This was a project to develop a direct manipulation gestural interface for designing sound effects in space and time.
Groovy Tubes is a tool for the design of multi- parameter sound effects in 3D space and time in the Wedge VR Theatre. A Groovy Tube has 3 parts – a sound effect, an input mapping, and a visualisation. In this paper we describe a prototype Groovy Tube for an effect that has 3 parameters – high pass cut-off frequency, filter resonance (Q), and playback rate of the sound passing through it. The input mapping translates the x, y, z movements of a 6 degree of freedom stylus onto the effects parameters along the time-line of a sound moving in space. The visualisation of these parameters is a Cubic Prism selected over Sphere and Fin variants for computational efficiency and visual accuracy. The first Groovy Tube was implemented in the Java based TIWI framework for the Wedge VR Theatre. Input interaction and visualisation were implemented in Java3D and sound synthesis was implemented using the JSyn Java API for sound synthesis.
The image was produced by Guarav Sood during his honours year working on this project at the ANU School of Engineering and Computer Science in 2002 and described in this paper he presented at the OzChi conference in Brisbane that year.
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