"Event Space" Sound

[Bobbsy]

I may be getting involved in a slightly unusual one....

 

I had a phone call today from a man representing a charity. They're building a "space" a local library for young children with autism and/or learning difficulties. The plan is to have a jungle trail created by wall murals and soft furnishings, and wish to have a variety of sound effects to back up the pictures. The sort of thing they have in mind is parrot FX by the picture of the parrots, jaguar FX by a picture of a jaguar, and so on.

 

They're open to suggestions about how this would work...for example are undecided as to whether they want the effects triggered by pushing a button or just by somebody standing in front of the picture.

 

They do have some degree of budget ("several thousand pounds") to achieve this...I'll likely be meeting with them next week and should get more precise details then.

 

I have some ideas how I could achieve this sort of thing...but as it's a new world to me I'd like to hear any ideas others have as well.

 

Could be fun...or could be a big mistake to get involved! :P

 

Bob

[bruce]

I was involved in building something slightly similar. Eek - I've just realised it was 18 years ago! I feel old...

 

Our scenario was a giant "piano keyboard" on the floor, which played notes as you stood on it, and also displayed the notes on a musical staff on the screens. If I remember correctly, we used a PC with an interface box to take lots of logic inputs, connected to a set of burglar alarm pads underneath the painted carpet which formed the "keyboard".

 

In fact, it might even have been a BBC micro. Remember them?

 

We were worried about the robustness of the setup, but it coped with about a hundred thousand visitors over a 3 month period. We had to replace the carpet twice though - it was just inside the main door, and got filthy...

 

Alternatively, could you do something with PIR (burglar alarm) sensors?

 

Bruce.

[alqueenan]

I've had a couple of things vaguely like this. Where do you start?

 

I would actually start off by talking to special needs teachers to find out what is likely to appeal to kids depending on where they are on the autism spectrum. It may be that having a zoned, "soundscaped" environment would be the most enveloping experience, or it might be better to have big, colourful, tempting buttons that trigger playback effects. I really have no idea.

 

What I have found in the past is that when you're asked to make a "feature" or "spectacle" of sound for something like this, it's actually quite hard to do because you're ultimately limited to two things - amusing directionality/reflections and playback. Hence the reason why there aren't many thrilling museum exhibits that celebrate clever sound design. That said, you could do a lot with playback and simple-but-effective is probably the way to go.

 

One bit of kit you could have some fun with (if the budget runs to it) is the Audio Spotlight - surely the most directional source ever developed. Another is the Stereo Dipole - good fun and much more convincing than any of the Ambisonics approaches I've heard.

 

HTH

[Bobbsy]

Already worth posting in here...I've seen/used "Audio Spotlight" before but "Stereo Dipole" is new to me and worth looking at.

 

Does anybody have any thoughts on what to use for the playback device? My own thoughts veer between one of Charlie Richmond's "Audio Box" units (ideal but possibly out of the budget) or a cheap PC with multichannel sound card (limiting and more open to finger trouble with inexperienced administrators). Are there any dedicated hardware solutions cheaper than the Audio Box?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Bob

[bruce]

The audio box looks nice. But I bet it's expensive....

 

Could you have a PC & soundcard which was sufficiently "tied down" to make it tamperproof?

 

When we did this all those years ago (I've just dug out the notes!) it WAS a BBC micro we used. We had exactly the same concerns, so once the software was written, it was compiled into a "language rom", burnt to eprom, and so the machine had no hard or floppy disks - so was effectively tamperproof...

 

Re dedicated hardware solutions - earlier today, in a completely different context, we were talking about these - the ones which are used to replay pre-recorded safety announcements in shops, trains, boats etc.They generally have a very simple user interface - one button for each message. Only one output though.... Would these be of any use?

 

:P the one we were talking about was on one of the Calmac ferries which serves the Western Isles. It has 3 pre-recorded announcements. The first two are general safety instructions in English and Gaelic.

 

On the bridge, there is a panel labelled "Safety Announcements" with 3 buttons - labelled "English", "Gaelic" and "Dog".

 

We assumed that the 3rd would repeat the safety announcement as a series of "Woof"s, for the benefit of canine passengers. But sadly not - it's just a pre-recorded "please don't leave unattended dogs in the lounge" message.... :unsure:

[Tomo]

I'd guess you're probably better off with a locked-down PC with multichannel sound card.

 

Set it up to automagically run the relevant software on startup and to shut itself down when you press the 'Off' button.

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to make Windows PCs run without a keyboard, although you can remove the mouse, but you can physically lock them up inside a box.

 

Local 'Admin' just gets to turn the unit on and off - they need never know that it's actually a PC to be honest.

[Sim]

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to make Windows PCs run without a keyboard, although you can remove the mouse, but you can physically lock them up inside a box.

 

Running without a keyboard isn't a windows issue, its the motherboards bios issue. All motherboards can run without mouse and keyboards these days.

[Bobbsy]

Totally OT...but my old BBC-B is still in the loft...more or less working except for a dodgy space bar as far as I remember.

 

However, as it's in excess of 20 years since I attempted machine code (or even BBC Basic) programming and I've lost an excessive number of grey cells since then...it may stay in the loft! (But I was proud of the remote control interface for a Utah Scientific routing switcher that I wrote at the time!)

 

Bob

[bruce]

It's certainly possible to boot windows with no keyboard (Classic error message: "Keyboard not detected, press RETURN to continue :P ). I've got loads of servers that run this way. I'd guess it may depend on the BIOS...

 

How you do it varies from machine to machine. You may need to guddle around with the BIOS, to tell it that absence of a keyboard during the POST is not a fatal error.

 

You can also disable the popup that appears when trying to start windows with no keyboard by messing around in the registry. With NT, you could use:

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Key: SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows

Name: ErrorMode

Type: REG_DWORD

Value: 2

 

The legal values are:

 

* 0 : errors are serialized and wait for a response

* 1 : if the error comes from the system, then it is written to the system log; no user intervention is required and dialog boxes are not displayed. If the error does not come from the system, then the system continues in normal operating mode.

* 2 : errors are written to the system log; the dialog box is not displayed

 

I guess there will be something similar for XP...

 

 

Edit: also see This Microsoft knowledgebase article.

[jim b]

You can use onscreen keyboard which was developed to allow disabled users to type without a keyboard, presumably people who have fairly good motor control to point and click with. Not that I think anyone will want to type on the PC much post install.

 

I do seem to recall that Soundweb units can accept switch inputs from triggers so if you had a series of looping playbacks and a number of switches near playback devices you could have an option there. Presumably if this is true then BSS will have specs for you to construct/buy switches in accordance with.

 

One thing I would be very careful of (from experience) is that you don't place into the environment things which can be hurled at carers/other users/the general area. As this would be a new environment for a lot of the kids I guess there will always be some who just don't like it and their way of expressing it could involve lashing out.

 

Also be prepared to be cursed by the library staff if any of the children find a particular favourite noise and play it again and again and again.....

 

Hope this goes ok for you...

 

Jim

[gtm]

As I mentioned in this thread get yourself a copy of xplite perform a clean install of xp and use the program to remove a lot of the stuff that isn't required for a sound playback pc ie internet explorer. This makes the chances of an 'admin' screwing things up by messing with settings as they are simply removed, it also makes the installation run much more efficiently and makes it much smaller, have read articles where people, with a little fiddling have, managed to get media playing installations down to 250mb, this was back when 250mb of flash memory was expensive but with 2Gb now reasonably prices you could get you whole installation and sound files onto a usb stick, eliminating the need for noisy, prone to failure hdd, and also making it easier to fix a fault- keep a copy of the fresh install on another stick if there is ever a windows related problem just swap the sticks

[Tomo]

Hard disks are more reliable than Flash for multiple writes.

Flash is more reliable than a hard disk for pure reads.

 

WinXP (including Embedded unless you poke it hard) writes to the hard disk every boot.

 

Hard disks are cheaper and easier to replace than Flash when it goes pear-shaped, so stick with hard disks!

 

I'd never heard of XPlite - sounds interesting!

[dosxuk]

Quite a bit of the kit we removed from the former National Centre for Popular Music (which is now our union) was used for doing very similar things. They had a wide range of show control stuff for the interfacing, and about 6 PCs which ran all of the audio.

 

Those PCs each had at least 2 16 way soundcards (8x stereo out - on phonos) which then ran into balancing boxes and then to speakers / mixers. The computers were all in rackcases with locked fronts, and running NT4, with no automatic logon (we never found the passwords, and only found out what they were running after looking on the hard drives on another machine).

 

There were also two video PCs, each outputting 12 MPEG2 streams (with stereo audio). This was all installed in 1999, so it's stuff which was proved stable in 97/98, so it should be relatively simple to get hold of similar gear nowadays. I would suggest talking to some show controls specialists, as they should know where to source the gear.

 

Most of the cases and even some of the machines are now back in the building, in racks, completely standalone (no mouse / monitor / keyboard), providing all the displays and interfaces for our visuals system. They've all been upgraded to off the shelf copies of winxp, and they don't crash.

[dbuckley]

These days you would almost certainly use a PC, and most folks would use SFX (but I would use PCStage as its more flexible) a MidiTron interface to convert buttons to MIDI. If you must have a hardware device, then either a sampler, or AudioBox would do but is OTT, look at the Gilderfluke stuff.

 

All far more museum / theme park / exhibition space than standard Blue Room fare :)

[Solstace]

The thought occurs that a Linux-based "liveCD" could be a way forward for this one. Yes, I know it would mean some programming and hunting to get the relevant audio/midi/logic devices to work - but if done properly and left to it's own devices, it should rarely need a reboot, and if it does it will always come back up in the state it was left in.

 

Taking the idea further, why not boot and run from CD, but have the sample files played back from a flash drive? Best of both worlds, meaning that the samples can be updated without having to re-burn/configure the boot CD.

 

Sorry - I'm up late 'coz my brain won't switch off... I'll go crawl back under my stone :)