS feed from Microsoft which did not seem to work as the application is based on using a ATOM format for the data.  This meant that for this version of my project to work I would have to incorporate elements which took both forms into account and which was also able to access the main content without any extraneous html data.  I therefore decided that although this is a good idea for a development in the future, it would be best to keep my application in its current 'sound of social networking' state.

IDAT210 - The Finished Project

#bdat Once I had formatted and completed the production of my project application all that was left was to launch the Facebook page to the public and get them to carry out the process for my project of text creation from which my application runs.  To do this I added a post to the page explaining the limitations of how the page could be used as mentioned in the Posts and Facebook RSS post.  I then invited a number of people to the page and began adding them as admins whenever they joined.  To ensure there were no mistakes in terms of the posts made I locked the wall off from open access so that only those who I had added as admin could write on the wall. This ensured that there are not extraneous posts that wont be taken into account.

By getting the public involved in the page this means my project application is now self perpetuating creating audio from other peoples participation in the project rather than mine alone.  To find out what the sound of social networking is like at the moment download the zip folder from here:

www.veat.eclipse.co.uk/projects/FBsoundproj.zip

Once the file has finished downloading extract the folder from the zip file and run either the exe file or the app file depending on whether you are using a PC or Mac.  Accept the security warnings to run the file and enjoy! If you wish to get involved in the project login to Facebook and search for Uni Project Help group, become a Fan and i'll endeavour to add you as an admin so you can contribute to the wall and see how it changes the sound of social networking.

IDAT210 - Textbox fix

As mentioned earlier I was not sure how to deal with the text in my application as I was not sure whether it was necessary, and had problems with the amount of text in comparison to the amount of space available. I have now come up with a simple fix to this problem.  Firstly I decided it would be a good idea to keep the text in the app as this gives people a chance to make comparisons between the textual data and the sound and visuals that are produced according to this.  Therefore I had to solve the problem of space for each of the posts made.  I decided the best way to do this is the most obvious way, in that I should add a scroll bar to the text box so that viewers of the application can scroll up and down through the various posts that are being used without having to refer to the Facebook page.  I therefore looked into scrolling text boxes and found that I could use a flash UIScrollBar component for the task.  This then had to be coded in after the text had been created in the AS3 code to ensure that it was relevant to the length of text.  The following is how the application now looks:

Hopefully once I have got the project properly launched on Facebook the amount of text will be much more varied and larger than this and so there will be more use for the scroll bar, as well as a longer and more varied audio and visual piece.

IDAT210 - Public Access

In order to give my Facebook page members some understanding of what they were contributing I was planning to upload the application to the internet somewhere, either as a Facebook app, or as a page on my website which the members could navigate to.  This way after posting, users could see how their contribution was used and how it changed/developed the 'sound of social networking'.  However on beginning to try and implement this I came across one major flaw.  Flash security settings are awkward in that on a local machine a swf needs specific access from the Flash Player to access any address outside the local machine, and that similarly when posted online the swf simply is unable to achieve any remote access to an address other than that of the server it is currently running from.  This meant that to be able to post my project application online so that it would run, I would need to access the remote information somehow else other than through Flash.  After doing some research I found one way to do this is to use a small PHP script to pull in the data which can then be accessed by the swf.  I therefore went ahead and tried to implement this solution only to find that my web space does not support PHP and so I could not upload it to a space online in which it would work. 

This left me with one other option.  In terms of the local device security this is true for swf files but not if the application is exported as an exe or mac app file.  I therefore went ahead and exported the file in these formats which can then be uploaded to my space and downloaded by others who can then run it locally on their computers.  This provides a slightly long winded access for the Facebook page members and others but does allow users to view the project, which therefore meets my ultimate objective, if a little bit awkwardly.

IDAT210 - Posting with Facebook RSS

Once I had created a fully working model of my project the final stage was to check its compatibility with the Facebook page, in particular looking at fan posts and comments.  Therefore to test this I used another account to add posts and comments to the Facebook page that was not an admin of the page, and the ran the application.  Unfortunately upon doing this I found that the posts and comments did not show up in the feed, and so did not show up as part of the application either.  However if I posted items myself (as the admin of the page)the RSS would pick the changes up. In terms of comments however, even as an admin, they would not show up on the RSS or in the application.  This meant there was only one way to get the feed to pick up the necessary data, which was to ensure all users were made as admins, and that they only posted directly onto the wall.  This was in all intensive purposes a major set back for the ease with which I could get data added to the Facebook wall for my application, but did have a work around so I decided to stick with what I had created so far and use the work around to make my project work.  This would mean inviting people to the page and then also telling them to only post onto the wall and making them all admins.  Admittedly this is more information than I ever intended to provide users of the page, but it was necessary for the project to work as a whole.

IDAT210 - Project tweeks

Once the body of the project had been devised and created the next step was to make sure all eventualities were covered in terms of how the project functions.  In particular this covered two likely problems, words longer than 12 characters, and enough posts to run the visualisation over the stage width.  To make sure these possibilities were covered I made two simple solutions.  In terms of the characters issue I had already decided that only 12 notes were going to be included and so either I ignored words over this length, or continued to represent them visually but miss them in the audio.  I therefore decided that the best method was to keep the word in the visuals by representing any word above 12 characters with another circle so that the visuals are as accurate as possible to the data, and so people wont get too confused.  This is shown below:

In terms of the other issue regarding more circles than the stage width I decided to keep with the notation theme and simply continue the following visualisation on a new blank page, as if the page has been turned to the next page of the score. This is shown below:

This will ensure that the viewer of the project will be able to see the entire visualisation of the entire audio track rather than just a part, quickly and easily. 

Another aspect that I decided to add to my project was small breaks in the audio between comments. Originally my audio was one long continuous string of sound.  However being that my project is based around the idea of communication I felt that I should somehow demonstrate this through the audio that is created.  I therefore added in breaks between the comments like rests in a piece of music to emphasise the different comments, and also to give a sense of some kind of communication between the different sections of music, almost as if they are responding to each other.  This mimics the communication had through the comments themselves and is also a standard concept in music composition so continues the link between the project and music.