Alvin@cup.portal.com (Alvin Henry White) (11/02/90)
Multi-Media Audio Synchronization Industry There are a tremendous number of human endeavors that attempt to synchronize sound to external events. Music, Advertising and Gregorian Chanting come to mind first off. I think it possible that a home industry could develope to include such people as reading teachers, preachers, home video production, rock and roll bands, computer animation, etc. A couple of people here in Silicon Valley have started their own small company to makes sound processing cards for small computers and by their demonstrations I became greatly interested in the possibilities. Unfortunately, there are a couple of abilities that are lacking from their products that I think would make the world of difference, but those things do not seem to coincide with their interest. So I am looking farther afield at things I have less knowledge about. The essence of the problem is in the following: First one has an audio tape. One wants to go through the tape and define certain determinable points on the tape for later processing. This can be done, either by machine recognition of already extant data in the tape or it can be done as part of an editing process where a point is located on the tape and a small, inaudible signal is added to the tape. Second one has an audio tape that they want to synchronize with the first tape. This second tape could be someone reading or singing or playing an instrument. One then runs the second tape through an editing process similar to the first where determinable points corresponding to those on the first tape are identified, marked, maybe numbered. Each tape is ran through a time counter program that records the time durations between each mark. The second tape in now ran through a dsp phase vocoder program to create a third tape having much of the second with the exception that its marked time intervals are equal those of the master tape. Now by playing both tapes simultaneosly they can be mixed to form the final product. If one had a card that had good dsp cababilities, and that could control something like four lanier dictation machines simultaneuosly, and some speech recognition program, it could turn on the master track, read until the first mark was found. Turn on an output machine and write out something that had the mark on it. Back up the master input so as not to loose anything at the cutoff point, read in to the next mark, etc. After the separate tapes had been processed two could be read in simultaneously and be simultaneously output to a mixed version or in my requirements be output to multi-track tape to be sent off to the record company. Alvin H. White, Gen. Sect. G.O.D.S.B.R.A.I.N. Government Online Database Systems Bureau for Resource Allocations to Information Networks [ alvin@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!alvin ]