Just in time for WOMAD Charlton Park we’ve finally launched our new community website Womad Stories.
Based on the same ideas and technology we used with Real World Remixed the idea is to encourage the festival goers to recount their favourite tales about the experience. From performance reviews to more general festival tales, both good and bad, we hope the site will bring out the inner journalist in the WOMAD punters.
Hooking in to the Flikr idea users of the site can also upload photographs to illustrate their stories and to enable this we are using a combination of custom php uploading scripts and the lightbox javascript library.
The most difficult part of the site to get working is tucked away in the submit and filter sections. The sideways scrolling filter panel was my best guess at how to deal with handling performance data from festivals dating back 5 years (with older information planned) in a simple and easy to understand interface.
As usual the site, from the back end to the interface is custom built in-house and has, for us, had an unusually long gestation as the original idea was floated nearly nine months ago. Development of the in-house ticketing system for Charlton Park and the long overdue redesign of Peter Gabriel’s website put the launch of the site back so it’s great to see it finally live.
My mate Jon’s finally put up the video of his recent art installation “The Sonic Marble Run”.
http://www.youtube.com/v/6ZQK3pBkAl4
I’ll let him explain…
The piece consists of two elements. Firstly, the marble creates sounds by rolling along textured runways and striking various things such strings, springs metal objects etc. These sound sources are then amplified and reproduced through an installation of various prepared speakers. The speakers are prepared in that they have been physically altered in some way to affect their sound. As the audience roll the marbles down the run the space is filled with an electro mechanical soundscape. It is a physical and electromechanical sonic experience: no digital here! The piece has so far been exhibited at the Grant Bradley gallery in Bristol.
You can find out more at his website
Welsh’s Synthesizer Cookbook have release a free sample set for those interested in the more “out there” sources of percussion..
A 130mb pack of kitchenware samples recorded in stereo and featuring more pots and pans than I have in my kitchen this looks like a great source for those more esoteric percussion sounds.
Originally from Create Digital Music
Finally PG.com leaves the Quicktime era and joins the rest of the world with embedded flash video. Just the one Moonclub video up at the moment but all future video content will be in this format and with luck and time on our side we will slowly update the older videos.
Based in part on the video player tutorial by Derrick Ypenburg over at CommunityMX but extended and customised to suit our needs here in the (ahem) Real World (sorry).
There are still a few little usage niggles which I’ll see if I can iron out over the coming weeks but basically the functionality is there and it does basically work which is always a bonus.
I’ve probably been on there for ages but no-one told me as usual. I’m been on other download stores before of course but iTunes is the daddy after all.
Of course there’s no distinction between me and the US based Stabilizer who released an album in 2005, the same as Last.fm, but hey.. I’m there! I just hope they aren’t getting any of my sales cash!
Stabilizer on iTunes
