audio – Cai.zone

A while ago I came across a widely-seen Youtube video about the history of the Amen breakbeat, which was a reposting of a recording of a 2004 documentary audio installation by artist Nate Harrison. It details the artist's view of the rise of the break, as well as what this might tell us about the effects of intellectual property on cultural development.

Can I Get An Amen? — Nate Harrison (2004)

Having enjoyed the piece's dry-yet-engaging style, as well as learning about such a specific cultural phenomenon in some detail, I sought out other pieces by the same artist. Luckily, they're posted on his online gallery, as well as on Archive.org. Several of them are somewhat-abstract video installations which are less interesting to me, but there are several other audiovisual essays which I have enjoyed, on various aspects on art, media and tools.

I was trying to make a bunch of elements change position as an audio file played, using a snippet something like:

$(audiohtml).bind("timeupdate", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("play", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("pause", onAudioUpdate);

function onAudioUpdate() {
	// Move the elements here
}

But the trouble was that the audio element's timeupdate event only fires once every 200ms or so on my browser (this is set by the HTML5 audio specification and isn't modifiable as far as I know).

200ms was slow enough that the animation of the elements looked jerky (5 fps).

Instead, I used a 10Hz setInterval clock to trigger the movement functions, and used the audio's play and pause events to create and destroy the clock:

Tag: audio

Nate Harrison's audiovisual essays

Can I Get An Amen? — Nate Harrison (2004)

A quick javascript hack to fake adjusting HTML5 audio elements' timeupdate event frequency