Chapter 11. Designing Audio Web Sites with Beatnik
With its Rich Music Format (RMF), Beatnik is an active player in the future of interactive web audio. The Beatnik format generates compact file sizes that rival those of MIDI. Beatnik's advantages are its ability for intelligent interactivity with JavaScript, its standard set of instrument sounds for consistent playback across all platforms, and its Beatnik Editor for adding custom digital audio samples and instrument banks. Beatnik's interactive capabilities combined with its high music quality and small file sizes make it ideal for full-scale advanced sound design on the Web. Examples of web sites that have been "sonified" using the Beatnik System are shown in Figure 11-1. To hear a sample of RMF and the Beatnik System, visit the Beatnik web site at http://www.beatnik.com.
Figure 11-1. Examples of sonified sites by Young & Rubicam (left) and 7-UP (center and right)
Beatnik Inc., a company co-founded by music legend Thomas Dolby
Robertson under the moniker Headspace, developed the RMF format.
Beatnik is significant because it's the first format that gives
web audio producers the tools to create full-scale, high-quality
interactive web soundtracks and the platform to deliver the music
over limited bandwidths. Even though high-quality streaming audio has
existed for a number of years, the interactive aspect has been
absent. Other popular interactive technologies such as Flash do not
offer as many controls over audio playback for traditional sound
designers.
11.1. New possibilities for interactive sound
Seasoned audio professionals accustomed
to delivering high-fidelity sound without bandwidth constraints often
have found it difficult to engineer a compelling aural experience for
the Web. Sound "design" for the web is frequently limited
to creating low-quality sound effects for rollover buttons or
composing background music with the same software-based, General MIDI
instruments everyone is using.
Beatnik offers a new kind of aural experience by connecting a
listener's interactions with what they hear. The Beatnik System
allows for accurate music playback of the sounds created in the
Beatnik Editor, regardless of the user's platform or machine.
For sound designers, Beatnik's precise playback in
cross-platform environments gives it an advantage over MIDI-based web
music composition and playback. With a basic knowledge of JavaScript,
audio professionals can build sophisticated interactive soundtracks.
Much of the Beatnik toolset will be familiar to the modern audio
engineer, and there are several applications that help generate the
JavaScript you
need, including Macromedia's
Dreamweaver.
Beatnik allows you to:
-
Orchestrate and deliver a complex, one-minute interactive soundtrack
with multiple instrument sounds, rhythms, melodies, and JavaScript
commands in a file size that's equivalent to a 10-second mono
MP3 file.
-
Create interactive soundtracks that unleash sound loops whenever a
user clicks on a new location. The sounds are all sonically
integrated components of one big groove.
-
Use JavaScript to create interactive elements, such as buttons,
mouseovers, and transitions, directly within a standard HTML page.
This is an advantage over using a standalone authoring application.
Beatnik also has a tool called the Beatnik Xtra for Director that
adds Beatnik functionality to Director/Shockwave projects via Lingo
scripting.
-
Maintain precise control over fade-outs and transitions when a user
leaves or enters a web page, clicks on a button or link, or rolls the
mouse cursor over a specified area.
-
Control how instrument sounds and music tracks cross-fade and mix
during playback.
-
Build a soundtrack that is responsive enough to make people feel like
they are jamming on a virtual graphic instrument.
While Beatnik is a powerful tool for building and delivering
interactive soundtracks, the technology has several
disadvantages:
-
It's not yet tailored for streaming long-format audio files.
For audio broadcasting applications, such as a radio show, live
conference, or a 10-minute tutorial,
RealAudio does a much better job. Beatnik
expects to add streaming capability in 2000.
-
The technology comes with a steep learning curve, which is well worth
it for the serious web sound designer but can be a drawback for
developers who just want to quickly add a few sounds to their web
site. Both MIDI and JavaScript authoring can be fairly complex for
the beginner.
-
Beatnik does not have as large of a user base as RealAudio or Flash,
which means you are more likely to encounter browser plug-in issues
and errors.
-
Previewing the Beatnik instrument sounds is difficult to do when
composing your MIDI music. Although you can create a live MIDI
connection with the Beatnik instruments and trigger them with a MIDI
keyboard, there is a significant lag in the response time, which
prohibits composing directly with the instruments in real-time.
Instead, you must use the internal sounds of a separate General MIDI
instrument to perform the various parts of a composition.
 |  |  | | 10.4. Summary |  | 11.2. Beatnik authoring system |
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