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Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

soundviz.com

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Re: Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

#11

Post by anigbrowl »

tylerdavis wrote: post #2

Hey Hacker News, I'm Tyler, one of the Co-Founders of SoundViz. Thanks for taking the time to check out SoundViz. We're very excited to get your feedback, so please don't hold back!

As an audio professional, I just find this strange - rather as if I offered to turn your favorite picture into a record you could listen to whenever you want on high quality vinyl (all of which end up sounding very similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwyQtdEMFJc).

I'm curious to see whether there is a market for this, but I already spend so much of my time looking at waveforms I'm not sure I want to look at more. Have you considered spectrograms or spectral phase diagrams, both of which can be considerably more visually interesting than a straight waveform?

Re: Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

#12

Post by tylerdavis »

glaugh wrote: post #9
tylerdavis wrote: post #2

Hey Hacker News, I'm Tyler, one of the Co-Founders of SoundViz. Thanks for taking the time to check out SoundViz. We're very excited to get your feedback, so please don't hold back!

Really good stuff, really nicely done, I love it. And good pre-Christmas launch timing :) Small issue: I grabbed an .m4a, uploaded it, and the screen just sat there. Console errors and whatnot. Didn't take a rocket scientist to guess that .mp3 might work better (it did). So I'm all good, but just reporting it. Again, really good stuff, congrats.

Thanks for pointing this out. Right now, we're supporting wav and mp3, but I'll be adding a couple things in the very near future - greater support for various file formats, and better error handling for the ones we don't support.

Re: Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

#13

Post by tylerdavis »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #5
tylerdavis wrote: post #2

Hey Hacker News, I'm Tyler, one of the Co-Founders of SoundViz. Thanks for taking the time to check out SoundViz. We're very excited to get your feedback, so please don't hold back!

As a proud Dad of an 11 month old chatter box I can see the appeal of this. I'll record some of her yabbering tonight and see what it looks like. If I went through with the purchase I think I'd couple it with a "press a button and playback the original sound" setup, as that would be pretty easy to add to the rfid triggered music playback system I've got one of my R-Pi's rigged up for. I just played around with a test…

Chelsea, my partner on this project said the same exact thing about the custom color palettes.

Let me know how it goes tonight!

Re: Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

#14

Post by tylerdavis »

anigbrowl wrote: post #11
tylerdavis wrote: post #2

Hey Hacker News, I'm Tyler, one of the Co-Founders of SoundViz. Thanks for taking the time to check out SoundViz. We're very excited to get your feedback, so please don't hold back!

As an audio professional, I just find this strange - rather as if I offered to turn your favorite picture into a record you could listen to whenever you want on high quality vinyl (all of which end up sounding very similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwyQtdEMFJc ). I'm curious to see whether there is a market for this, but I already spend so much of my time looking at waveforms I'm not sure I want to look at mor…

You're not wrong. I wanted to focus on one implementation first, given the challenges, but I'd like to go the spectral phase route next.

Re: Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

#17

Post by tpbstats »

tylerdavis wrote: post #10
tpbstats wrote: post #7

This is OK Computer by Radiohead with the sprinkled donut theme: http://i.imgur.com/whVq5uE.png Feedback: - Overall really nice interface - At first the messages you get while waiting for the wave are really nice, but then they get slightly annoying. Some kind of indicator of how long it takes would be better. Processing time was acceptable. - Frankly I think the visualisation is uninteresting. I am not interested in…

First of all, thank you for the feedback. Agreed on messaging/processing indicator. The size of the bars is based on the amplitude of the sound you're processing, so your results will vary, depending on the dynamics of the sound. Have you tried In Rainbows? ;) Recording - You are correct. I think a count down would also be useful. Currently, the recording starts as soon as you hit the button, which can produce some s…

Tried a few different tunes, found Violence by Andy Stott to be the most interesting due to the intense dynamics of the track: http://i.imgur.com/YYFBxBN.png

A little more feedback:

- It bothers me that I can't make the bars completely square (the most square setting has a slight roundness to it).

- Maybe an option for designing a custom palette would be interesting. Maybe importing one from http://www.colourlovers.com/ or a similar service could be an option.

- A free download as desktop background option would be a nice touch. Free advertising.

Re: Show HN: SoundViz – Your favorite sound as beautiful art

#20

Post by tylerdavis »

lukasm wrote: post #19

Is there a demo somewhere? I don't have a mp3.

Unfortunately, we don't have any demos yet, but it's something that has come up, so we're planning on it. Do you have a microphone?

If not, if you sign up, I can create a draft for you so you can play around.

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