Hacker News Reader

Comment by catshirt | Hacker News Reader

i was really excited when i found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCuGpiR7FRY

(don't think it's too OT... we could imagine this being a delay/echo sequencer...)

strangely, the name of the app is not in the title or the description of the video. took me a while to find this demo. (can't remember the name).

on one hand i feel like there are endless possibilities. on the other hand, why can't i think of one? not that i am the most creative but... i don't see anyone making any either. most VR audio apps are contrived- they don't make any more sense in VR than they do on a desktop.

i'm excited either way. i think even contrived instruments have potential if you add remote multiplayer.

View on HN

>on one hand i feel like there are endless possibilities. on the other hand, why can't i think of one?

Music doesn't have any innate visual element. It's an auditory and tactile medium. In theory, Photoshop or Final Cut could add all sorts of "audiolization" tools, but the idea seems quite odd. Representing sound as visual images scarcely makes any more sense. We're living in a visual culture, so we tend to overlook the importance of the other senses.

VR currently provides no tactile feedback, which is absolutely vital in musical performance and production - muscle memory doesn't function without it. The theremin has been around for a century, but only a handful of people have ever learned to play it well. It's extraordinarily difficult to wave your hands around in mid-air with any amount of precision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l9YcewEumw

Another interesting one is/was AudioGL (not AR but 3D):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-RCzeJQazA

https://www.audiogl.com/en/audiogl

I had a ton of fun playing with SoundStage: http://www.soundstagevr.com/

It's far from "full-featured, professional-quality", but it completely sold me on the viability of VR as a medium for audio production.

I think the key is going to be pairing the extra human bandwidth you get from VR controllers, with these new types of generative networks that are emerging out of machine learning research. I'm playing around with this idea for my next VR experience after Soundboxing. But I haven't made great progress on autoregressive acoustic sample based generators like wavenet, which I had hoped would work better for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com