Stereo Panning

Roundware's roots are in sound art and therefore aesthetic flexibility and fine-tuning have always been at its core. Stereo panning is one of these features that has been available from the start to give artists or anyone creating a Roundware experience the ability to create motion and interest in the stereo field.

Panning is first-gen Roundware functionality and is rudimentary, but still very useful for the aesthetic tuning of the system. The panning functionality is supposed to behave as such (though I have experienced some odd behavior with this, so I'm not convinced it is working properly):

• min and max pan positions are defined per audiotrack (-1.0 if full left and 1.0 is full right)
• min and max pan times are defined per audiotrack as well
• each audiotrack then proceeds to pick a random start and stop pan position within the defined range
• a pan time is also randomly chosen from the range
• then the asset (which is a mono audio file) is played back within the stream starting at the initial pan position and ending at the destination pan position taking the pan time to traverse the "distance" linearly
• when the pan destination is reached, the process starts over with a new pan destination and new pan time chosen (the previous pan destination becomes the pan origin of the next step)
• I'm not sure how this works in transitions from asset to asset; ie whether the process starts over or continues from where it left off. Probably doesn't really matter, but I think it's the latter.

This is very useful not only for some audio variety and motion in the stereo field, but also for multiple audiotrack scenarios in which one track can be mainly left and the other mainly right etc. When we gain the ability to filter audiotracks by tag #189, this will be even more useful.

It is important to note that Roundware does not currently offer any directional audio capabilities; the stereo panning is simply of assets in the stereo field independent of the physical environment. It would be very interesting to add true directional audio sometime, though, as well as things like controlling panning with the device compass and/or other sensors. Some of these features could be very interesting aesthetically as well as for accessibility purposes and even wayfinding.

We could also have sounds emanate from the direction from which they originate allowing people to hear things that aren't where they are located, but are from the direction they are looking etc etc. Some folks in Joe Paradiso's Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab are doing some very interesting experiments on this sort of thing that could prove to be great additions to Roundware.

There are many significant possibilities!