Roundware - contributory, location-aware audio

Polygon speakers!

March 2016

To date, Roundware has only allowed for the underlying speaker audio to be arranged in circular shapes. Latitude, longitude and radius, nothing more. Until now.

We are very pleased to announce that, after much effort, we now have polygon speakers! You can now create vastly more complex arrangements of speaker audio, facilitating a whole new degree of sculpting of the audio experience for participants. The shape to the right is perhaps not overly practical, but demonstrates the complexity which can be achieved.

In order to allow for polygon speakers, we had to migrate the Roundware database from MySQL to Postgresql, which gives us a lot more potential for other GIS-related enhancements as well as some other cool features of Postgres that might come in handy. Hopefully sometime relatively soon, audio assets will have the option of non-circular shapes as well.

some love from Evolver.fm

October 2012

Eliot Van Buskirk wrote a nice article and did an interview with Halsey about Roundware on the popular Evolver.fm blog put out by The Echo Nest.

Why The Roundware Open-Source Audio Location Platform Rules

Perhaps it takes someone of a more artistic bent to build a platform for pinning songs and live-recorded audio to specific locations on a map — and then open-source it, so that any other individual or company can use it to build whatever they want using the same basic framework.
...
Burgund’s apps are alluring, combining augmented reality, location, art, and crowdsourcing in a way that hasn’t quite been done before, though it builds on Burgund’s own Scapes project.

Roundware at MuseumNext

June 2012

Roundware was included in Nancy Proctor's talk at this year's MuseumNext conference in Barcelona. Nancy discussed her thoughts on crowd-sourcing and "recruiting the world" in relation to the Smithsonian's collections as well as other museums. She also had some very interesting insights into the history of museum audio tours and where they could (should) be going in the future.

Her entire talk is well worth the time to watch, but the Roundware discussion begins at 29'22" right after she plays the video documentation of Halsey Burgund's Scapes exhibit.

Access American Stories @ the Smithsonian

April 2012

Access American Stories is an app developed for the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian designed to facilitate the experience of the new American Stories exhibition for blind or people with low-vision.

The app uses Roundware to collect verbal descriptions of the 100 objects in the exhibition from visitors and then plays them back to enhance the experience of being in the exhibit.

dot com

December 2011

We recently procured roundware.com and though we have no plans to use it in the near future (it points back to roundware.org for now), we are happy to have it off the market and under our control. We tried to get it when we obtained roundware.org, but it was owned by someone else, and it turns out, not surprisingly, that the someone else was a domain aggregator.

Thankfully, the knowledge that no one else in their right minds would ever want roundware.com gave us the confidence to be very strict in the negotiations. So we got it with funds commensurate with an open-source artistic software project. Perhaps in the future we will use it to offer a hosted Roundware service to museums, artists and such.

Trademark

November 2011

The 'Roundware' trademark application is officially in process. Shockingly, not only is 'roundware' not a word with existing trademark claims of any sort, but as best we can tell, it isn't a word being used in any capacity for anything at all. At least not anything else on the internet. There are some random websites that peddle "round ware", but that is usually referring to some sort of china, porcelain or something to eat off of.

So our application should sail through the USPTO as smoothly as anything, but it will still probably take 6 months until we are official.