Last night I watched the Ballet Boyz‘s film, Young Men. It is a film without dialogue, apart from some screaming, set in the First World War. A mixture of dance and music, the film brought out a different set of emotions than spoken word. The music and the physical moves affect us in a different […]
I was at the Research Software Engineers’ conference recently and in the group discussing training. One of the themes that I advocated is training in soft skills such as communication. In part I meant this as the bridge between the developer(s) and business but on reflection, perhaps I mean something deeper as well. A while […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
A link has been surfacing on Joseph Faber‘s Euphonia, a nineteenth Century text-to-speech device. Using mechanics, it appears to have spoken whilst being controlled by a human. It takes the Victorian fascination with automata to new levels.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
