Recall from last year's summer blockbuster hit "Transformers" there was a robot featured named Bumblebee that could not speak like the rest of the robots.
Instead, he used clips of audio that contained the words he wanted to communicate. At the surface, this appears to be a simple task; just search for audio files containing the words you want. This isn't as easy as it seems. In Transformers, Bumblebee would "speak" using audio clips that reflected his mood. If he was energetic and happy, his "speech" clip was energetic and happy. Today's computers are not capable of determining the "mood" of audio. Mood is a subjective emotion that varies from person to person.
If we wanted to ever create a machine like Bumblebee, we need to teach our computers how to determine the mood of songs and audio. One approach to this problem, is to get people to help the computers "compute" mood. I have developed a collaborative, two player game, that lets people listen to an audio clip, and provide the mood labels every second of game play. Read more about the game at http://schubert.ece.drexel.edu/moodswings.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
BFTAW Youth Kick-Off Luncheon Program
On Thursday February 8th, 2007, Dave and I, participated in Black Family Technology Awareness Week's kickoff Luncheon. We were invited as special guests to speak with the 200+ students, teachers, faculty, and friends in attendance. Along with our presentation, Grand Hank did a great science demonstration as well an exciting interactive demo with sound.
The week before I did a presentation for about 100 students at the Media and Music Conference at the Julia de Burgos School in North Philly. In preparation for that conference, I developed the Magic behind Sound presentation, however after an initial dialog with the students, it was apparent that I needed to readjust the focus of the presentation from the technical aspects of sound, to a more hands on/demonstration of sound wave manipulation.(Read More about that Conference here).
At the Luncheon kickoff I decided to do the Magic Behind Sound presentation as I had originally intended. I told Dave about the presentation and asked for his involvement and he undoubtedly agreed to help out. We decided to divide the sides in half, keep the presentation brief, and do a demo afterwards. For the demo, we recorded the students onto the computer, and displayed their voice "waves" on the screen for them to see. For giggles, we had one young lady say "Peter Piper" and showed how her waves were compressed, and spiked whenever she said any word with a P.
Another young woman was brave enough to sing for us. After recording the sounds, I did some manipulations and processing to the sounds and played back the new sounds for the audience. They were excited to see the interesting new sounds, and they were amazed to see the sound corrections done for the young lady that sang! Check out peter piper recording, young lady singing, as well as other sounds below!
The week before I did a presentation for about 100 students at the Media and Music Conference at the Julia de Burgos School in North Philly. In preparation for that conference, I developed the Magic behind Sound presentation, however after an initial dialog with the students, it was apparent that I needed to readjust the focus of the presentation from the technical aspects of sound, to a more hands on/demonstration of sound wave manipulation.(Read More about that Conference here).
At the Luncheon kickoff I decided to do the Magic Behind Sound presentation as I had originally intended. I told Dave about the presentation and asked for his involvement and he undoubtedly agreed to help out. We decided to divide the sides in half, keep the presentation brief, and do a demo afterwards. For the demo, we recorded the students onto the computer, and displayed their voice "waves" on the screen for them to see. For giggles, we had one young lady say "Peter Piper" and showed how her waves were compressed, and spiked whenever she said any word with a P.
Another young woman was brave enough to sing for us. After recording the sounds, I did some manipulations and processing to the sounds and played back the new sounds for the audience. They were excited to see the interesting new sounds, and they were amazed to see the sound corrections done for the young lady that sang! Check out peter piper recording, young lady singing, as well as other sounds below!
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