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 AVOL
– AUDIOVISUAL ONLINE:PLAYING WITH INTERACTIVE SOUND VISUALIZATION
Nuno N. Correia
 Aalto University, School of Art and Design, Media Lab - Hämeentie 135 c, FI-00560 Helsinki, Finland 
ABSTRACT
AVOL (AudioVisual OnLine) is an interactive audiovisual project for the Web, installation and performance by VideoJack (a collective composed of the author and André Carrilho). AVOL was one of the four winners of a competition bythe Portuguese Ministry of Culture to develop artworks for their net art portal. Further to the launch of this portal, AVOLhas been presented as installation and as performance. In AVOL, users manipulate seven “objects” composed of differentelements: a sound loop; an animated visualization of that sound; and graphical user interface elements that facilitate theintegrated manipulation of sound and image. Each of the objects has four main variations, allowing for multipleaudiovisual combinations. The objects may interact with each other, creating additional diversity. The main researchquestion that the project addresses is: how to develop a project that allows for an integrated musical and visualexpression, in a way that is playful to use and engaging to experience. The methodology used for the evaluation of theproject is practice-based research. In this paper, the project and its motivations are presented, as well as prior work fromthe same authors in the field of interactive audiovisual art. A short discussion of the state of the art follows. Thedevelopment of the project and the different modes of presentation (Web, installation and performance) are discussed, aswell as feedback gathered. Conclusions are then reached, and possible future developments are outlined.
KEYWORDS
Sound visualization, audiovisual, animation, net art, graphical user interface, interaction design.
1.
 
INTRODUCTION
 AVOL
(AudioVisual OnLine) is an interactive audiovisual project for the Web(http://www.videojackstudios.com/avol/, referenced 11/1/2011), installation and performance by Portuguesenew media artists Video Jack. Video Jack are a duo composed of the author, a programmer and musician, andAndré Carrilho, an illustrator and animator.
 AVOL
was released in December 2007, and further developeduntil 2010. It is the outcome of a competition organized by Direcção Geral das Artes (DGA, a department of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture) in order to create their Net.Art portal. It follows upon previous work byVideo Jack for the Web and performance, such as
 Heat Seeker
(2006-2008) and
 Idiot Prince
(2006). Theproject aims to allow for an integrated musical and visual expression, in a way that is playful to use andengaging to experience. Based on the experience of the author as creator and user, and on feedback gatheredduring presentations, these aims were achieved, although more could be done to allow for an increasedversatility and diversity.
2.
 
BACKGROUND, MOTIVATION AND AIMS
In January 2007, Video Jack were among the 12 Portuguese artists invited by Direcção Geral das Artes(DGA, then Instituto das Artes, a department of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture) “to submit a proposal todevelop an art work conceived specifically for the Internet, for the purpose of integrating the future Net.ArtGallery of the Instituto das Artes” (translated from the original invitation letter). Video Jack submited
 AVOL
,which was one of the four proposals accepted for the Gallery. The DGA Net.Art Gallery was released inDecember 2007 (http://netarte.dgartes.pt/, referenced 11/1/2011), integrating AVOL (Figure 1.).
IADIS International Conference Game and Entertainment Technologies 201183
 
 
Figure 1. Screen capture of 
 AVOL
 
In 2006, Video Jack had finished their first major project, entitled
 Heat Seeker
 (http://www.videojackstudios.com/projects/heat-seeker/, referenced 11/1/2011). The main objective of 
 Heat Seeker
was "to combine animated visuals with sound in an electronic music performance (restoring a visualelement that is lacking in laptop-based music performances) creating an engaging hypermediated experiencefor the audience" (Correia 2010, p. 244). An additional aim of 
 Heat Seeker
was "to make the act of manipulating the visuals apparent to the audience, similarly to how the audience views a musical instrumentbeing played live in a performance" (Correia 2010, p. 245).In
 Heat Seeker
performances, the sound element was manipulated separately from the visual element –the software built by Video Jack allowed for visual manipulation, whereas the audio element wasmanipulated using commercial software (
 Ableton Live
). Another distinctive aspect of 
 Heat Seeker
was its useof narrative animation, combined with non-narrative elements. Among the latter were “animated icons”,flexible small animations that could be manipulated by drag-and-drop, key presses or random behaviors.Another previous work by Video Jack,
 Idiot Prince
(http://www.videojackstudios.com/projects/idiot-prince/, referenced 11/1/2011), also from 2006, was influential for
 AVOL
. In
 Idiot Prince
, programmaticbehaviors such as random movement can be added to abstract animation modules, creating overlappingpatterns. The starting point for
 Idiot Prince
were the “animated icons” developed for
 Heat Seeker
, althoughin
 Idiot Prince
their behavior lost the interactive aspect, depending exclusively on random behaviors.
 AVOL
 combines elements from both.For the audio side of 
 AVOL
, the author drew inspiration from
 Role-Playing Egas
 (http://www.videojackstudios.com/collab/egas/, referenced 11/1/2011), a project about Egas Moniz,Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
 Role-Playing Egas
(2005) was developed by the authorand Portuguese artist and researcher Patrícia Gouveia. The project includes a “music box” section, with eightaudio loops of equal length. There are start and stop buttons for each loop. Having the same length, they areinterchangeable, allowing for the creation of multiple combinations of sounds.For their next project, Video Jack aimed to integrate the two elements that were separate in
 Heat Seeker
–audio and image – under the same application and the same interface. The call for proposals from DGAprovided the trigger to develop a follow-up to
 Heat Seeker
, which would be showcased on the Web instead of in performances. This provided an additional challenge – to develop an application that would be used not byVideo Jack, but potentially by anyone with Internet access. With their
 AVOL
proposal, Video Jack aimed topursue their objective to integrate image and sound in the same software environment. Their main concernwas to develop a project that would allow for an integrated musical and visual expression, in a way thatwould be playful to use and engaging to experience.For
 AVOL
, the author planned to develop the “animated icons” in
 Heat Seeker
into animated elementsthat not only would be audio-reactive, but also would control sound. As in the “animated icons”, they wouldhave drag-and-drop functionalities and randomization possibilities. The author entitled these elements“Interactive AudioVisual Objects” (“IAVOs”), because they would combine an interactive element - a GUI(graphical user interface) to control sound - with sound visualization, by means of audio-reactive animations.Using
 AVOL
, the user should be able to combine different sound loops, and consequentially differentanimation loops, creating an audiovisual composition.
ISBN: 978-972-8939-50-2 © 2011 IADIS84
 
The name of the project was inspired by Sergi Jordà’s work
FMOL
(Faust Music OnLine), “an Internetproject for real-time collective composition” (Jordà 1999, p. 1).
3.
 
STATE OF THE ART
The relation between music and image has been explored throughout the centuries. Ancient Greekphilosophers, such as Aristotle and Pythagoras, considered that there was a correlation between the musicalscale and the rainbow spectrum of hues (Moritz, 1997). The color to music correlation was further exploredin the Renaissance by several artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, and later by Isaac Newton (Van Campen2008, pp. 45-46).
3.1 Early-mid 20th Century
Artistic movements of the early 20th century, such as Bauhaus and the Futurists, further exploredcombinations of music and image. Italian Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, experimented with“color organ” projection in 1909 and painted “some nine abstract films directly on film-stock in 1911”(Moritz 1997). In the 1920s, Oskar Fischinger and Walther Ruttman created visual music films in Germany –a combination of tinted animation with live music (Moritz 1997).When Oskar Fischinger moved to Hollywood in 1936, he became an inspiration to a younger generationof visual music artists, such as brothers John and James Whitney, who “decided to take up abstract animationafter seeing a screening of Oskar's film at the Stendhal art gallery in 1939” (Moritz 1995).John Whitney is “widely considered ‘the father of computer graphics’” for his explorations of computer-generated manipulation of visuals through mathematical functions (Paul 2003, p. 15). He was among the firstgeneration to use computers for the creation of artworks in the 1960s. He and his brother James were alsoinspired by Fischinger, and decided to take up abstract animation after seeing one of his screenings (Moritz1995). Whitney’s work is influenced by music – “I am moved to draw parallels with music. The very nextterm I wish to use is ‘counterpoint’” (Youngblood 1970, p. 215). However, Whitney dismisses those whoattempted to correlate color with music: “they were so hung up with parallels with music that they missed theessence of their medium”. He prefers to approach his own musical parallels more loosely: “the essentialproblem with my kind of graphics must resemble the creative problem of melody writing” (Youngblood1970, p. 220).
3.2 Audiovisual Art the late 20th and Early 21st Centuries
Progress in personal computing hardware played an important role for the dissemination of digital art in the1990s, when “affordable personal computers were powerful enough to manipulate images, render 3D models,design Web pages, edit video and mix audio with equal ease” (Tribe and Jana 2007, p. 10).Artistic digital sound and music is a vast territory, that includes: “pure sound art (without any visualcomponent), audiovisual installation environment and software, Internet-based projects that allow for real-time, multi-user compositions and remixes, as well as networked projects that involve public places ornomadic devices” (Paul 2003, p. 133).These digital sound and music projects are frequently interactive, and some of them incorporate visuals:“(they) also commonly take the form of interactive installations or ‘sculptures’ that respond to different kindsof user input or translate data into sounds and visuals” (Paul 2003, p. 136).Many of these projects that combine music and visuals digitally “stand in the tradition of kinetic lightperformance or the visual music of the German abstractor and painter Oskar Fischinger” (Paul 2003, p. 134).Golan Levin is one of the artists that have explored interconnected audiovisual creative expression, inworks such as
 Audiovisual Environment Suite
(1998-2000), “an interactive software that allows for thecreation and manipulation of simultaneous visuals and sound in real time” (Paul 2003, p. 133).In 1994, Netscape released the first commercial Web browser, “signaling the Internet’s transformation(…) into a popular medium for personal communication, publishing and commerce” (Tribe and Jana 2007, p.6). For many artists, the advent of the Internet represented the emergence of “a medium in its own right”, of a“new kind of space in which to intervene artistically” (Tribe and Jana 2007 p. 11).
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