Hacks #52-60
Based
on feedback from other work I have done, I know many web designers
have a common misapprehension about sound, and it goes something like
this:
I am not a fine-art painter, but that does not stop me from being
able to draw pictures or design graphically compelling web sites. I
am not a musician, and that does stop me from
creating sounds and making music files for my web sites.
That attitude is fine for an HTML site designer who
doesn't have to do much with sound, but when it
comes to web motion graphics, a lack of sound-authoring ability can
be a big disadvantage. Sound is fundamental to animation and
interactivity. Try navigating a few Flash sites with the sound turned
down or playing Quake with the sound amp set at 2 instead of 10. It
is just not the same!
The alternative to creating your own sounds is to buy a few sound
source CD-ROMs, but the content from these are usually either of the
"so overused that it will appear all over the Web in
no time" or "so way-out wacky that
nobody will want to use this" variety.
The problem is that
sound is not well supported as a subject in
its own right within web design. We all know how to optimize a bitmap
for the Web without causing too many jaggies or
stippling/banding/coloring noise, but sound optimization rarely
extends beyond setting the MP3 export bit rate to give us a smaller
filesize. In fact, sound optimization technology also has its own
"jaggies"
(aliasing frequencies) and noise
effects (quantization noise), and you need to know
about them to generate the best filesize-to-quality ratio.
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Sound is much more bandwidth-heavy than anything except video, so it
is very important that sound is optimized as much as possible in any
web content.
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So, the main thrust of this chapter is to show hacks that allow you
to create sounds for Flash without having to go to a (usually very
costly) off-the-shelf sound source CD-ROM and without having to
nurture any music talent. We also look at a number of issues that can
stop Flash sound from working as advertised (and which have put off
many Flash sound experimenters in the past).
A secondary aim is to present a few sound-related hacks that are not
normally attempted. These techniques are hacks because they are sound
applications that are not mainstream, such as Flash-based spoken word
input and output.
Many of the routes to creating complex sound rely on recent additions
to Flash (such as the Microphone class and more
subtle enhancements like the ability to provide better timing and the
overall stability of the Flash Player). This means that some of the
sound hacks have really been viable only with recent revisions of
Flash.
For the basics of using sound in Flash in the standard ways, refer to
the ActionScript Cookbook by Joey Lott
(O'Reilly). This chapter covers some of the
nonstandard or lesser-known sound techniques, plus techniques for
authoring raw sounds suitable for web use.
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