Category Archives: Programming

New beginnings, new stories and finding ways of communicating

I am starting a new project with the Oxford University Museums to work on making art more accessible. My role is a technical one but I love visiting the museums concerned and it feeds out of an interest in audio and sound. One of the challenges at the moment is to create user stories for […]

The Audio Paper format announced in Seismograf

The Sound Studies Lab posted some recent work about Audio Papers that was published in Seismograf. A short overview might be The purpose of the audio paper is to extend the written academic text: to present discussions and explorations of a certain argument or problem in sound. I’m interested in this as I have had […]

Identifying depression on social media

I was skimming Arxiv yesterday and came across Moin Nadeem‘s paper on Identifying Depression on Twitter. I am a little skeptical of the area due to the Samaritan’s Radar application. There is an awful lot that is good to the paper and the work in it and clearly the model has something very positive about […]

Is UX really providing user experience?

Although I am not a gamer (no, have not played a game for years), Benjamin Brandell’s reflections on User Experience in 1990s games is a provoking read. His thesis is the contentious: the evolution of UX — although we know it now as a way to keep users sticking around — this is from a time period when it wasn’t […]

Facebook getting some spatial audio

I’ve just seen the news about Facebook buying the 3D Audio company, Two Big Ears, to support its spatial and virtual reality businesses via Techcrunch. They are also releasing their 3DCeption as a free download. I look forward to playing with it at some point soon. At this moment, it appears that the workstation is […]

Audio fingerprinting and AudioContext study

Having a quick surf around this morning on the bus, I came across this post on Techcrunch about a study from Princeton University into online trackers. They were able to create a fingerprint of a machine using the AudioContext API that allowed for the tracking of machines. As the article mentions, online privacy will be […]

Here, hear – exploring the city with Here Active Listening

I was lucky enough to get a set of Here Active Listening buds from DopplerLabs. The buds are a set of small digital signal processors (DSP) that sit in the ears. They are about the size an in-ear bud and sit snugly in the ear canal (with changeable rubber seats) that are paired by Bluetooth […]

Auto play on audio user experience

I was fortunate enough to talk at UX in the City Oxford last Friday about audio. Thanks to Software Acumen and the programme committee for the invitation. One of the questions asked was that of audio patterns on the web, which is a layer above where I normally work. One of the anti-patterns that I […]

Notes from visualisation workshop

Notes from yesterday’s Digital Humanities visualisation colloquium at Reading on 31 March. Reuse of models in different form: tensions between drama and academic use. Life of Rome as MMORPG. VR seems big: Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard. What’s the sustainability? As the tools become more available and publication modes. How does the digital output fit […]

Some recent work in sonification

Just a short post. I attended the Text Encoding Initiative Conference in Lyon where I gave my first proper software paper, written with David De Roure. I’ll write about it properly shortly but here is the link to the paper,“It will discourse most eloquent music”: Sonifying variants of Hamlet, in the Oxford University Research Archive. […]