[salon]

salon is an experiment in which a flash interface allows a user to populate a room with famous twentieth-century personalities, who speak their minds abstractly via max/msp. what would happen if andy warhol, margaret thatcher, and the dalai lama found themselves in a room together? it might sound a bit like this.

[design]
salon has a list of characters to choose from. when a character is selected, an avatar appears, ready to be dragged into the salon. as more avatars populate the salon, they begin to circle about one another, always orienting themselves toward the nearest adjacent avatar. each avatar is connected to a vocal audio sample of the character it represents. the timeline of the sample is visualized as a ring around the avatar, and as an avatar rotates to track the nearest adjacent avatar, the audio sample is scrubbed and the avatar begins to speak. when the avatar rotates clockwise, the playhead is dragged forward through the sample, while counter-clockwise rotation yields a reverse sample playback. the speed of rotation determines the speed of sample playback, resulting in pitch-shifting.

each of salon's characters has four statistics derived from their public personalities. the first two, influence and trust, affect the quality of the avatar's motion through the salon. the higher a character's influence, the more likely other avatars are to flock to him or her, while a trusting character's avatar is more likely to flock toward others. the dalai lama is a rare example of a character with both high influence and trust, and as such is almost always surrounded by admirers and mentors alike. the second two statistics, chatter and clarity, affect the quality of the character's vocal sample playback. more talkative characters tend to emit a continuous stream of chatter. whether or not the chatter is understandable depends on the character's clarity; andy warhol, for example, talks non-stop but makes no sense.

[technology]
salon comprises a flash interface, a max/msp audio sample player, and a flosc server to allow the two to communicate. a demo of the flash interface is viewable here; however, this version does not have sound as max/msp apps cannot run online. i will post a standalone version of the max patcher sometime in the near future, so that the entire application, with interface and sound, can be downloaded and run.

in the meantime, please take a look at this demo video.

salon is still a work in progress. future work includes: refinement of the character movement, in particular in order to improve the listenability of the audio content, an interface for submission of additional characters by editing the XML back-end (in particular, this feature would be nice for an installation -- visitors could take snapshots via a webcam, and log themselves into the salon), and a possible port of the audio interface to JSyn for online play.

it's also worth noting that all of the audio samples and photographs are borrowed from the bbc audio archives, an awesome collection of recorded interviews with all sorts of people. thanks, bbc! also, thanks to doug easterly for the video.