ace.uci.edu — PersonalSoundtrack, a tiny wearable computer, detects your walking or running speed and plays songs from your music library that match your pace. Song speed is adjusted in real-time to match subtle variations in your gait, while larger, deliberate pace changes cause the device to change songs. You simply put it on and begin moving; that's it.
Oct 17, 2006 View in Crawl 4
kolywaterOct 17, 2006
the whole point is that you're running on-beat... not just to a general level of activity. with the sony player, you're still just making generic playlists that have very little to do with your activity.the only way i can describe is like being in your own music video: every step you take lands with a drum hit, or a bass drum kick, or whatever. plus, you don't have to define a playlist ahead of time, and the songs are time-stretched in real-time to constantly match your pace.
aquaxOct 17, 2006
Whoa, this would be awesome. I'd so have "Eye of the Tiger" playing when I ran up stairs.
kolywaterOct 17, 2006
ya, i know. patents suck. their patent was granted just recently, and of course apple has a LOT of patents they've never turned into products. also, my project is open-source/free-software. we'll see. i have a working product, an academic paper published on it, several public shows, and the university of california at my back.
omervkOct 17, 2006
Please let me know (in a comment to this current thread) where this blog is to be hosted. I'd love to hear, through the blog, about how the software discovers tempo.If the file system supports utf16, it will work. Otherwise, with utf8, I think you need to add the codepage for the language. On the other hand, using utf16, you might need to alter your software to support it.I'm guessing that since you use vfat, the card will be read/writable from any Windows machine as well as Linux... right?
kolywaterOct 17, 2006
ya, the cards are readable in os x, linux and windows. automated bpm detection is HORRIBLE even in the best case, and thus i completely avoided it. bpm is subtle data and should be community-determined, not machine-determined. musicbrainz is planning to include a bpm field in their database later this year, so they tell me. this is the perfect solution in my opinion not only because it's more accurate, but it also supports a community involvement and great projects like musicbrainz.a phd student at MIT recently did some great stuff with BPM detection, but it's still not as good as a musician tapping the tempo with his/her finger.once that's done, the music-brainz tagger application can simply tag all of your music files with the BPM. this is currently how the device works: it's just reading the BPM tag off the mp3 file and matching it to the real-time, moving averaged user pace.
theod48Oct 17, 2006
I JUST WANT THE HAPPY BRADY BUNCH MUSIC TO PLAY WHEN I GET HOME
kolywaterOct 18, 2006
that's essentially what i do, but instead of a proprietary .bpm tag i edit the bpm value that already exists in the standard mp3 idv3 tag. personalsoundtrack doesn't have an internet connection.. the bpm tagging is done, only once, on your home computer, like a laptop or whatever. i used itunes, and edited the mp3 idv3 tags i wanted to send over to personalsoundtrack.
starmantaOct 18, 2006
Smaller pictures would serve your purpose much better- I looked at both of those and really don't know what I'm looking for. Unless it's that giant, black box, in which case - wtf?
kevinharbinOct 19, 2006
duggmirror.com