Interactive Sound and Music Production
Interactive media has become one of the most important forms for entertainment and education over the last decades and sound and music play a big role in those formats including music for games and interactive movies. Contrary to the traditional channels for producing and distributing music, interactive media lack standardized formats and concepts for how it should be implemented.
Studies have indicated that most music producers find the task quite hard and tend to drop artistic ambitions when the technical obstacles like difficult programming or tedious work are too many. My research aims at finding technical solutions, useful terminology and efficient processes for producing sound and music for interactive media that help the producer to stay focused on the artistic aspects of a production. The strategy is to run an iterative process integrated in the education at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm where we design, prototype and evaluate technology for interactive sound and music.
The work so far has resulted in a descriptive language called WebAudioXML (waxml) that makes it possible to realize an artistic vision in an online interactive sound and music applications without the need to learn any programming language. The result from the studies so far has been very promising and indicates a potential for a future standard like waxml. The student feedback also highlights areas for improvements and further development that will be the basis for future work aiming at inclusive technology accessible for everyone.