Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10 with Vocola

See on the speech computing forum about Dragon Naturally Speaking v10 and Vocola

Vocola works with DNS v10. This is encouraging since chances are high that other third party addons will work.

Tagged soundscapes

tagged-squareAt long last, I was finally able to try tagging a soundscape. I took a basic rectangle and, using audio editing software, namely goldwave, I was able to mix my audio tags into the soundscape.

Since this is a proof of concept, I have only tagged the verticle sides of the rectangle. Tagging the horizontal sides is tricky since they are rendered as a single long beat. If you listen carefully, you will be able to make out that there are actually two notes representing the upper and lower sides. However, I have not found any easy way of tagging these. The idea behind the tagging is to add labels to soundscapes just like the way labels are added to images in print.

Finally, I have played the soundscapes at the “very slow motion” setting of the vOICe. This facilitates the tagging and also helps to render the image clearly at least for new users.

Note:
my thanks to my cousin Abhishek for helping with the mixing and for drawing the rectangle.

A what/where visual-to-auditory sensory substitution fMRI study: can blind and sighted hear shapes and locations in the visual cortex?

See this ECVP supplement for the abstract. Essentially, the study concludes that the visual cortex does activate when individuals hear soundscapes asociated with objects as opposed to listening to arbitrary sounds asociated with objects. My only question is how do we explain this to people and show them the difference? I have made several presentations on the vOICe and a lot of people equate the vOICe to sonar. This is not true and we need a convincing way to demonstrate this to the end user.

A tutorial on the vOICe

I have created a tutorial on the vOICe. You can see it at the following link. The tutorial is meant for a beginner. It walks the reader through simple images and familiarizes them with the vOICe and seeing with sound. The idea is to give the user a launch pad from where she can further explore the vOICe.

Tutorial on the vOICe

 

My thanks to Lucy Irving for hosting the above mentioned tutorial.

An area wise map of sysmic activity in India

See this map of seismic activity in India. The map is divided into different bands. Red are the most active regions and white are the most stable regions. You will need to use the color filters of the vOICe to hear the different bands.

Yellow regions are the areas with a moderate amount of seismic activity. The color identifier of the vOICe is able to identify some of the colors in the image. I wish it would give me a complete color breakdown. It does render the entire image after all.
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