cluster - mediated space etc. » glanceware

Documents with Tails: Blogjects

Darrell Berry — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 10:46:59 +0000

Evidently there’s a nice new ‘theory object’ neologism for the class of things of which Documents With Tails are members: blogjects.

Thanks for Stephen for reminding me to read that paper.

Glanceware Music Navigation #2

Darrell Berry — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 16:45:58 +0000

For starters, drop the idea of a single rigid taxonomy — there are too many ways through, even assuming that canonical representations are possible. So we’re probably looking at something at least personal, possibly community-based. Folksonomic tagging would be a start, but how to navigate in a neatly glanceable fashion?

I’m thinking of building a personalised acoustic surface, where patches of looped sound are snippets representing genres and subgenres, and which morph into one another ‘at the edges’ so you end up with a navigable 2- or 3-space which is a musical patchwork. ‘Drill down’ into any patch and explore the subgenres under it. Everyone (or their software) could generate their own personalised surface — which would keep things small enough to be navigable — from a CDDB-style online database of user-contributed, tagged patches. Easy to make, with a few rules and some code to allow individual people and their software to stitch them together seamlessly into their own personalised surface. And would appeal to long-tail passion: people who care about genres would be motivated to have them well-represented by nice patches…

Glanceware Remotes?

Darrell Berry — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 23:02:34 +0000

So. Sometime soon, broadbandwidth and QoS sufficient to stream 16/44k1 audio reliably, longhaul. And at some point a bit later, maybe, OMD aggregators which will be able to provide access to most of everything that way.

On my mind at the moment is the question: how to navigate the whole of music space, in a glanceable fashion: minus clunky jogwheels and textual taxonomies. I’m thinking, as rules of the game, to allow only a 5.1 surroundfield and a remote useable one-handed, without any interactivity built into the remote itself — effectively a system which could be used in the dark, or without a screen visible. How to make such a thing that would, with a ‘reasonable’ amount of time/effort spent on interaction, get to the specific tracks anyone wanted, with the whole of world music as the source? It feels possible. More soon.

Ambient Orb

Darrell Berry — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 17:29:36 +0000

Tim points this one out. This is exactly what I mean by glanceware. That it is entirely non-linguistic is even better. Know that you know something, without necessarily being aware how you know it. Their Stock Orb is exactly what I was proposing here.

Glanceful Kunstkopf?

Darrell Berry — Tue, 22 Jul 2003 19:44:48 +0000

Thinking more about glanceful interfaces, and the communication of complex multivariate datasets. For reasons I haven’t gotten around to writing about here yet, I’m veering towards sound cues for a lot of things, particularly binaurally-located vocal cues. I’m looking for a pipelining spatialiser using some simple head-related transfer function (HRTF) that I can feed audio into at approximately realtime. For ‘earcons’, simple samples are easy. For vocal cues, I’m thinking of using FESTIVAL. But I need the spatialiser, and I can’t find one that runs on Linux and accepts a stream input. Maybe I’ll have to hack something in Max. I’d rather not.

Discreet Computing/Smart Spaces

Darrell Berry — Thu, 22 May 2003 09:40:17 +0000

I’ve been working for a while to turn some of the things I talk about here into a more coherent document — part monograph, part marketing tool for what ku24 does.

From the introduction:

Digitally-mediated communications are now essential to creative businesses. However, the wholesale adoption of desktop-centric personal computing has created new challenges for organizations whose success depends, fundamentally, on social interaction and creative collaboration?too often, the digital tools brought in to assist workflow and communications have instead obstructed genuine collaboration.

This whitepaper suggests a radical framework for change, exploiting recent development in social network analysis and emerging communications technologies to restore the primacy of interpersonal communications to the creative workplace.

You can find a draft in PDF format here on the ku24 site.

If you have any feedback, please let me know.