Music, maestro!
After making a long list and listening to tens of albums, I've chosen Phenomena by Zanski for this project.
I chose this album because first of all, I like it, but also I think this is a solid choice for the features I want to implement into this project. Let's go over them.
Features #
I thought about the interactions and features I want to implement into this experience and decided to go with the following:
- Some sort of object interaction to load data about the songs, perhaps physics based?
- A way to play the songs in vr, stem based (more on this later)
- Info/facts about the album
- Lyrics synced to the song currently playing
- Visuals related to the song/album
Playing with stems #
As I dabble in music production quite a bit, I'm familiar with how music gets mixed and mastered, and that's usually via stems.
Stems are simply put the invididual tracks of a song. For example, if you have a song with a bass, a drum, and a guitar, you can have a stem for each of those. Vocals would also be exported as a stem to master.
I thought about fun interactive ways to listen to the song in vr and came up with the idea to play with the stems in vr. I do this quite often when remixing different songs, taking out the drums for example to add my own, but sometimes it's fun to play around with just the vocals and drums, and add the bass in yourself.
I really wanna try and take this fun experience into the vr space and allow the user to single out stems and play them.
I checked if this was possible with Three.js and found this demo which has multiple sounds playing at the same time, positional audio and also visual feedback based on the audio output.
These are all things on my checklist and I want to create a demo with this asap to try it out.
Phenomena TV #
Leading up to the release of the album, Zanski released a few videos under the moniker "Phenomena TV" about how he produces his music.
I'd like to incorporate some of these into the experience to give you a large sense of how the album came to be.
Stems demo #
Now, these ideas are fun I think, but ripping the stems of a full track is a bit of a challenge. There are definitely tools to do this, but they don't always sound great. That's why I'd like to reach out to Zanski and see if he'd be open to collaborate on this project. Having access to the raw stems would be so much better for the end result.
I've included an audio sample below of what original vs ripped stems sound like.
This is a snippet of the officially released stems of "Where did you fall" by underscores.
Below is the same snippet of guitars, but ripped from the full track with Spleeter.
As you can hear, the original stems are much clearer and dont have artifacts or other noises that the ripped stems have. Spleeter is very good at classical music, but for electronic music, it's hit or miss.
Planning #
I've also updated my planning a bit. By the end of this week I'd like to be done with the concept and be able to develop full time for the next 3 weeks. I want to keep at least one week as a buffer for bug fixes and anything else looking to ruin my week. Better to be prepared for the worst.
I've also updated this blog itself a bit. I've fixed some content, page routing and css styling.
Oh and how could I forget, I got a domain name for this project. The name of this project is The Virtual Soundscape, and I discovered that thevirtualsoundscape.com was still available so I went ahead and got it.
This domain will probably expire in a year from now since I dont see the point of renewing this indefinitely but for at least until November 2022, it'll be available.