Building Ambisonia.com

On thursday, I met up with the lawyer who will look after the legals on the site.  He will craft up 2 documents, the end user license agreement and the ‘contributor’ agreement.

This will allow Ambisonia to sell content. I still have to build in a cart system, with credit card payments and all that kind of stuff…and that will take months. But soon, Ambisonia will be in a position to finally sell something. This is important, I’ve got no money left and its time the site stepped up into the next level of ‘business reality’.

So what will ambisonia sell to start with?

Here’s my idea: We choose 15 or 20 of the best recordings, (all types of recordings)…. lots of John Leonard’s sound effects recordings, some classical stuff (what we can clear for use).. Aaron’s recordings are always great, Paul Hodge’s recordings, some of Henry’s electronic stuff, maybe some of mine … and a few others.

Then we get an improvised story-line artist (I know a few people who do this brilliantly) … to spin a yarn that ties all of the sounds together into a 1 hour (or more) story.  In other words, we find a way to pull all of these disperate sounds together into a coherent whole. Something that would in effect be very similar to a ‘War of the Worlds’ style piece.

We publish this as a DVD Audio … everyone gets a cut. The ‘value add’ for purchasing the DVD-A is that you get the full story line in it (you dont get that from downloading individual pieces).

I was just surfing around and came across a site called Will It Blend which apparently gets HUGE traffic.

Its actually a marketing gimmick … where a blender company periodically blends all sorts of things to show how powerful and good their blender is. They do very stupid things like blend an iPhone. Actually I think it is a brilliant idea.

… and it translates extremely well to a surround sound site called howdoesitsoundinsurround.com … a site which records all sorts of silly things in surround sound. Would be excellent to demonstrate/advertise/market a new surroudn sound microphone product…

Scattering pigeons is somethign that I’ve long wanted to record in surround sound. I’ve actually made several attempts at recording pigeons in the past and they are very difficult to record.

The flapping of their wings causes a lot of air turbulence (wind, I guess) that causes problems for the microphone.

There’s 3 sounds to pigeons … there’s the flapping of their wings … a powerul wooshy sound, there’s a high siffy sound of air passing through their wings and then there’s their ‘glouglou’ murmur.

I dont know why I didn’t think of this before … I’ve long wanted to have a repository where I collect ideas for surround recording, and posting them as blog entries categorised under one title is a perfect way to do it.