Turntablists beware!

F

“..prop swords are packed with accelerometers which transmit control data to be used by the sound designers…” This sort of thing is pretty common in video game sound design…

I’m not so sure it would be that useful in film sound design… good sound editing is all about intuition and what works for the scene or moment. Oftentimes, it works better to ignore parts of the action to better tell the story, which is one of the things that makes sound design for games challenging: that kind of moment by moment audio storytelling is hard to do in an ever-changing game environment.

That being said, this is the most interesting use of the wii-mote that i’ve seen :)

It is easy to stress the simplicity of the idea behind Ben Burtt’s lightsaber sounds, but don’t forget the pain staking ours of getting the sound to synchronize with the movements (or vice versa, as is the case sometimes).

It’s also challenging task to write audio applications in Kyma (or whatever platform).
The exciting part is that its not challenging for the user to the device (the Wii controller in this case) to get the sounds out of it. There is also a direct correlation between the movements of the user and the sound coming out of the program.

To me, this has a lot of potential. I can imagine a future where prop swords are packed with accelerometers which transmit control data to be used by the sound designers. This kind of thing has been happening in the visual world for some time, with stand-ins with special suits acting out the parts of digital characters to be rendered later.

Whether or not sound design should head in that direction is open for debate. However I do think with the decreasing cost of these devices, as well as increasing computer speeds opens up a world of possibilities where physical actions could be recorded and could sound rendered to those actions.

…did I just describe the MIDI spec in that last sentence? ;]

EVERYTHING is cheaper than a kyma and a mac1 ;)
… Pity…

= lame eggs

MM