In an earlier blog, 3D Jazz From the Front Row: part 1 of 2 – Recording 3D audio, I discussed how we recorded 3D audio from a jazz gig as part of our ‘Research in Emerging Technologies’ project. This recording also became one of the pieces of media which I would use to see how certain types of media spreads online in a ‘Spreadable Media’ project.
Me and my work partner Alex Drane created a video where we demonstrate an audio production plug-in called Harpex-B. The Harpex-B plug-in allows the user to move audio around a spherical space and experiment with placing audio sources around a 3D perceived environment [1].The audio used in the video is from the jazz gig recording.
In the description of the youtube video, we added bit.ly links to both of our blogs explaining how we recorded and produced the audio.
We sent tweets out containing the bit.ly link:
We also posted the video in several audio related forums on LinkedIn and Reddit:
There were problems we encountered with posting on forums which we had not predicted. In many of the forums listed, a new user has to wait to be accepted and even then, there are constraints on your freedom within the forum. In a few of the Reddit forums, a new user has to gain a minimum ‘karma’ score, attained by entering into discussions with other users, before they are allowed to actually post something themselves. This is mainly to stop spamming but in this case, limited the amount of forums that we could share the video in.
The use of bit.ly links allowed us to track how many clicks the links were getting:
This graphic shows the number of people who clicked to see the video from the forum posts, over the first 5 days.
Here is the number of people who clicked to visit my blog about how we made the recording, from the youtube description of the video.
And here is the number of people who clicked on the link to Alex’s blog about how the audio was dealt with within ProTools and the Harpex-B plug-in.
Conclusions:
While social platforms are incredibly powerful and can reach millions of people, for media to spread it has to be topical and impacting. There are several types of impacting media, the typical forms being a funny post, a inspirational post – anything which taps into people’s emotions spreads more than anything else.
The media I posted on social platforms didn’t spread well at all because it wasn’t topical or impacting. However, selecting groups of people like forums automatically boosts the chances of it spreading because members of an audio engineering forum will be interested in anything audio even if it is not topical or impacting. Forums pose a higher chance of spreading media but are harder to become a member of than platforms like twitter and facebook.
References:
[1] Harpex-B plug-in information. www.harpex.net
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