It would have been so easy to go for yet another generative artist for the pick of FOTB07 Day 3, but good though Jared Tarbell was, today the thing that blew me away was the first session to go so far over my head it made me feel like a junior again (which was a nice feeling).

Flash is absolutely crap at playing with sound. All you can do is shift the pan and the volume of imported sounds really. Unless you get in and start hacking around with the byte code that is, then you can actually start generating sound. This is what Andre Michelle has been doing recently. Once you have tricked Flash into generating sound, if you know what you’re doing, you can start playing with the wave and, next thing you know, you’ve got a synthesiser.

Andre has got Flash to produce some pretty convincing emulations of a 303, a 909, vinyl scratching and loads of other synth noises. And they run with very low processor overhead, so they can be layered and layered and layered. One of the demos he played was a near perfect recreation of early nineties acid classic Acperience, happily bouncing along at around 10% CPU usage. Listen to Andre’s version here.

With everything else I’ve seen at FOTB I was thinking “yeah, I can do that”, and wishing we had clients who wanted to pay me to develop that kind of stuff. But with Andre’s work, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Tweet

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under as3, audio, conferences, flash, fotb, generative, innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.