Recognizing Audio Patterns Visually
I’m working on a whopping slideshow for a big client. The fun part, unfortunately, is pretty much behind me. The framework has been built. At this point, I’m merely a slide-crunching machine. There are hundreds of slides. This partly explains my sporadic blogging in recent weeks.
Things I’ve come to realize: a) more than ever, I’m thankful for JSFL (particularly, its File API), which allows me to make automated changes to all my slides at once; b) when I deal with audio files in Audition often enough, I begin to “see” recurring spoken phrases in the waveform — which is a bit like that dude in The Matrix who “sees” blondes, brunettes, and redheads in the tumbling data characters.
For example, the highlighted area of this waveform says “Select the Next button in the bottom right-hand corner to continue.”
I’m sure this newfound ability will fade in time, but I’m glad for its presence at the moment, because it allows me to crop audio at a glance without having to scrub.
Why mention this? Ehh, because I’ve been unusually strapped lately, and I want to at least mention why. The waveform thing sort of illustrates the point in an amusing way (“signs you know you’ve been working too hard …”). But there’s more to it than that.
I’m also involved with two Flash reference books to be published some time … vaguely … soon-ish. I can only be fuzzy about the date because — quite honestly — all I know is that these books will coincide with the next release of Flash, and I truly don’t know when that will be. I’m honored and excited to be a part of both of these books, one as a co-author and the other as a contributor. As the publication dates come nearer, I should be able to share more detail, excerpts, and the like.
In a sense, these books feel like a visualization of the thoughts in my head and the words I’ve used so often in training sessions and mentoring. With any luck, readers will “see” useful information among the words, screenshots, and sample FLAs — just like that waveform phenomenon. 
My collaborators on both projects are very good friends, and it’s been a whole lot of fun IMing ideas back and forth, mulling over how to best illustrate a given point, and researching the heck out of this colossal animation/programming tool we’ve come to love and use every day.
As soon as I get back on track, I hope to pick up the pace again on this blog. I’ll have to create a new category soon for ActionScript 3.0, as well. (If you’re a die-hard AS2 fan, not to worry … AS2 is going to be in heavy use out there for a loooong time. I’ll keep writing about it.)
February 14th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
WOW!!! I thought I was the only one… with that ability. I did some work a while back with a lot of audio and I was able to recognize the phrases by the waveform as well.. How funny.. great minds think alike!!!!
BTW… I was able to find a work around for the flash player to allow for 1 player. Although not very easy… I just created an I-frame and set the hyperlinks to target the iframe. That way the user never leaves the page they are on. Drawback is I still have to create an html file for each movie. But at least it is just editing the video variable in the html and not a bunch of swfs.
Thanks again for your help and insight.
Dax
February 15th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Dax,
Glad to hear that! Success of that sort can be a tremendous encouragement. The next step would be to reduce all those HTML pages into one by passing in, via query string, which FLV to play. It takes JavaScript to do that and is probably worth a blog entry here, so I’ll add it to my list. Good job!
February 22nd, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Hehe nice freaky stuff! I have two books around here that were released when 2.0 came out. (MX 2004?) I started with Flash 4, and I’m currently still un-learning much unnecessary use of stage & timeline.
I’ll sure as hell will buy one, probably both those books when they come out, the way this blog looks.
I’ve clicked a bit around on the Adobe site, but will 3.0 really be so different in respect to 2.0? Will we have to un-learn 2.0 to write proper 3.0?
February 26th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Tiemen,
AS3 is different, for sure. If you’ve poked around the Adobe site, I imagine you’ve seen Gary Grossman’s and Emmy Huang’s ActionScript 3.0 Overview. If not, take a look.
At first glance, AS3 just looks bigger. I made a rough count of the classes listed in the ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference — over 180. This contrasts with the approximately 65 classes listed in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.
Once you get into it, you’ll discover new ways to do things. For example, there is no AS3 equivalent to
Sound.attachSound()or theMovieClip.onReleaseOutsideevent. Event handling in general has been overhauled (for the better, as it is now internally consistent).So in brief, yes … you’ll have to un-learn some AS2, but not all of it.
In a strong sense, programming is programming. What’s more important than the syntax of any particular language is a general comfort level with principles shared across languages. People have their preferences, of course … I lean heavily toward ActionScript, in spite of its quirks, but I’ve also programmed to some extent in C#, Java, JavaScript, Lingo, and Python. Of those, I like some better than others, but I find myself able to make sense of them all, thanks in large part to the growing sophistication of ActionScript.