Advice on audio installation for art exhibition.

Love Lidén

Freshman
Jun 12, 2013
2
0
0
44
Gothenburg, Sweden
Hello, I'm looking for some advice on how to solve a problem I have with rigging up a specific audio installation at Röda Sten, Gothenburgh, for an exhibition I'm taking part in. I'm a filmmaker, so I have experience in audio tech as far as recording for film goes but little beyond that.

What I'm looking to do is have one small room where people can enter and record themselves, and another room where those recordings are played up, preferably in random order. And I want this process to be automated.

So basically this is a software issue, and I imagine it should go something like this: One peice of software to make the recordings and place them in a certain folder, and a music player that automatically plays files from that folder at random, and updates the playlist as files are added. Problem is that I can't seem to find a player that can do that, or an application that can do both.

I'm also thinking about what might be the best way to set up the recording spot to be as user friendly as possible, preferably so visitors can just press a button to start and stop the recording. We can aquire additional hardware if necessary, though a cheap solution is preferable.

It should be a trivial problem, but I'm in a bit in a hurry so I thought asking around might be quicker that trying to solve this myself.

I can't provide much here in terms of audio expertise in return, but I hope I can be of help to others if someone needs advice on film related stuff.
 
Re: Advice on audio installation for art exhibition.

All of this would be pretty easy using a linux box and some scripting. Even something as simple as a rasbery pi could probably handel just audio recording and playback. The user interface could be nothing more than a start stop button or use the space bar.
 
Re: Advice on audio installation for art exhibition.

I managed to solve this by using Audio hijack pro, turns out you can script that to start recording automatically each time someone talks in the room and update automatically with iTunes so the files are added to a specific album as they are recorded. I can then setup a smart playlist that sorts out the short accidental recordings and playbacks the longer recordings at random.

This neatly solves my problem and removes the need for visitors to do anything except just talk into the microphone, very nice.