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Sound can add a lot to your scene, but use it wisely.
Poorly chosen endless sound loops are indistinguishable from torture.

This book was recommended to me by one of the developers of Adobe Atmosphere.

It has quite a reputation with professional programmers, but as a JavaScript near novice, i also like it a lot!

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By writing more or less simple Adobe Atmosphere JavaScripts, or using the prebuilt "Script Presets" you can add high quality sound effects (FX) to your Atmosphere environments!

Atmosphere beginners find they can easily create simple and fun environments, complete with ambient (background, uniform continuous) sound without programming. But they also find that they must either know how to write scripts or rely on the programming of others to get more advanced sound FX, like sounds that are triggered when a visitor to their scene gets close to a visible or invisible object.

However, sound scripts are some of the easiest of scripts to write, so they are a good way for the novice programmer to get into Adobe Atmosphere JavaScript, while quickly enhancing their scenes.

To provide help on these sound FX scripts, i started a series of articles under the name 'Dr. Dynamic'. These articles are intended both for my site and for the Afterlife group's monthly online Atmosphere magazine (now AtmosphereNews).

These three articles describe how to use the several types of sound properties and effects available in the Adobe Atmosphere API (Application Programmer's Interface).

My Audio Tutorials

The first Dr. Dynamic article covers the easiest of effect - directionless, continuous ambient sound. You use this for music, wind, surf and other audio backgrounds.

The constant looping of your ambient sound demands a very careful selection of sound content (and hopefully an off switch). Poorly chosen endless sound loops are indistinguishable from torture. Well chosen sounds can add a lot of realism and feeling to your environment.

My second article is about adding directional sounds to objects or areas in your environment. These are usually sound loops, which are turned on automatically, as your visitor gets within a certain distance of them. They also get louder as the visitor approaches their source position, which you usually associate with some visible object in your scene. These so called "positional" sounds, such as the sound of water coming from a fountain, are quite easy to script and have a "script preset" available.

Alert! There seems to be a bug that causes "positional" sounds to not lower their volume as you move away from them, as they used to.

To go with my second article, i created an audio demo environment -"Dr. Dynamic's Audio Lab". The script which runs this Atmo environment can be downloaded for study when reading the article. This script also contains the sound controls for the Adobe Atmosphere player. These, like the effects themselves, can be easily copied and used in your own projects. These controls are described more completely (along with the"invisible sound trigger" script, in my third article).



The third audio article details the use of invisible triggers for sounds (turning on sounds by the proximity of the player), as well as adding sound controls to Atmosphere's scriptable control panel.

A little warning here. I'm still learning to code in JavaScript and my sound script does not yet use the "this" keyword, which keeps scripts from potentially interfering with other scripts (makes globals into locals) you may be using. I hope to fix that soon.

Dr. Dynamic's Audio Lab