The ideal scene I have in mind is using a tablet PC in full screen mode, eg. displaying a PDF presentation or a web page design, and some meeting attendant draws his/her ideas/changes/notes on the display, marking areas, writing notes right in place, etc. A piece of software that is (graphically) on top of the display actual in sight to the observer, i.e. has the focus, collects all those “screen touches” and assigns them to the open file. But this should also work with just a normal PC/mouse set up or any tough screen environment. The hard bit would be, so I reckon, for the software to assign some “notes capture” to a certain page of an open document been presented, a subset of the document that is. The two ad hoc solutions that come to mind include either a support for the overlay software by the presenting software, so the assignment is actually done by the presenter. Or else the overlay software hast to have an understanding of all possible file formats’ structures, i.e. PDF, bitmaps, just anything that should be marked. Now, if this file is opened the next time, and the overlay software is activated, it should from it’s database display all notes associated with this document’s page.
I Had a Dream
Friday, 20th Apr 2007 at 09:23 (audio, diploma thesis, ideas, music, technical stuff)
Tags: upnp
… a day dream that was. I was walking through my flat listening to music of my favourite kind. Well, tell me something new you might think. Here it comes: Each time I walked from one room to another the music speakers in the next room would be activated by the N95 (or any other Upnp aware device) playing the music. So the music would only be played in that sorounding I was in. Of course the music was not locally stored on the N95 but came via Upnp (or whatever) from my file storage via ether.
That’s not so unrealistic as I thought at first. I vaguely remember reading about a sound system that can address all present speakers individually via remote control even. That, of course must have been centrally controlled, though, and should have been proprietary, i.e. only working of all hardware comes from the same manufacturer. But how about if that worked via Upnp (or anything the like)? I guess the tricky bit would be the hand over of the signals transporting the sound information, i.e. manage gapless playback as if everything was wired and feed by broadcasting the sound to the speakers. Of course the speakers most likely would have to support some kind of wireless technique that the signal could be transmitted by.
Also, some mode that does address each speaker individually should be implemented, regulating the sound volume for each box (or at least each room) so the toilette is not blasted away… But I guess that would be rather easy and does not even need a modulated infrastructure as needed for the “sound hand over” scenario described above. What a cockaigne world it would be to have an abstract layer every manufacturer sticks to and supports to handle “cross-platform-interaction” like needed here. Well, I’m looking forward to building that cockaigne and living in it. How about you?
What would be even greater to have a stationary player, say in the living room, controlled via, eg. Upnp, but still be able to have the hand over working, i.e. have the system notice where the sound should be played in which volume. Another attempt could be some kind of tracker that knows where the person listening to the music is sojourning. I don’t think that would be the best approach since most likely it needs complex structures. Plus I can’t think of a way to keep that tracker “inter-platformly” scalable for many scenarios and systems.
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Tags: upnp
Music Analysis — On The Way to Diploma Thesis Topic
Thursday, 19th Apr 2007 at 19:55 (audio, digital music, diploma thesis, ideas, music, technical stuff)
To step onwards in finding a subject for my diploma thesis I’ve googled a littel and found the following:
First of all I looked for what topics are being worked on at my uni to maybe narrow it that way. Our Institute for Digital Media seamed the best guess showing a seminar by Dr. Dieter Trüstedt called “Elektronische Musik in Theorie und Praxis” (electronic music in theorie and in practice”). Only after a while I noticed that it emphasis on, or I should say is making music, not analysing it. Nevertheless I was pointed to a book by Miller Puckette (Dept. of Music, University of California, San Diego) called “The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music” including some parts about wave analysis in generell, digital music, etc.
Issues I’m looking for are as described before, more precisely finding similar music as a starting point. I also found a few (not yet reviewe) papers:
- Music Database Retrieval Based on Spectral Similarity by Cheng Yang
- Pattern Discovery Techniques for Music Audio by Roger B. Dannenberg and Ning Hu
- Toward Automatic Music Audio Summary Generation from Signal Analysis by Geoffroy Peeters, Amaury La Burthe and Xavier Rodet
- Audio Retrieval by Rhythmic Similarity by Jonathan Foote, Matthew Cooper and Unjung Nam
Also, what came to my mind what to maybe take into account how humans (mammals) distinguish music (or complex sounds) and thus learn more about the brain, also.
Another thought that hit my mind concerning the use of such an analysis was to use it in, say meeting recording scenarios as some kind of search algorithm. Imagine you have some 3 hours of meeting recorded (possibly conference call) and need some certain part of but cannot find the time position by any means. Maybe by the analysis spread out above one can use a search just as we do nowadays with text: Speak the word or phrase one is looking for (with a different voice — your own) and find the position in the audio file.
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