The project can be found here.
Idea:
Our audio-visual project explored the philosophical question of: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It is a question that has to do with observation and perception.
The artistic interpretation of this idea came in two ways: audio (the sound of a tree being chopped down, it creaking, ambient noise that distorts the listener’s ability to hear the tree falling, and the sound of it eventually falling) and visual (GIF of someone attempting to chop down a tree, pictures of a forest from different angles “zooming-out”).
In a way, there is a delay between what is perceived (visual) and observed (sound). You see when the tree is being chopped down, but you don’t see how it looks like when downed. One can only make the assumption that it was the same tree that was observed that was heard, but one cannot be certain. That is the idea we tried to audio-visually execute
Implementation:
We first came together to work on a way to interpret the philosophical question into a project. We then story-boarded how our project would look like and the sequence of events that would take place.
1.) Actual Zoom Features:
While initially, we were working on a zoom feature that was defined and implemented in magnifier.js, which I was initially trying to work on with the first picture, it was too difficult to integrate into our project. There seemed to be a problem accessing the library of code that the author wrote. Scratching that idea, we then agreed that zooming out could be visually represented by making the picture smaller and smaller. Abdullah was able to write his own javascript functions, manually hard-coding the initial size, then shrinking it proportionally across its height and width.
2.) Adjusting Volume/Sound distortion.
3.) Hover effect with distorted sound.
Division of work:
Abdullah worked on most of the functionality of the project, while I worked on the visuals and CSS elements of the project.
Post Mortem:
I found that we were successfully able to interpret the question audio-visually. Abdullah was a great partner, it was truly an educational experience in observing how he implemented the functionality of the project through javascript.