https://feever.fr 2

FEEVER

Faust Environment Everyware (ANR Blanc Project, 10/2013 - 06/2017)

Music has been transcending societies and eras. In our digital world, from portable MP3 players to radio streaming to Surround Sound-equipped movie theaters, music and more generally audio processing is a life-enhancing practice that impacts everyone everywhere in evermore personalized manners. Yet, the Net has been slow to offer users and developers the kind of advanced technologies that would make similar listening enrichment standard, seamless and easily customizable online. If HTML-based Web sites can easily be equipped with advanced general processing capabilities via scripting languages such as Javascript or graphically enhanced via powerful display tools such as WebGL, no such technology exists in-the-large in the audio domain.FEEVER Flyer

The FEEVER project aims at providing the key technologies that will make the whole digital world sing, be it when web surfing at home or listening to a radio stream on the go.

Imagine a world in which an audio engineer would design a new reverberation algorithm and post its implementation somehow on the Internet. A listener, looking for a richer audio experience, could use it by browsing the corresponding site, which would automatically lead to the download and activation of the corresponding sound processing snippet in her browser or even reroute her audio stream to the remote reverb site for processing. Equipping the reverb site with remote management capabilities paves the way to even richer sound installations in which multiple processing platforms would collaborate to provide to the user a dedicated listening environment; a couple of touches on her tablet, and audio parameters could be tuned to suit a changing situation, for instance when moving from the comfort of her home to the noisier environment of her car.

FEEVER intends to make such a vision a reality. Yet, scientific and technical challenges abound, while the technological solutions need to be:

  1. portable, to allow program-once, deploy-everywhere economic advantages,
  2. easily programmable, to narrow the gap between specifications and implementation,
  3. able to deal with multiple platforms, for seamless integration within the users listening environments,
  4. efficient both in terms of computing time, since audio processing is a highly compute-intensive activity, and energy, if only to permit mobile applications, and
  5. secure, since audio processing activity performed on the client side must not jeopardize the user system.

FEEVER is structured around four partners and five main tasks.