Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
A new kind of volume control (ironicsans.com)
81 points by dwwoelfel on March 31, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



Kind of cute; nice HTML5 example. He says it only works in Firefox, but worked fine for me in Opera.


Crashed the tab's process in Chrome!


Not for me, but it didn't work, either.


At first I didn't get it. But then I tried it. And I like it! How cool would this option be for 'books on tape'.


I'd hate to be the reader doing 5 different takes for the entire book, from whispering to shouting my lungs out for hours!


Even better if you could get it working automatically. I wonder if there's any existing work on using signal processing to turn audio of spoken words into a whisper or a shout?


Theoretically, you'd need to separate the tonal part of the voice and the noise part. The tonal part goes up/down, let's say, one octave at a time and becomes louder or quieter. Pure whisper is essentially only the noise part. The separation routine should look into the spectrum: the tonal part must look like narrower bands, while the rest is noise. Tonal transformations may be more complex in reality than just multiplication, but the simplest transformation might work OK too.


An Auto-tune for emotion?


Voice synthesis? Not exactly what you were asking for though.


Please not ;-) I don't want my audiobooks shouting at me!


Then don't turn the volume up that high?


I'd love to have a Chris Farley shouting version of the Bible.


I need this for my two-year-old.

Which setting is "inside voice"?


This is similar to the velocity channel in digital music, which is how hard the note is struck (possibly changing the quality of the note), which can be separate from the volume.


You could expand this to a choose-your-own-adventure for audio clips.



Not exactly. You select the tone of each of your interactions to drive the story flow, e.g. "You whisper to Character A" or "You yell at Character A".


Ahh, interesting (I bet you didn't think I'd notice your reply, 11 days after my comment :))


Reading the title I hoped someone finally built a car audio that auto-adjusts the volume depending on background noise.


I've driven a hire car with that feature several years ago. I believe it was a Citroen Xsara Picasso.


If you go from shout to whisper right at the last line, it becomes one of the creepiest things I've ever heard.


Looks like he posted a day too early for April's Fool. Nice joke anyways!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: