VeniceScape is proof-of-concept spatial audio app for iPad that I created in 2020 for Syng. Using dozens of sounds sourced from freesound.org and a scan of a tourist map of Venice Beach as my starting resources, I arranged a dense, detail-packed audio tour of Syng's home neighborhood, from the serenity of the Venice Canals in the southwest to the chaos of the drum circles on the beach and the rollercoaster of the Santa Monica Pier in the northeast. It has buskers, skateboarders, people playing volleyball, diegetic music, weightlifting, racquetball, volleyball, a roller coaster, joggers, and more. This work represents the peak of the integration research that I had been doing with playing back first-order ambisonics in Wwise from realtime control in Unity.

The 2D iOS app’s interface depicts the scene in two different views: The larger one up top showing the listener’s immediate surroundings in detail, and the smaller one at the bottom showing their position relative to the entire map of Venice Beach. From there, there are a couple different controls to play with.

First, the map is rotatable with a two-finger twist gesture, allowing the listener the ability to “turn their head” and change the onset angle that they hear each oncoming sound from. Next, there is a toggleable loudness-reactive “emitter view” that shows the listener in the “detailed view” exactly where the sound emitters are, what their shape is, a label for what they are, and how loud they are in the current moment. Many sounds feature directionality, so that getting behind a sound source will roll it off, in line with walking past an interior space such as a loud bar or a retail store. Finally, there is a toggle for enabling “Wander Mode” which simply pauses in the current position for a random long amount of time, then slowly moves to another part of the map over another long period of time, and keeps doing that.

This was an extremely fun project; one of my favorites that I’ve ever created. It was especially fun limiting myself only to recordings that I could find from freesound.org, which tends to have a lot of crap, but you can find gems if you dig hard enough. I tried to source clips that attribute to be from Venice Beach itself to the extent that I could, but there are only a couple amongst the whole set here - many come from Europe or other places in the West.

This project was my main focus during the scariest and most uncertain phase of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when I spent nearly all of my time locked in my apartment not going anywhere or interacting with anyone. So it was also just really therapeutic to spend long chunks of my days just listening to the sounds of people and civic life - field recordings of buskers, crowd walla, incidental music that you’d hear going through crowded public spaces, etc.

The Syng office was located right in the heart of Venice Beach. Coffee walks on the beach going past loud public displays was an iconic part of the daily routine, and I missed it dearly. So this was my means of bringing the vibe of the office back into my apartment at a time when it was not safe to go back. I could lay on the floor of my office with headphones plugged into my iPad, turn on Wander Mode, and close my eyes for like half an hour, feeling as though I was still in the second most-visited tourist destination in Southern California - located just 10 minutes away from me in real life - when I wasn’t.