Design & Art
We began our design conversations by asking how to represent the various attributes of reverb. Thankfully, It’s relatively easy to visualize room size virtual reality. However, the wet/dry ratio is hard to represent. So we brainstormed two possible representations about how to visualize REVERB:
- Having a miniature version in front of the player (orb + small cube/church model + tiny human), and changing the tiny human inside the cube to represent the distance between the guest and the sound source. In this approach, the wet sound would be dependent on the size of the cube, and the dry dependent on the distance of the tiny character and the orb.
- Place the guest directly inside of the church, and allow them to interact with their environment to change the effect. In this approach, the wet sound would be dependent on the length of the hallway from the door to the altar, and the dry dependent on the distance of the player to the orb. They would stretch their hands apart from each other to expand the length of the hallway, and push the orb back and forth with one hand.
This week we decided to prototype the second approach, placing the guests inside of the church to affect reverb. We chose this approach as we felt like it leaned more on the benefits of being in virtual reality over the first approach. If we are placing their body inside of a virtual space to allow them to understand reverb, physically placing them inside of the building that is causing the effect should theoretically help them to better connect the effect with real life.
Before finalizing our designs for both reverb prototypes, we sent out a survey to novice musicians to ask them what they “see” when hearing the wet and dry effects on a track change. We had ideas of how reverb should be represented, but still wanted to know if people had other visualizations of reverb that we had not come up with. Therefore, we made 3 storyboard versions of visualizations and asked if people interpret reverb a particular way:
1. Extend a hallway –> Move the sound source away from you
2. Enlarging the reverb effect –> Move the sound source away from the tiny human inside the cube
3. Lower the opacity of the church –> Lower the opacity of the sound source
Our hunch was correct, as the majority of people chose the hallway extension after hearing reverb applied to a track that we attached.
Tech
From the tech side of things this week’s focus was to primarily implement the prototypes related to reverb. The survey that the design team did was greatly helpful in deciding what we wanted to actually implement.
We started off my implementing a “Tools/Plugins” inventory that could be used to apply a certain effect to a soundtrack. While the work for that is finished, we switched our focus to concentrate purely on the reverb prototype as a standalone experience instead of having to combine it with the previous prototype.
Nevertheless here is a look at the way a track selection is done and a plugin can be applied. We expect this part to come in handy towards the end of the semester.
We then moved on to researching how the Reverb API works and came across an interesting feature that the FMOD’s SFX_REVERB plugin has : Reverb Presets
These work differently from the Convolution reverb where the property of the space is algorithmically generated and it came with a bunch of presets off shelf that we could apply through the API. The API for presets wasn’t very straightforward but we worked around it to easily pick a preset and start off with it.
We moved away from Convolution reverb because the licensing for the Impulse Responses wasn’t straightforward and we didn’t have the time to go and record IR’s in the spaces that we wanted to show in the experience, aka Church/Cathedral
We picked the “Concert Hall” preset and used it for a “Church” space Reverb plugin.
We then mapped the distance and the length of the hallway corridor to the Dry/Wet values respectively to give a visual perspective of what was happening when these values changed.
Next week we will be concentrating on finishing up the second prototype for the Reverb plugin and move on to the next tool. We hope to get at least 1 more smaller prototype out before our Halves presentation but we will re-evaluate the scope according to the preparation needed for our presentation. That’s all for now!