Oxygen
It was harmless enough when it started. I created a sound set for my linux computer because I was sick and tierd of the defaul ones. About a month later I decided to share them with the world on kde-look.com and the feedback was quite nice. Iñaki commented that my humble sound set should be KDE’s 4 default theme, soon after I sent him an email asking “fine, but where do I start? who do I contact?” he pointed me is the direction on mailing lists and irc channels, but things didn’t evolve much. A few weeks later Pinheiro established contact and soon enough we agreed that the Oxygen futuristic-zen-like visuals were in sync with the direction I had chosen at the time to create the Kinper sound theme.
So where you can keep track of “what’s up with that”. The Kinper sound theme is in the forge to be a part of the brilliant Oxygen icon set that hopefuly will make KDE an even more interesting interface between user and computer.
For now here’s the link for the Sound Theme on kde-look. It’s going through a major re-vamping but the guidelines are there.
Date Unknown - I’m in a bit of quaddrile. What I thought was the logon sound suddenly became de logoff sound. huh? hyea… well… I sometimes forget people don’t listen to music the way I do, and there are strickt rules one should follow to make these bits and pieces of audio. It’s much like making a jinggle for a commercial. there are seldomly any minor scales being used because they tend to be depressive. and next time you hear a commercial jinggle you might notice that the musical progression always ends with a higher note that it stared with, thus giving the consumer a feeling of “crescendo” about the product.A logon sound shouldn’t be much different, it would be easy to do a cinemmatic entrace with big string arrangements and full-blow precurssion, but oxygen seems to me a lot more elegant then that. So the descending logon sound became the logoff sound (because there a descent makes sense) and I made something up for the logon sound. No more full piano chords, a simple arpeggio will give it the sense and sensibility that will reflect the icon set’s pastel-but-lively tones.
2007-02-04 - The guys requested a longer logon sound. I added a few bars that emphasise the melodic phrase I have chosen to mark the “audio image” of Oxygen. (if you have no clue what I’m talking about think about the NBC logo popping up on the screen; can you disassociate that from the three musical notes played wile it’s running? no, right? that’s what I’d call “audio image”). This solved another problem wich was the initial switch between logon and logoff sound. the “image” is there again. I’m not thrilled with the outcome, but I’m content.
2007-02-15 - Dev05 requested a “warning” sound to be added to the kinper soundset. I’ll get into it as soon as I get the ideas I’m having for the screencast/ad/whatever out of my mind and into actual music.
2007-02-18 - Just finished the blueprint for a theme that can be used to showcase KDE in screencasts and such, it’s coherent with the system sounds in terms of feel, but it’s a bit more orchestrated then the logon sound. There is an unexpected solo from an unexpected intrument. that I like. The audio image is present again, this time with a sound I labeled “SteWond” because it reminded me of a Beat Club performance I cought on TV Stevie Wonder playing this mean analogue synth; he used it mostly for left hand activity but what caught my attention was the little details he was doing on the high notes… I’m not saying it’s close to Stevie’s sound, it just reminds me of it. 
You can find the said blueprint on Pinheiro’s blog (cool commenting on the piece) or access it directly via this link. Now in bold: it’s a blueprint, yes, I’m skipping tempo, the ending is rhythmic chaos, it’s all good now.
2007-02-19 - Corrected the tids and bits that were wrong with yesterday’s blueprint, I can consider it now pretty much nailed down. The next phase will be to provide it with a bit more interesting stereoscopic experience, especially the percurssion wich is lacking the kick-in-the-naughty-bits effect.
2007-02-20 - Created the warning sound requested at KDE-LOOK (although I suspect DEV05 is accessing the site via Gnome-Look), it’s available in the standard package.
On another note:
Good to know one is not alone.
I had a nice chat with Joseph Gaffney regarding sound and multimedia on KDE. He developed the documention stating the standards and bare minimums for sound specs. Turns out I’ve been creating my sounds at 44.000Hz and the minimum for KDE is 48.000 so I’ll have to redo the mastering of everything done until now.
Talking to Joseph got me musing about 5.1 sounds and how they’d seriousy make KDE standout from the other desktop enviornments, I have however no idea on how to even start forging that sound on by my humble self. But I will surely investigate.
2007-02-21 - I’m taking into consideration some comments on Pinheiro’s blog. The pizzicato at the end of the comercial is mostly gone (except at the very end where I like the way it wraps things up), for starters. I hope I have time to do all the alterations before the end of this week.
2007-03-04 - Right, it wasn’t a very productive weekend, it was more of a state-of-affairs sort of deal.
It seems I need to step away from single melodic sentences and/or simple and straight intervals to create messages. it’s way to limited and ends up beeing confusing for the user to differenciate audio messages.
but I’m doing it by steps, so sys_Battery sounds are the first one’s beeing done with a single note followed by a chord, when I feel I’ve exhausted that, I’ll move on to the oposite: chord followed by single note, if that doens’t feel like it’s enough I’ll move even further to full blow chords. The hard bit about full chords is the WIN legacy thing, error is still that big piano chord that is still trapped in our collective minds.
Another thing I noticed this weekend wile experimenting with sounds is that I’m dangerously close to the sound used in the Live Messenger’s “nudge” sound. It’s ok for as long and I don’t to the twirling thing they did there. but still…it’s a close one.
Adhoc
- Commercial V5
IM
- Contact In
- File Failed
- File Finished
- File Trasaction Request
- Contact LogIn
- Contact LogOut
- Message In
- Message Out
- New Message (start chat)
System
- Battery Low
- Error
- Login Error (no valid credentials)
- Log In
- Log Out
- Message
- Question
- UsB IN
- USB Out
- Warning
10-02-2007 - Right! Everything is at 48.000Hz!!! yay!
Plus I got the some other sounds done and I’ve brushed up the jingle a bit more.
I’ll soon enough start filling in the wiki Joseph pointed out to me a few weeks back, as to the naming specification of the sound theme.
I compiled the list of sound on the current version of KDE and I noticed that the accessibility sounds are supposed to have….well…sounds. I find this rather strange. Shouldn’t we be using synthesized voices to warn about those events? Abstract sounds shouldn’t be used to warn users that are potentially impaired. it seem’s quite counter-productive to me. I’ll dig a bit further regarding this and who I should contact to make this happen.
Bottom line is: speech synthesis is something that should be working “out of the box” in every single distro or desktop environment, for the sake of actual accessibility.
