September 4, 2008
Otacracy.com and Introductions
So!
It's the beginning of another academic year and there's a whole new batch of people to get acquainted with. Always a: fun thing, typically lasting a few months if not the entire semester. Thankfully, there isn't all that much for you to know about me. Here's a quick list...
1) I do music and sound.
2) I love video games.
3) I adore photography and photographic equipment.
4) I care a lot about game design precedent and will talk about older and more obscure games for hours... and nothing annoys me more than when my memory fails me. (Right now, I'm pretty frustrated that I can't remember the name of this Korean tango game for the PS2 from a couple of years back...)
5) I collect domain names.
Now on that last point, I just want to make clear that this isn't the same as making websites. Most of the time I'll just grab a domain name and do nothing with it.
I hope that otacracy.com will be different. Hopefully the name doesn't scare anyone off, because I'd rather people check it out, especially you guys since (I'm assuming!) you guys are passionate and knowledgeable and I'm exercising writing muscles that have atrophied over the last few years.
Otacracy is not a hardcore anime/manga/games site. While there will be a lot of that type of stuff on there, that's not nearly everything that I obsessively dork out on.
The latest article in there talks about games and people. Yeah, that's intentionally vague.
I'll continue posting about certain items on otacracy as I see appropriate... and you'll take me to task for my ridiculousness. (Right? Maybe? Perhaps?)
Posted by diamante at 8:51 AM | Comments (1)
June 25, 2007
Boo-hoo for you!
Yeah, we know that those fancy phones over in Japan just kick our phones' proverbial behinds all the way up and down the Pacific coast, but now we have it in a brightly colored commercial from those wonderful guys at Symbian. Boo-hoo for us!
Posted by diamante at 3:58 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2007
SurroundScapeMixer visuals...
So, it's been a fun ride with thesis thus far. And right now, I'm REALLY angry at myself. :)
(Don't let the smiley face fool you!)
I've succumbed to the physical device metaphor! ARGH!
After much user testing, the thing has a more interesting interface that improves upon the draft interface in a number of ways...
1) Users drag an icon on to the channels to represent it.
2) Channels with the same icon are moved simultaneously.
3) The Tablet now shows which channels are recording automation (rather than having to look at the sequencer).
4) Much faster screen refresh now...
I really like it! I'm just annoyed that it came to it! Not just any physical metaphor! Frigging METALLIC BLUE.
Posted by diamante at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)
February 28, 2007
Surround Sound class assignment
So as some (one) of you may know, I was there with my Xbox 360 on Monday night at 9...and no one showed up until almost 2 hours later. :) I understand that part of the blame lies on me, as I didn't give proper reminders of it.
In any case, it sounds like a good idea to instead take advantage of open lab time. Specifically Friday 12-2 before class. At that time, we'll have the Xbox 360 and the center speaker set up for your enjoyment!
If you'd like to borrow some games from your friends and bring them in, that'd be cool. I'll try to have a decent assortment of games there waiting for you. Please be careful with them!
Posted by diamante at 3:04 PM | Comments (0)
January 29, 2007
Surround mixing hip hop music...
...it kind of worked!
So last Friday, I had some fun with some of my cousin's material, remixing it into surround. Nothing big...mostly the draft stuff he had on his Pro Tools rig...
Lesson 1) Pro Tools...ARGH!
So while both of us can use Pro Tools, we're not really experts, so it took us a while to figure out how to get the surface controller mapping working...and once we did, we didn't quite get it working the way we wanted.
We ended up taking the easy way out...exporting out OMF files so that I can use them in Sonar. Frustrating.
Lesson 2) More LOOK, Less numbers.
So right now, the tablet looks something like this:
Which I've now realized is, while extremely functional, doesn't give a lot of information. Or, rather, it gives a lot of bleh information. We could move things around really well and we rather quickly came up with sound placement that he was very happy with, but visually he was hoping for something more "shape-y"
And I think I see what he wants. Gonna spend the next few days playing around with some visuals. I know what I want to get on the screen but sort of hard to describe. The image that I have in my mind is a sphere in Maya in vertex edit mode, so we're poking into the sphere or pinching and pulling out and stuff like that.
So yeah. More solid shape, less points.
And screw the angle/focus/db numbers too!
Posted by diamante at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007
CTIN 406 Week 3 Slides
Week 3 lecture slides can now be downloaded here in PDF form. Have fun!
Posted by diamante at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)
January 22, 2007
Testing out your ears
Hi folks,
After this past week's lecture's test tones, I wanted to forward along a few other interesting sites that allow you to test how your brain interacts with your ears, and general hearing perception range. Check these out if you get a chance:
Here's a fairly classic hearing test - the page also has the standard frequency response charts, showing how the perception of loudness varies with the sound's frequency.
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/hearing.html
This one is more about musical perception/memory, and takes a bit of focus:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v300/IcerC/OnlineScreen.swf
A bunch of other interesting tests (one claims to tell you if you're "tone deaf", for instance):
http://tonometric.com/
And the student who's aggregating the results of these tests has some observations here:
http://jakemandell.com/
-Scott
Posted by diamante at 8:38 AM | Comments (0)