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Audio for Interaction at Microsoft
Seven photos of presenters and other stuff.
Report from contributions by Bob Moses, Vince Dayton, Aurika Hays of the
AES PNW Section
The AES Pacific Northwest Section held a meeting at Microsoft on December
2 to learn about the company's latest developments in "Audio for
Interaction." The speakers were David Thiel, Robin Goldstein, Ken
Greenebaum, and David Yackley. The meeting began with an overview of Audio
for Interaction by David Thiel. David explained how computers enable a new
type of media. Traditional media has a linear structure where events
happen sequentially over time. Computers enable non-linear interaction
with an infinite number of possible experiences, based on the user's
input. Decisions are made by software at run time, rather than design
time, which places new challenges on the process by which this software is
developed. Audio engineering for interactive applications is similar to
live sound production because you have to react in real-time to situations
and events that happen unexpectedly.
Interactive audio is a new field, and promises to be an area in which
practitioners may focus their careers. In relative terms, Audio for
Interaction is in its infancy - the movie industry took 20 years to figure
out what to do with film. Audio for Interaction is even more complicated
than film because it introduces a non-linear structure, and David does not
believe we will see "maturity" in this field for decades. This opens the
door for a lot of creative innovation. We hope the many AIS (Art Institute
of Seattle) students in attendance took note of that.
Robin Goldstein talked about her efforts to develop a "DirectSound Design
Studio" (DS2). DS2 is a set of authoring tools, API's (Application
Programming Interfaces) and runtime components for constructing dynamic
audio soundscapes used in interactive media products. DS2 provides a
comprehensive sound design environment for interactive media products. DS2
wraps DirectSound for use in web applications or CD-ROM products.
Architecturally, it provides reusable sound design components, and
performs most housekeeping and I/O related functions. Robin claims DS2
puts more power in the hands of sound designers, and even enables
non-programmers to design and test complex interactive soundscapes. In
theory, this reduces iterative cycles between sound designer and
developer, reduces code complexity, and therefore reduces costs of both
design and development. Robin briefly demonstrated the typical workflow
process that a developer would use DS2 to create a soundscape. She also
showed several examples of the DS2 tools in action, and then turned the
meeting over to Ken Greenebaum.
Ken talked about DirectAnimation, which is an API that is already
implemented and available in Windows 98 and in Internet Explorer 4. He
gave a presentation of the technology available now and also pointed to
future directions in the improvements that are planned. DirectAnimation is
a subset API of the DirectX technology that Microsoft has been working on
for multimedia developers. With DirectAnimation, a programmer now has
available the object technology (i.e. components) that is self contained
and supports the COM (Component Object Model) standard interface. This
allows developers to provide full featured, interactive, animated
components, that make for much more engaging applications for the end
users. Since the technology is built upon the COM foundation, a developer
using DirectAnimation components can make them available to other
applications, thereby providing reusable code and extending the feature
set of new applications written by new developers.
Next came David Yackley who presented DirectMusic, which is the newest
DirectX technology. DirectMusic is designed to provide a complete music
solution to web site designers and title developers. David demonstrated
DirectMusic Producer, which is an application that sound designers can use
to create multimedia products. Some key features of this application are:
Down Loadable Sounds (DLS), integrated editors for all of the DirectMusic
objects such as styles, personalities, templates, and DLS instruments and
collections, and real-time context sensitive music creation. The
DirectMusic engine can create musical transitions on the fly in order to
allow a smooth transition from one scene or page to another. Musical
motifs can be played in response to a click or selection. These musical
embellishments are synchronized rhythmically and harmonically with the
performance. In addition, mood changes, tempo changes, intensity changes,
and volume changes can happen in real-time in response to the users'
actions. One of the more interesting features of DirectX technology is the
ability of a graphical object to not only have audio specific properties,
but to make those properties context sensitive to the real-time
environment of the application using these objects. As an example: if a
gamer was moving through one virtual environment then he or she went
through a door (or some other portal) into another environment, any
graphical objects with their associated sounds (like a gun or maybe an
avatar) could change according the requirements of the new environment.
Moving from inside a small vehicle to getting out of the vehicle, walking
across a field, and entering a cave, would all have different sounding
environments. These environmental properties can be passed to an object
which will in turn respond with an appropriate sound and behavior.
David Thiel came back and closed the evening with a discussion of his "My
Interactive Sound System" (MISS) technology. David's work is part of
Microsoft's research arm, which has no requirement to release products.
MISS is not a product and consequently David's presentation was more
conceptual than practical. MISS provides services for the unification of
the sound effects, music, and dialog in a soundtrack. David demonstrated
the process in which he used procedural programming to create a
pre-production version of soundtrack behavior. MISS allows the separation
of the programming process from the sound design process, which allows
practitioners to work more efficiently.
Overall the evening was rich with many issues and challenges concerning
audio for interaction.
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