Bitsphere's Weblog

Focusing on the real economy – Ringtones moved to vibedeck.com

bitsphere — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:50:21 +0000

For some time Bitsphere offered ringtones to download for free at the Bitsphere Website. Some downloads later the free as in beer way has not brought back any beer. So the ringtones now have moved to http://vibedeck.com/bitsphere. The whole set of ringtones published by Bitsphere are now in a set hosted by soundcloud.com and can be downloaded at vibedeck for currently 1.90€.

One of the reasons of this step is as mentioned above a beer from time to time paid with money from the Bitsphere Project would be just great. Another reason is the possibility to gain experience in selling online.

If anyone does not have a paypal account feel free to send me a message or leave a comment. For sure we find a payment method.

Any comments are welcome!

Guerilla Web Sounds – Part II

bitsphere — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:20:36 +0000

This summer Bitsphere wrote about the Guerilla Web Sounds project. You find the first post here: Guerilla Web Sounds. This still seems to be an idea worth following.

Last week the Bitsphere website was updated with a guerilla sound. A low pink noise sound is played when a visitor hovers over a link in the left navigation bar. Checked it out and tell about your experience in the comment section!

Technically the sound is played by a javascript which is activated with the "onmouseover" property of the a-tag. The script sets a timeout after playing the song once. So there is a break in between two calls of the function to prevent browsers to get confused. If you have questions about the implementation or how to implement yourself feel free to ask!

Is there such a thing like abstract music?

bitsphere — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:41:40 +0000

Music always is in time as a given function thereof. The invention of the recording machine has added recursion to this formula and changed music as a we perceive it and how it is accessible. Some musicians used to bring loopers or other devices on stage during the last decades. Some play music which they call ‘musique sérielle’ which provides some answers to the new listening habits.

When comparing the shift in the audio world before music recording as it might was and afterwards to the painting world before and after inventing photography there is obviously one big difference: In painting there was a shift to abstract painting which cannot be found as such in music.

What do you think? Is this observation true? Please leave a comment in the comment section below this post if you have any thought about this subject!

Bitsphere offers another free ringtone

bitsphere — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:53:47 +0000

As a by-product while working on the oneminute video this spring Bitsphere created a message tone which is free to download. Here is the location on the website: Bitsphere-Message_Parabolic_Trajectory.mp3.

If you like to listen to the older ringtones and message tunes visit Bitsphere on Soundcloud.com: http://soundcloud.com/bitsphere-sounds.

Enjoy!

Oneminute Video 2011

bitsphere — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:11:11 +0000

This year Bitsphere participated for the third time at the Oneminute film festival in Aarau, Switzerland (http://www.oneminute.ch). The video shown at the festival is the first video by Bitsphere done with a real cam. An augmented reality engine computes a virtual cube into the real video. The cube bounces off wooden tokens placed before the cameras lenses.

The application works in realtime. When a token is hit by the cube a sound is played out of a reservoir of one hundred sounds which are similar but not the same. So there is a big variety of sounds. To take the final video several takes were done since the application is not deterministic and behaves in different ways depending on the starting point and velocity of the cube and the position of the tokens in the field of view of the camera.

If you have questions, suggestions or something to say about this video or the application use the comment section below this post!

Feel Good Exercise

bitsphere — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:56:32 +0000

To go a bit off topic Bitsphere likes to present a very short feel good exercise. It consists of three simple steps:

First take a sheet or canvas and some colours. Using this try to paint or draw a picture how your psyche looks like now.
When finished step one paint a new picture which shows the psyche you wish to have.
Now bring the colours, shapes or forms which distinguish picture one from picture two into your house, flat or office. This might be only little changes. Maybe you add a little this or that or even paint a wall.

Why not leave a comment if you have similar exercises or even did this one? In the meanwhile Bitsphere is out to the second-hand store to get some items to support the outcome of step two.

Guerilla Web Sounds

bitsphere — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:36:44 +0000

Most of the websites are silent. This means that there is no sound. There is no technical obstacle which hinders people to add sound or even music to their websites and there are enough sound designers out there who would be glad to do some work for websites.

The reason web designers do not use sounds is that users often get disturbed by the sounds. Everyone who worked in a strict office knows that people do not only hide their surfing abroad work tasks from their boss but also from their co-workers (they could tell the bosses). At some offices but mainly at home people tend to listen to music while using their computer. In both cases users of a website do not need an acoustic signal. And yes, it also decreases download speed of the site.

The solution to this problem might be “guerilla sounds”: Very short and vague sounds that might as well come from another source. They would be small enough to download quickly and not annoy but amaze people visiting your site.

So, what do you think about the idea? Please respond in the comment section or post links to any “Guerilla Sound Page” found out there! Thank you.

Mathematical simple colours in programming and webdesign

bitsphere — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:50:09 +0000

Working on the oneminute video 2011 once more some quick colour decisions had to be made while programming. Sometimes just to test or to highlight a new feature of the video engine. Most of you doing programming or web design must have been in the same situation.

Some colours seems to come easier since they follow a certain pattern. Talking about hex colour codes the basic group is 0xff0000, 0x00ff00 and 0x0000ff which shows:

This colours are chosen quickly and every experienced programmer knows the result. A similar simple group build the two colors 0×000000 and 0xffffff which shows:

This may be no breaking news for you. But do you sometimes make part of the community which choose this colours when it comes to a quick decision?

There are other groups of colours beside the fundamental colours. When gray is needed the most simple choice would be 0×777777:

But the mathematical middle in between 0×000000 and 0xffffff is 0x7f7f7f which is also simple to type but slightly different:

When it comes to colours there are many different colours available which are simple to type: The next picture shows a gradient with the colours 0x1111ff, 0x2222ff, 0x4444ff, 0x8888ff, 0xaaaaff:

There are other colours which are chosen in sake of the numbers instead of a colour model. How about 0xabcdef or 0xfedcba?

Do you recognise some of the mentioned colour codes? And what colour codes do you choose when it comes to testing or quick decisions? Please post them in the comment section and with your help there will be a picture illustrating the comments on this blog soon!

The value of a tripod

bitsphere — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:52:16 +0000

For a recent photography project a tripod was needed. There are plenty of them in second hand stores since people buy them, use them and somehow cannot resell them afterwards so they bring it to the second hand store. However the one in use now is a simple ones in a neat seventies look with the basic function of holding the camera and providing some rotation freedom degrees which are sufficient to do the first steps in photographing with tripod and it did not cost as much as is paid for an hour of simple work.

The main task of a tripod is to keep the camera still in case the exposure time is to long to hold the camera with the hand. As a general rules this happens when the denominator of the exposure time is longer than half the length of the focal length (e.g. 50mm focal length – exposure time > 1/25 sec).

After some time using this tools something interesting may happen. Since the field of view is fixed the picture can be chosen in a much more relaxed way and every corner is fixed for careful checking before pushing the trigger and capturing the image. This leads to a total new experience in composing a picture. And finally boosts your photographic know-how to a new level which is helpful even if not using the tripod.

So if you try to do serious photos – get one!

Reverberation and psychic reverberation

bitsphere — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:30:22 +0000

One of the central description of a tone in nature is its reverberation. Reverberation occurs if a sound is reflected by any obstacle so the sound seems to be longer than it was at the beginning. This effect was used in history back to early human concerts in caves, amplified in very long reverberating cathedrals in medieval Europe and is nowadays simulated with electric reverberation devices or software.

But aside the acoustic phenomena there is a psychic reverberation of sound which occurs when the mind is occupied by a sound that no longer persists in the outer physical world. It may also be called a psychic echo.

The most common example might be the catchy tune which comes back to the mind several times. Other sounds can be hardly forgot: Sometimes people cannot stop thinking of the noise of an accident. Some people are very much affected by strange voices, so they start to ape them, not always in favour of the origin.

Please tell me in the comment section which sounds, tunes or noises you can hardly forget!