Swishpunphweet Sweetie

Alright, so I feel that my experience with the plastic bag may have deviated somewhat from the initial intended goal, buuut...you know what? I'm fine with that.

Inspired somewhat by Evelyn Glennie, I started thinking about the various sounds of a bag. There's a potential for limitless sounds in a bag - I'm willing to bet someone could even perfect the playing of a bag into a legitimate instrument. Anyway, I decided to document a very short time with the bag using audio. As I've had experience with Flash (but not with audio), I used Flash as my tool for this experiment.

First, I used Garageband to record a minute or two of me toying around with the bag. I swiped it through the air, flicked it, punched it, twisted it, and overall mutilated the thing. I ended with forming an air pocket and popping the bag.

With my raw audio, I then sliced the clip into nine 1-2 second snippets using Audacity. Then, in Flash I formed a line of columns. As you roll from the left to the right, you hear the various sounds condensed into a sort of snapshot timeline. Though the user can always scroll to any button, you always have a general idea of WHEN the sound occurred. You know the sound in the 4th bar happened after the 3rd sound, but before the 5th.

The .swf can be found here.

On a side note, I had a parallel project running alongside the bag experiment. As I learned more about sound in Flash, and after toying with various iterations of what to do with the bag's audio, I put this together. I rather like this (probably more than I like the bag experiment), and might expand it sometime in the future.