The Norwegian Academy of Music launched their new web page and logo today. As part of the visual profile, they wanted to create a dynamic logo, continuously reflecting the activities at the school. I was asked to contribute to making this new dynamic logo dynamic, and we ended up basing the system on analysis of the sound of the school.
The system I have developed is based on microphones in the canteen and the two concert halls. The audio signals from the microphones are fed to an analysis program, which in turn sends three global and perceptual paramaters (sound level, sharpness, and noisiness) to the logo generator running at the web server. The logo generator interprets the three sound parameters, and modifies the shapes, sizes and colours of the graphical elements in the logo.
To the right is a screenshot of how the logo looks on the web page, and below are a couple of examples of different shapes that appear.
The analysis program has been developed in the graphical programming environment Max, using the analyzer~ external for the audio analysis, and some components from the Jamoma library. The most challenging part was to create a solid TCP-connection to the web server, and to secure that the hardware and software can run for many years without interruption. The interface for the application is shown below.
It has been a fun project to work on, particularly as it has required to develop something that will run for much, much longer than anything else I have created previously.