I was dining at the Delhi golf course. The napkin at my table was placed to my right in the shape of an inverted cone. It reminded me of a funnel. See this picture. Notice the napkin tapering to a point at the top of the image.
soundscape of napkin
I was asked whether the vOICe could be used to sonify spectrograms in PRAAT. it can. See the steps below.
1. Launch PRAAT.
2. Reduce screen clutter if possible. Disable any unnecessary toolbars and close any unnecessary windows.
3. Load your sound file and using your screen reader’s mouse cursor, click on the “edit button”.
4. You now have a spectrogram displayed.
5. Launch the vOICe.
6. Navigate to the “options” menu.
7. Navigate to the “sonify gui” submenu and expand it.
8. Choose the option to sonify the area under the mouse pointer. This option sounds the view under the mouse pointer. The reason I have chosen this option is because the spectrum, according to the help appears as a grey line in the bottom half of the PRAAT window. You also may want to hit f5 for inverse video so that the grey spectrum stands out.
9. Hit windows+m to minimize all windows. By now, you should be hearing changes in sound as you navigate.
10. Navigate to the PRAAT window.
11. Assuming you are using a screen reader, switch to its mouse cursor.
12. Navigate towards the bottom of the screen. You will hear sound changes as you navigate through the various buttons. In my limited testing, the spectrom was a horizontal line that varied in pitch depending upon its frequency. The height of the line represents the frequency while the length of the line represents the length of the spectrum.
13. There seem to be a lot of options that dump the data about the current object to a text file so you may want to use them to get precise numbers etc.
14. You can slow down the soundscape to facilitate better interpretation.
15. Try loading different sound files with varing frequencies and look for the pitch changes in these files. This will help you in becoming oriented to the spectrom and how it sounds.
There have been several attempts to read printed letters using the vOICe. I have one way to do this. This is not the only way and I am still learning what letters look like. My reading has been limited to recognizing the shapes of letters using the vOICe. I had planned to use the windows magnifier to enlarge the size of the letters. I have used notepad as my wordprocessor of choice.
1. Set the font size to 72 or, if you want to try the magnifier, set the magnification level to 6.
2. Set the vOICe to follow the mouse pointer and activate negative video. Also, set the speed to quarter.
3. Hit windows+m to minimize everything.
4. Navigate to notepad.
5. If you are not using the magnifier, then set the font size to 72. If you are using the magnifier, do not bother doing this.
6. If using a screen reader, then get your mouse cursor to follow the insertion pointer.
7. Write the word CAT.
8. Navigate to the letter “C”.
9. Sit back and enjoy the soundscape.
10. You can activate the edge detection feature but there is no real need to do so.
Also, be careful with the letters “A” and “L”. They seem to run together. Other letters may also do this. It is possible to slowdown the vOICe even further. The settings like half speed and quarter speed are relative to the normal speed of sounding the soundscape. You change this normal speed and then slow things down. You change the speed via the Edit | Visual Sound Preferences | Visual sound
duration (s) per video frame dialogue box.
It will make reading words easier. Of course, with practice, you can increase your reading speed. To navigate from word to word, use the arrow keys.
This is a paper on the the vOICe co-authored by Jamie Ward and Dr. Meijer.
The abstract is here
Zachary Reynolds “novel training paradigm for The vOICe involving active, cooperative tasks”. A popular task involved users using the vOICe to play a form of tag in which two subjects wearing The vOICe try to turn off their opponent’s luminescent red
hearts which are attached to their backpacks.
I have created a shape exerciser to compliment the exercise mode of the vOICe. The program lets you build your own shape library for exercising. The shape exerciser is a tool for practicing shape recognition. You can navigate to the following link for downloading the shape exerciser.
Shape Exerciser Zip Installer
With thanks to Jacob Kruger for the file hosting.
The idea behind this post is to illustrate how color and some descriptions can be used to interpret an image that a person has never seen. As always, these images have been percieved using the The vOICe.
<a href="http://www.blindliving.com/"A friend posted about nuthatches on twitter so I decided to take a look at them. There are several kinds of nuthatches but for our purposes, we will focus on the white-breasted nuthatch and the red-breasted nuthatch.
See the below link for the red-breasted nuthatch.
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/PHOTO/MED/red_breasted_nuthatch_1.jpg
see the following link for a picture of the white-breasted nuthatch.
http://www.birdsasart.com/White-breasted-Nuthatch-soft-light-VERT-_H2D8927-McLeansville,-NC.jpg
I have never seen a bird before so do not have an idea of its shape. I know what a breast is. I heard the entire image and then decided to find the red breast. The red color filter did the job so I now knew where the breast was. I now slowed down the speed to quarter. There is a wavy line as you approach the right of the image at the left and reach the correct height. I suspect that is the stripe of the nuthatch but I cannot be sure. As for the wings and the bill, I do not know where they are. They are bound to be there but my knowledge of bird anatomy is rather limited to be able to find them.
As for the white-breasted nuthatch, not much to say except that the shape is interesting. The color filter does not help here but I have not tried all the color.
Also, I tried the skin filter and got silence. I take it that the skin filter is optimized for human skin?
Jacob Kruger pointed out that the orange filter gave the most interesting results in the red breasted nuthatche’s case. If the description at http://www.birdsource.org/ibs/IBSspecies/rebnut/index.html is correct, then the orange portion is the under part of the nuthatch.
Finally, to read more about the nuthatch, navigate to the following link.
http://www.cjwildlife.com/news/id=30/upside-down_birds___courtesy_of_the_vermont_institute_of_natural_science_-_vins.html