Audimance is a tool for the creation and deployment of user-directed artistic audio experiences. Content may be designed for use in isolation, as accompaniment to other media, or in conjunction with live performance using QLab.
Audimance enables a user-centered, flexibly complex, audio environment ideal for nonvisual audiences and can be used to provide either single-track or multi-track audio description.
Audimance was initially created to solve for a lack of equity and aesthetic sophistication in the previous standard practice of audio description for dance. Designed by Laurel Lawson (laurellawson.com) and initially deployed alongside Kinetic Light's DESCENT (kineticlight.org/descent), Audimance is based on research and continual feedback from primarily nonvisual artists and arts audiences.
Audimance provides a flexible deployment platform which:
- permits artists and content creators to easily deploy single or multi-track content
- facilitates venues in providing consistently available accessibility without large dedicated hardware systems
- creates user-directed aesthetic experiences which prioritize user agency for style and complexity
- Rich multi-track audio description to accompany live or recorded dance, theatre, or other performing arts
- Spatialized sonic art or performance
- Simple audio description to accompany performing arts
- Silent concerts or other sound experiences leveraging personal mobile devices
- Delivery of programs, notes, or other textual assets accompanying performing or exhibited arts
- Audio description for visual arts, such as gallery or museum exhibitions
Audimance can be run as a binary operating on a set of custom web files and program agenda configuration. Generally, no modifications to the engine source code are necessary.
Audimance expects a certain format for its execution root. See the /example
directory for this structure.
The most important file is the agenda.yaml, which defines the program,
sections, cues, audio files, etc. The web templates are located in the views/
directory. index.html is always the entry point, and room.html represents
the template for a room (a place where a performance occurs).
There are very few constraints on styling or format overall. Instead, the data
structures are accessible via Go text/html templating and from Javascript.
An example of an agenda.yaml file can be found in /example, but the full structure of this file is describes by /agenda/agenda.go.
The data structure available to a Room is:
struct {
Announcements []*agenda.Announcement
Room *Agenda.Room
}The main index, however, has the entire Agenda available at its data root.
The /app/app.js file is bundled with the binary application and can be loaded
from that location in your HTML files. It is exposed as an ES6 module.
Inside this module, there are a few key components:
LoadAgenda(function), which loads and processes theagenda.yamlfile for use by the Rooms and optionally custom Javascript.SpatialRoom(class), which creates and manages a room with spatialised sounds placed as configured by theagenda.yamlfile, and scaled to the size of the HTML container with IDaudimance-room.TrackRoom(class), which binds manually-constructed<audio>tags to their corresponding sources, keeping them in sync with the performance.PerformanceTime(class), which keeps track of cues and timings of the performance. The rooms use this internally, but it is exposed in case the developer wishes to create their own actions on certain events.
This package receives continuous ticker notifications and cue announcements which enable Audimance to keep in sync with the live performance, to the fraction of a second, continuously synchronizing.
The SpatialRoom class provides a complete application for playback and
interaction with a performance. You need only load it from your room's HTML, provide
it a <div id="audimance-map"></div> to fill, and it will handle everything
else.
Feel free, too, to simply use it as a model on which to build your own.
Because Audimance is intended to be run at venues with unreliable internet, all dependencies are bundled and local. We recommend any additional dependencies be managed in the same way to reduce external internet traffic from dozens or hundreds of audience members.
Audimance leverages Resonance Audio to provide cross-platform 3-D spatialization of many source sources.
Audimance provides source-separated external synchronization (such as for synchronizing certain audio sources to a live performance), and virtual rooms which may be traversed and chosen independently and interactively by individual audience members.
Audimance accepts cues on a UDP port (9001, by default) to be fed from external synchronization sources, such as from Figure53's QLab. It expects the cue label to be received in case-sensitive plain text on the UDP port to trigger the cue.