Ever noticed how difficult it is to hear your mobile phone in a noisy place like a sports stadium or crowded bar? "That's because there's a lot of noise" you think. But there's an additional factor: polyphonic ringtones are a lot harder to hear than the good old monophonic ones.
The problem with polyphonic ringtones is that since they divide their output power over the complete audible spectrum, they get easier masked by environmental noise. Monotonic ringtones stand out, putting all their power in a single frequency at a time. Anyway, polyphony is here to stay, so let's make the best out of it.
Here's how to make a ringtone that you can hear well in noisy situations (requirements: audio editor software + mobile phone that can play mp3s):
Take your favorite song that has a lot of high frequencies (audio fx, percussion, hiss noises,...) and chop it up a bit. I took Vitalic's "La Rock 01" but you might as well try out some of Dave Tipper's stuff.
Remove bass frequencies and add treble, e.g. with a filter like this:
Transfer it to your phone, sit back and wait until you get called.
My ringtone is available right here, ready for download and transfer to a mobile phone. You can preview it with the applet below, although it sounds different on a pc speaker than on a phone. And be warned: listening to this kind of stuff a lot is not good for your ears.
You like movies and you're about to get married? Enter the fine initiative of the people of bodametraje.com, who cast the pair of you in the roles of real movie stars, making a complete short movie with you as the stars/ heroes/ villains/ whatever suits the script. The idea was launched in Spain by bodametraje.com, and the wedding guests really seem to appreciate the dvds with the short films (which are mostly handed out at the wedding). Or, to quote the production team:
"Bodametraje.com ofrece la posibilidad de dar un toque inovador y exclusivo a su boda mediante la realización de un cortometraje de cine protagonizado por los novios, un "bodametraje".
Usted elige un tema y la organización se encarga de escribir el guión. El tiempo de rodaje suele ser de tres días aproximadamente, y no es necesario saber actuar, un buen trabajo de postproducción conseguirá un resultado espectacular.
El cortometraje podrá ser proyectado en pantalla gigante durante el cocktail de recepción o en algún momento del banquete o bien se repartirá un DVD con el mismos a cada invitado como recuerdo de los novios sustituyendo los típicos puros, bombones, o figuritas... (que tampoco nos sorprenden).
Sus familiares y amigos quedarán impresionados al descubrir su lado más Bond... y les agradecerán la originalidad, pues quién quiere ver otra boda estándar?
No solo tendrá el corto sino que además podrá disfrutar de las tomas falsas y entrevistas tipo Hollywood. El DVD tendrá un total de 30 minutos."
I programmed the flash website, easy and to the point. Check it, there's a nice shortfilm under the "ofrecemos" menu.
Last week I finished the flash programming of two design websites, one for prestigious designer José Piris and another one for the stylish interior design shop Cromoduro. All was done in ActionScript, with a new library of prototype functions I made for flash. The design itself was done by Kim B., and the result is smooth enough - another one for the archive.
I've been digging a little into the google maps api, but apparently you don't need to know anything to do some things. Thanks to Google maps mania and Wikimapia, I got the frame below (in 49 seconds), with a nice tagged Google map of Santander. Pretty cool indeed.
I just learned how to finetune Autostitch to make some pretty nifty panorama pictures. Check my last one, stitched together from 11 pictures. I also did some post-processing, but that might need some more finetuning. Anyhow, this looks like a nice way to toy with my weekend pictures.
Phew, I'm starting to finish off some side projects. Yesterday I made the finishing touches on a speech analyzer program meant as an accompanying tool for a set of oratory courses in Spanish. It's programmed in .NET and makes some beautiful real-time plots of voice frequency (pitch) and speech rate. Some technical details: real-time pitch estimation was done by Noll's algorithm, real-time speech rate estimation was a mix between enrate and a newer correlation-based method. For the signal processing part we relied on the Exocortex.DSP FFT library, and for the graphics we used the ZedGraph classes.
AdventureImagery.com, the online shop for extreme sports and related stock footage. Check out the crazy videos! I particularly like the skydiving, kite surfing and bicycling footage.
Santander-Unico.com, the "quality guide to Santander". Indispensable for anybody visiting Santander (Spain). Includes some google maps and the nice shadow hack tastypopsicle made of the onion skinned drop shadows.
AulaDeOratoria.com, the first Spanish portal for everybody interested in getting his message to his audience.
