Festival2012/Submit/The Web Gramophone

The Web Gramophone

• Title of session: The Web Gramophone
• Name and affiliation: Alex Lakatos and Brian King - Mozilla Representatives, Hackers
• Session format: Design Challenge

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

• Make : A Web application, with client and server parts
• Learn : Web technologies
• Learn: How to work with audio and images on the Web
• Learn: Use the Audio API in Firefox, Canvas, and typed Arrays
• Do: Collaborate and communicate

How do you see that working?

A mix of people with different skill sets to get together and build something new.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

For a large group, we would split into different groups with different skills sets. Participants can move around from team to team. Towards the end the groups would come together again to make sure there is a clear understanding of what needs to be done to pull together and finish the project. Coding will then continue.

A smaller group would be easier to manage but would mean that participants might have to take on more tasks to pull things together.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

• Our hope is that anyone participating will see how a design challenge works and be able to run one themselves after.
• Using audio and images in Firefox: Towards the end when everything links together.
• Teach how to build any Web app, once they learn here and do some follow-up research and prototypes after.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

• A working app.
• A Web Service where you can upload audio and it produces an image or images. It can also work in reverse where images produced by the app can be shared and the service will play it back as audio.
• Any image can be used. You can play a regular image, but it's likely the audio will be scrambled and won't sound good.