A 2d representation of a lion and a cub
vOICe
A field of sugarcane
A sugarcane fieldI made a quick trip to India’s sugar cane producing region. I found plenty of sugarcane fields en route. Here is the photograph and a soundscape of one such field. You can clearly sense the sugarcane stocks. As always, the photograph has been taken using my Nokia E51 phone along with the vOICe.
An image of the Large Hadron Collider
arial_view_cernAn arial view of the CERN site>
Nice view of the LHC from the BBC website. I can detect some cylindrical objects which I suspect are the electro magnets of the LHC.
Looking out the viewfinder of a camera using the vOICe
A photographer friend invited me to his house for dinner. During the course of the evening, I had a chance to play with his cannon slr camera. I used the vOICe to look out of the viewfinder of the camera. As I have observed previously, you see very little. However, at that time, the vOICe still had the bug where very little of the view was shown on third-generation mobile phones. I now tried looking out the viewfinder with the version of the vOICe that had this bug fixed. I saw more than what I earlier saw. My friend was standing against a white background namely, the door of the washroom. He had to use the flash but, the camera of my Nokia e51 managed without much difficulty. Initially, I saw a patch of bright light and then a lot of darkness. It turns out that the cap of the lens was in place. Once that had been removed, I tried to distinguish him from the door of the washroom. I found it rather hard to do but then, I was not wearing any earphones. As I moved closer, I eventually reached a stage where I could see the buttons of his shirt. I perceive them as a lot of bleeps. So, if you are photographing a person, be careful about how much detail you are getting in the photograph. If you are getting an excessive amount of detail, move the camera back a bit.
The inside of a desktop computer
insidepc
Tagged soundscapes
tagged-square
At long last, I was finally able to try tagging a soundscape. I took a basic rectangle and, using audio editing software, namely goldwave, I was able to mix my audio tags into the soundscape.
Since this is a proof of concept, I have only tagged the verticle sides of the rectangle. Tagging the horizontal sides is tricky since they are rendered as a single long beat. If you listen carefully, you will be able to make out that there are actually two notes representing the upper and lower sides. However, I have not found any easy way of tagging these. The idea behind the tagging is to add labels to soundscapes just like the way labels are added to images in print.
Finally, I have played the soundscapes at the “very slow motion” setting of the vOICe. This facilitates the tagging and also helps to render the image clearly at least for new users.
Note:
my thanks to my cousin Abhishek for helping with the mixing and for drawing the rectangle.
A what/where visual-to-auditory sensory substitution fMRI study: can blind and sighted hear shapes and locations in the visual cortex?
See this ECVP supplement for the abstract. Essentially, the study concludes that the visual cortex does activate when individuals hear soundscapes asociated with objects as opposed to listening to arbitrary sounds asociated with objects. My only question is how do we explain this to people and show them the difference? I have made several presentations on the vOICe and a lot of people equate the vOICe to sonar. This is not true and we need a convincing way to demonstrate this to the end user.