Yeah, I played with it as soon as I updated to it. Same thing - got a lot of people wondering if I'd lost my mind (again) due to the funny (-ier than normal) noises. You're right, it's pretty impressive considering the nature of the environment.
However, after playing with it for about five minutes, switching various options, the whole Squeak environment slowly ground to a halt, kinda like continuous garbage collection. I'll try and reproduce it and see if it was coincidental.
Dan writes:
Just Curious...
Has anyone tried this out? It's a lot of fun to play with and a significant piece of real-time software for a friendly, garbage-collecting, object-oriented language.
Just get the 'new morph...' menu, and choose SpectrumAnalyzerMorph from the Widgets category. Make sure you have a microphone hooked up, push 'start', adjust the gain, and start making silly noises.
Enjoy
- Dan
=================================================== Duane Maxwell dmaxwell (at) entrypoint.com CTO http://www.entrypoint.com EntryPoint (619) 578-8500 x226
Information contained herein is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of EntryPoint. ===================================================
Yeah, I played with it as soon as I updated to it. Same thing - got a lot of people wondering if I'd lost my mind (again) due to the funny (-ier than normal) noises. You're right, it's pretty impressive considering the nature of the environment.
I was working on the code for this on a flight back from the east coast and, after casting a number of nervous glances at me, the guy next to me finally asked "Do you always sing to your computer?"
He looked relieved when I explained what I was doing...
Note that the "sonogram" mode tries to show you all the data, even if i can't keep up with real time. Thus, on a slow machine, it can fall further and further behind while stealing most of the CPU cycles. The cure is use lower sampling rates and, somewhat contrary to intution, *larger* FFT sizes. The reason larger FFT sizes are more efficience is that they consume more data for each display update cycle.
Note that you can really see the "FFT Uncertain Principle" at work by trying different FFT sizes. A larger FFT size gives you good frequency but poor time resolution, while the converse is true of smaller FFT sizes. If your machine is fast enough to keep up, higher sampling rates give you more frequency resolution for a given time resolution.
One cool demo I like to give is to push up the gain to the point where the signal starts to clip. A nice "clean" spectrum such the one you get by whistling suddenly generates a bunch of spurious harmonics as the peaks of the signal get lopped off...
Another cool demo is the dramatic difference in the spectrum of a hissing noise (the "s" sound) versus that of a vowel sound ("ee" or "u").
I had a course on signal processing way back when, but this tool really made all the concepts come alive in a new way. I wish I had Squeak back then.
-- John
Duane Maxwell dmaxwell@entrypoint.com wrote...
Yeah, I played with it as soon as I updated to it. Same thing - got a lot of people wondering if I'd lost my mind (again) due to the funny (-ier than normal) noises. You're right, it's pretty impressive considering the nature of the environment.
However, after playing with it for about five minutes, switching various options, the whole Squeak environment slowly ground to a halt, kinda like continuous garbage collection. I'll try and reproduce it and see if it was coincidental.
This could happen if your machine is marginally too slow. Then in sonogram mode, the display will get behind, and memory will start to fill up with the unprocessed sound. We should probably put in a feature that dumps incoming data if it gets behind more than a couple of seconds. Also we might be able to tighten up the display code for the sonogram a bit, but TANSTAAFL.
- Dan
Dan writes:
This could happen if your machine is marginally too slow. Then in sonogram mode, the display will get behind, and memory will start to fill up with the unprocessed sound.
Yak! I hope not! It's a Mac G3/266. On the other hand, I was probably running a bunch of other apps at the same time....
We should probably put in a feature that dumps incoming data if it gets behind more than a couple of seconds. Also we might be able to tighten up the display code for the sonogram a bit, but TANSTAAFL.
Don't do it on my account. I ran it for about an hour in a cleaner environment, and it ran just fine. I agree it's probably a good idea to be a little more defensive for those less blessed.
Thanks!
=================================================== Duane Maxwell dmaxwell (at) entrypoint.com CTO http://www.entrypoint.com EntryPoint (619) 578-8500 x226
Information contained herein is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of EntryPoint. ===================================================
Duane Maxwell dmaxwell@entrypoint.com wrote...
Yeah, I played with it as soon as I updated to it. Same thing - got a lot of people wondering if I'd lost my mind (again) due to the funny (-ier than normal) noises. You're right, it's pretty impressive considering the nature of the environment.
However, after playing with it for about five minutes, switching various options, the whole Squeak environment slowly ground to a halt, kinda like continuous garbage collection. I'll try and reproduce it and see if it was coincidental.
This could happen if your machine is marginally too slow. Then in sonogram mode, the display will get behind, and memory will start to fill up with the unprocessed sound. We should probably put in a feature that dumps incoming data if it gets behind more than a couple of seconds. Also we might be able to tighten up the display code for the sonogram a bit, but TANSTAAFL.
The code actually appears to freeze my iMac --decidedly unSqueak-like behavior-- requiring a Control-Escape out to unfreeze the machine. It would be nice if there were some way that could be repaired.
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