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.

Displaying photographs with lighting contrasts

You can find musings about how to use dynamic lighting in photographs.

I've taken pictures of a beautiful scene only to discover later that a great part of its beauty lay in the contrasts not of color but of light. The human eye is amazingly dynamic, able to flick from one part of the view to another with 10 times the light in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately the developed picture can only use reflected light, and you do not get the same dynamic range of intensities that we see every day. But suppose a picture were displayed not by reflected but by transmitted light. Imagine a picture (a slide) illuminated from behind by light that is not uniform. It would not be terribly hard to hand make masks for a particular slide using filters and a very bright light source. It seems quite hard to do this automatically. Even digital images, which use the CRT to generate different light intensities, have a certain flatness. Can we make a CRT (or LED-based system) with a greater range of brilliancy, and will the intrinsic coarseness of resolution for the light source interfere with the fine resolution of the picture itself?

It turns out there's been some interesting work that might easily have a bearing on this. In the September 2005 NASA Tech Briefs on page 70 is a report about work done by Kevin Yu on "Sol-Gel Glass Holographic Light-Shaping Diffusers." The idea is to use holographic light diffusers to spread the light around in a light table to be where you want it to be, and Yu's teams' contribution is to include sol-gel optical glass.

OK, cool. The missing link between their work and my ideas is how to make a holographic plate given some kind of pixelated light meter. I think that's just a matter of some calculations to generate the holographic mapping. I dunno if sol-gel is substantially better than other material for the somewhat less severe requirements of a photo display box (they write of being able to withstand temperatures of 1000 degrees C).