DJs for children's play

The athletic club's family new years' night had one gym full of "bouncy" toys, with the usual castles and cage of plastic balls to flounder in--and a DJ playing amusing songs at full volume.

But what do the kids really like? Do they like loud music, or soft, or something else entirely?

This is a job for the psychology department: a student project!

Every week for a couple of semesters hold a kid's fun Saturday afternoon in a gym. Put the same play equipment on both sides, in the same positions. In the middle put chairs for the parents (who are told what the study is about, and asked not to lead the kids one way or another) facing in, and a large "hanging strands" curtain in between. The "curtain" will be fun for kids to run back and forth through, which will randomize the side they eventually wind up on.

On one side put a DJ (one of the psych students) with a sound system angled to put the loudest sound on one side of the room. In other words, one side of the room has the music (or whatever) and the other has much less music volume.

Every ten minutes count the number of kids playing on the "bouncy" equipment on the music and the "quiet" side of the room. Repeat this for several Saturdays, and then change the type of music.

We can't put two kinds of music in the same room without dissonance, and can't separate the rooms because the kids will want to be with their parents. Therefore we can only study degree of loudness preference for various types of music.

Options would include

• Loud rock
• Quieter rock
• Loud pop
• Quieter pop
• Loud "kid's music"
• Quieter "kid's music"
• Playground noise (kids playing)
• Lullaby music

If the gym holds about 60 kids at a time and you run the experiment for 5 Saturdays (and we ignore the fact that some kids will come repeatedly) we get 300 measurements. You'd expect some fraction to be with their parents or running through the curtain--so say 200 are in the bouncy play areas. An even split would be 100 on each side (if they have no preference), so you should be able to measure preferences at the 10% level or better.

I'm not sure how much this would cost: gym space plus equipment rental plus fabricating the curtain plus music fees...

Multi-touch screen sound mixers

I think that Band in a Box is missing something, if I've read their documentation correctly. They provide all sorts of sounds, but not mixer consoles. If you create a set of instrument sounds, you will want to adjust their relative volume, probably on a dynamic basis, and the obvious way to do that is with some variety of multi-touch screen interface to the computer. You could drag-and-drop to assemble and connect the board to the instrument sources you've created, and use virtual sliders to adjust their relative volumes--recording that information as well for later playback. I assume that frequing the signal is done at the instrument level and not the mixer board level, which simplifies the board layout somewhat.

It wouldn't be as easy to use as a real mixer without touch feedback, but the possibility of easily recording and later revising the changes would seem to make up for it for the novice without the bucks for a full system--which is one of Band in a Box's markets.

Scent of a human

Has anybody tried to get a thorough collection of all the chemicals we exude/exhale? We all know about CO2 and H2O, and methane; and some of us know of a few others: chemicals from the bacteria in the armpits, and so on.

Suppose you took clean (or at least thoroughly analysed) O2/N2/CO2/H2O, chilling it down to nearly liqufaction to get rid of impurities and then heating it back to room temperature. This is the input air for a sealed (baked out) bare room with a recently bathed naked man standing in it. The output air is also chilled to condense out the water and then super-chilled to condense out the other chemicals he has exhaled or exuded from his skin, letting only the O2/N2/CO2 escape.

We already know about the relative rates of exalation of water and CO2. What else is in that puddle we'd condense out of the used air? (Trying to understand the shed skin cells is probably too huge a task.)

I don't know how good we are at "figure out what's in here" chemical searches; though we can figure out ways of detecting known chemicals very well. But there's bound to be a lot of different chemicals present. They may vary by time of day; they almost certainly vary from men to women, and there's a hint that they may very with a woman's menstrual cycle.

Something's there. I wonder what it is? Too bad dogs can't talk.

UPDATE Some people look for things like benzene or chloroform in the breath to measure uptake of contaminants, but these are specific searches. I'm thinking of more basic research. A systematic search using many subjects in many states of health might be useful in finding new diagnostic techniques. How much does your body chemistry change when you get such-and-such a disease? Can you "smell" the difference? Once you know what to look for, it might be easy.

Also, chromatography is a very powerful tool, and can separate out chemicals in several different ways.

Drawing with a mouse wheel

I like the Mac approach to selecting icons: they sort of scroll under a "magnifier." I dislike trying to draw with a mouse: I have to click on "box," move to draw the box, move to click on "arrow," move to draw the arrow, move to click on "text," then type the text and repeat. I also have a mouse with a scroll button.

So let's put all those together. If the mouse has a scroll button, you can click on the class of items you want to switch between (in my case, boxes, arrows, ellipses, text). Then you scroll to the box, with the (translucent) menu appearing in that nice Mac magnifier strip view, draw the box, scroll to the arrow, draw the arrow, etc. Of course you have to move your hands to type text, and when you want to change modes you have to find the menu item at the side of the page, but the rest of the time you just look at your work and don't waste time and attention racing the mouse around the screen trying to land on the tiny buttons.

Maybe this exists already, but I haven't seen it and Google didn't show it quickly.

Laptop lanyard

I watched the fellow beside me working on his laptop as we rode the bus, and a sudden stop made me realize how precarious his tool was. A laptop should have a stiff outer ring in its case, and a lanyard projecting from that. Just hanging onto plastic is fraught, hence the stiff ring. You then use a short elastic cord: one end attached to your belt, the other to the lanyard. If the laptop does fall, the impact will be less. Of course the elastic band has to be slightly adjustable.

Language Learning Feedback

Problem: It is very hard to get the accents right in a foreign language. Although some of the consonants can be tough, vowels seem to be even harder to get right.

Observation: We can easily take a Fourier spectrum of a word and identify the sounds of the various letters in it. That technology is many decades old. Current technology has evolved to allow "training" of voice recognition, so that the computer can identify the individual accents of the user.

Question 1: Can we extend this so that the program can recognize the patterns an individual applies to the underlying sounds? A woman's voice will differ somewhat in timbre from a man's, for example. Can we isolate the effect of that timbre?

Question 2: Can we identify a "pure vowel sound" from a particular accent?

Question 3: Can we then combine the two to predict how an individual ought to pronounce a word in a particular accent or language?

Proposal: Using an interactive sound booth, with microphone and headphones, the student speaks the specified words into the microphone. The computer compares the sound the student has produced with the ideal (or the predicted) sound of the word, and rebroadcasts these back to the student's headphones with some feedback mechanism. I suggest that the feedback be volume: the closer the student reproduces the correct tone, the louder the sound in the headphones. The setup could be: left ear is student, right ear is correct sound.

This way the student gets not just practice speaking the language, but instant (and private) feedback on how well he is getting the accent right.

Music search engine

Many times I have had a fragment of a tune run through my mind, and wondered what it came from. Sometimes I've found the same fragment appear in two different melodies--with a slight change in a note.

Suppose you could type in (with sound, so you can hear what you've put in and make sure it is what you want) a string of notes, and then ask the search engine to find all works where this was part of the melody (or part of the viola part, and so on). You could use this to find the tune that you wanted to use but couldn't remember the name of, or to find out if the song you composed was invented or remembered, or look for similar motifs to research influences among composers.

Suppose one were to scan or otherwise incorporate the various musical lines for a given work into a searchable database, so that you could look for works that matched a given fragment. A work might consist of one musical line (a simple tune) or many (the voices for each instrument in a symphony), together with any lyrics involved. It would not be hard to define a search for a string of notes. (A rest is a note for this purpose.)

What would be hard is optimizing the search. The text search engines search for word matches. Words are nicely separated (by spaces, commas, end-of-line, etc), and there are only a finite set of them. Unfortunately there aren't always neat divisions, and the blocks of notes are quite long. You could try arbitrarily partitioning a musical line into chunks all the same size, and using a pre-indexing that lists all the different such chunks that were used. This might get rather big, but I don't have a good feel for how big Google's indexing system is, so I've no way to guess how feasible it is.

After getting the base search engine running, the obvious next step is implementing fuzzy searches, where one or two of the notes aren't exact; and shaped searches, where the key is arbitrary. This would make is useful to the rest of us who aren't musical pros or academics.

Of course you need to have some standard descriptions of notes and formats for downloading musical directions and standards for associating musical lines into a single work, but I'd think these would be fairly straightforward to devise.