TOP TEN KAPI AWARDS: “Zoo Pal: A Gift” with SmartyPAL

The app “SmartyPAL-A Gift” was submitted to the Kapi Awards run by Children’s Technology Review – a top, influential publication.

The final winners will be announced in December. We’re currently in the TOP 10.

kapi award

Please take a second and view our page by clicking here & ‘heart’ us.

smartyPAL

The kids’ learning app, ZooPAL-A Gift, launched on August 5th and is available for the iPad in the App store! It is a personalized, interactive story in which your child solves a series of tasks to help retrieve a mysterious box and rescue a new animal. Developed with early childhood development experts, each task helps pre-schoolers build critical skills. With 160 different story lines possible, there’s always a new adventure for your child. I did sound design/music composition for the app suite.

Some highlights from the first week of launch:

– Reached top 100 rank in 7 different countries under the “educational games” category

– Downloads already in the 1000s in just a week and kids are returning to the app at a high rate day after day

– App featured by iTunes in the top 20 apps in 5 different categories/regions

Press: Here is an article about SmartyPAL from a couple of weeks back.

If you have kids in the 2-5 range (or know someone who does), please download the app here.

Update on the App “Zoo Pal: A Gift” with SmartyPAL

smartyPAL

The kids’ learning app, ZooPAL-A Gift, launched on August 5th and is available for the iPad in the App store! It is a personalized, interactive story in which your child solves a series of tasks to help retrieve a mysterious box and rescue a new animal. Developed with early childhood development experts, each task helps pre-schoolers build critical skills. With 160 different story lines possible, there’s always a new adventure for your child. I did sound design/music composition for the app.

Some highlights from the first week of launch:

– Reached top 100 rank in 7 different countries under the “educational games” category

– Downloads already in the 1000s in just a week and kids are returning to the app at a high rate day after day

– App featured by iTunes in the top 20 apps in 5 different categories/regions

Press: Here is an article about SmartyPAL from a couple of weeks back.

If you have kids in the 2-5 range (or know someone who does), please download the app here.

SmartyPAL in the Philadelphia Inquirer

SmartyPAL,” a project I worked on with Kartik Hosanagar and his wife, Prasanna Krishnan, had an article written about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer! I did songwriting, arranging, and sound design for the project, a new educational tablet application designed for kids. Voice acting was provided by Jason West and Courtney Cilman. Check it out and please spread the word about this neat new app!

Check out the article here.

Photo Credit:  CLEM MURRAY, Staff Photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer

the Wading Bird – a Sound Design project

This is one of my two final projects for “Sonic Measures,” a Sound Design course I took this spring with Professor Terry Adkins and Marc Blumthal.
The assignment was to take some video footage which was primarily visual in nature (and natural – not a performance) and to use sound design to enhance the raw footage. In Logic, to enhance the audio already present from the video (which was very distorted,) I used percussion, foley water sounds, and other effects and reverberation to create a soundscape to highlight this bird, stalking prey along the shoreline.

The video footage was taken on my Droid cellphone in Sarasota, Florida.

New Project: Foley Fiction – a Soundtrack without a Film

This was my final assignment for my Electronic Composition Class at Penn with Professor Primosch. Almost all featured sounds are made from manipulated sine waves, chirps, or (mostly) recordings of me singing or speaking or making noise into a microphone. I recorded a crowd of students throwing frisbees as well as some ambient city sounds in the middle of the night, but those samples were used sparsely and every sound in this project is ‘foley.’

Here is a narration to guide you through this film soundtrack [without a film]:

Incognito at his daytime desk job at the office, an assassin receives an assignment via telephone. He clears his desk, packs his bag, quickly grabs his keys, and walks casually to the elevator around the corner from his cubicle. He takes the elevator down four flights, then its doors open onto a train station. Crossing a platform, pop music plays on the radio. The assassin walks through the station unnoticed to his parked motorcycle. Across the platform, the assassin boards and starts his motorcycle. He rides the motorcycle through a windy set of tunnels, until… he reaches a large crowded roadside restaurant. He parks his motorcycle, strolls along the sidewalk until he reaches a table in the middle of the street-side seating where – he fires a single shot, eliminating his target.  In the wake of his crime’s commission, the assassin skulks away unseen.

I created this project using Audacity and Logic Pro 7.

Enjoy: HERE IT IS.

New Project: Sound Editing and Mixing

For an assignment in Professor Terry Adkins’ Sonic Measures course at UPenn this spring, our first project was to choose an audio source, then to deconstruct and make something unrecognizable from it (so the end result is not obviously tied to or traceable to its original audio source). I chose Bobby McFerrin’s a cappella track that plays under the Pixar short film Knick Knack. We used Logic to use editing and mixing functions to create something entirely new by recycling and modifying our sound source. Mixing tools were used to enhance the environmental/other qualities of our projects.

My goal was to create a sound scape evocative of biking through a construction zone or busy city, like the Big Dig or Boston, MA more generally.

…Sonic Measures Project: “Knack Knick”…