Gabriella Levine

ongoing and past work
Archive for January, 2011

Proj. Dev. studio – project idea

An exploratory project about timing and computers, specifically related to sound:

I would like to explore sound, how it is represented with data, and demonstrate how is produced digitally by making a physical interface with which people can manipulate the sample rate of a signal.

Bit rate = (sampling rate) x (bit depth) x (number of channels)

Sampling rate: the number of samples per second (or per other unit) taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal.

audio sample

audio sample

Audio bit depth: the number of bits of information recorded for each sample. Bit depth directly corresponds to the resolution of each sample in a set of digital audio data. Common examples of bit depth include CD quality audio, which is recorded at 16 bits, and DVD-Audio, which can support up to 24-bit audio.

Bit rate the bits of data transferred and received each second

By making a physical interface that people can interact with, I want to allow people to be responsible for sample rate (I was thinking they could push a button over and over rapidly, but no matter what, the sample rate will be WAY TOO SLOOOOW). Perhaps a lever would work. Cell phones / walkie talkie transmission uses a sample rate of 8,000 Hz. I would like to design a way that two people can interact, or one person can interact with a device / a computer and manipulate the timing that a computer asks for incoming data.

This next part maybe is less hashed out:
I would also like to make an interface that allows people to change the resolution of recorded samples, and see how it affects the audio quality. I would like to make a display using light and/or color to show the relationship of difference in resolution possibilities with different bit depths.

FECPW – What I want to built (class 1)d

I have already started this using Processing, but I’d like to build a this as a dynamic site, possibly using googlemaps:
A map of the US, showing car pool requests:
Something that ends up looking like this (Ben Fry’s zipdecode map of zip codes is a nice template)

benFry zipdecode

And it’d be able to zoom:

benFry zipdecode

And it will look something, really roughly, like Linked In’s InMap to visualize your links as a network diagram. (In other words, it will have two dots, and a line connecting them. For starters…

benFry zipdecode

For starters, I’d like to create a wiki, for something, maybe carpool requests, that takes people’s current address and adds it correctly to a google map or some other map interface, and shows it nicely :
googleMap