Audio Patch

Hi chaps,

Everything sounds to be going well with the promotional side of things. Sorry to hear about your Grandad J to the D!

I've spent some time today trying to get some samples into the system. As it currently stand there are 104 samples in which 10 samples load every half a second. On my computer which admittedly isn't the best it pretty much kills it, this is mainly due to the samples altogether working out at around 660mb. I can reduce this quite a lot by downsampling all the samples which don't contain much high frequency content.

As you all probably know the hearing range of a human being (us mere mortals) is around 20kHz. The Nyquist sampling theorem states that you need to sample at twice the hearing rate to eliminate aliasing and artefacts within the sounds. That means if the sound of a bird chirping is around 8kHz we can sample it at 16kHz therefore reducing the size of the file by nearly a third and not killing my poor computer along the way. Max will recognise this as a 16kHz sample and play it back through the soundcard at the correct speed.

There are also a lot of samples which I can cut down further to make the ambiences more random to use the samples in quite a dynamic way and also give me more marks for my use of interactive audio principles. Well thats my theory anyway. Plus again my computer will probably crack a smile at my generousity!

In terms of interactivity I've not done a lot, mainly because I've been in the Paris celebrating my ripening. Thats actually the least of my worries at the moment. I'm quite optimistic about it and if we can't get multi point interactivity working we can easily solve the issue by parameters relating to the speed of peoples movements playing back more sounds and creating a deeper sound than if the user was moving slowly, setting a more relaxed scene.

Any road, if you haven't already put your pyjamas on and made a hot chocolate for bed I've probably made you resort to it by now. My god I can chat on and on and on.

And yes Jon to the D I can help you with the visuals when we next meet to integrate the whole shazam together. Friday may be good for me, but that depends on everyone else too. Bit of a bugger that I'm occupied on Wednesday and Thursday... Long story!

Thank you for reading this far

Gaz