Old RTF
From 2002, the first iteration of my commercial website, Repeat-to-fade.net can be found here if you have an old flash plugin that works (not advised, get rid of it) otherwise it’s dead now (sobs). It contained an archive of pretty much everything I’ve done but more importantly, in this context, it was a pretty good illustration of how my web based ideas around sound developed after the MTV2 project. Being my own client meant that I could simply indulge my curiosity.
Working with the same developer who had programmed the MTV2 site, Thomas Poeser, I decided to make its model for internet sound the focal point of my own site.
I knew I wanted sonification to be at the heart of the user experience so with Thomas’ help I designed the navigation around the sound. One of the reasons for the success of the MTV2 site was its engaging interface, its core simplicity was masked by a design that invited interaction. As the sound for repeat-to-fade was also to be built on user interaction, it was key that this interface should also be playful. But in addition the interface should enable a more detailed ruleset with which I could compose. File sizes were a restriction so I designed a sound engine based around multiple, asynchronously looping files, some were very short, creating longer single tones and textures when looped, others were much longer, crossfading in and out of each other to make a constantly shifting audio environment.
The sounds themselves were taken from pieces of music I had made, I wanted to hear how the site could be used to reconstruct these pieces, either deliberately, or inadvertently, as a by-product of finding information.