Now that telecommuting for work will likely continue to be the norm, people are communicating more and more by audio and video. In fact, many professional creators are now running projects from their home setup.
To capture audience attention, content creators produce videos with compelling imagery to tell engaging stories. However, many miss one of the most important aspects of video: audio. Not only does riveting audio immerse viewers in the experience, it also enhances visuals with sound effects, commentary, mood music, and such. Inferior audio quickly ruins the ambiance.
Many content creators and consumers tend to regard video as visuals, but that’s only part of the experience. Immersive video content includes strong audio. Just like in a movie, the audio for video content comprises many components: the narrator or subjects, the background music that sets the mood and draws viewers in, sound effects, and so forth.
Nowadays, users can and often upload various media files to social networks, websites, and messaging apps. Most of those media are images and videos, with a significant number being audio files. Subsequently, to create a thumbnail to depict an image, a site or app would crop and then resize it to scale. To depict a video, they would convert, crop, and resize a single frame from it as a thumbnail.
In May 2018, Cloudinary sponsored Capitol Music Group’s first hackathon held by its new Capitol360 Innovation Center, which aims at connecting musicians and software technologists to facilitate and stimulate the creation of music. See this interview for details. As a starter project for the hackathon, we built a sample app called Music Discovery Service.