Happy Twenty-Oh-Seven! Sheer Audacity
We finally crossed over from writing 2007 on schedules and budgeting projections, to "live and in person" real meetings. Hope 2006 and New Years were good to you. Just to catch up, here's what I've been up to lately.
I've been working/playing with some cool applications lately. In December, I had a chance to get back to some digital recording and sound editing using the open source program Audacity. It's functions and interface are almost identical to other apps I've used so the transition was very easy.
Rather than go into a full-scale article on recording, I'll focus on one important aspect of the audio work; clean-up. Here's the technique for Audacity. Highlight a blank section of the wav file to sample room noise, breaths, etc. The first pass of the noise reduction effect creates a profile of this "noise. Set the amount of clean-up you think you'll need the program to use in its profile. This is for searching and removing the noise across the wav file. Unfortunately, you may get some squirrely electronic noise as a side effect.
My cohort at the time was talented designer Michael Heroux, who suggested a nice noise reduction approach. Since the annoying electronic sound is most apparent in the pauses between words, simply select these "spaces" and set the volume level to minus 10. This avoids the sudden drop-off of a true silence, and softens everything selected to a natural point. Geekin'!
By the way, the context for this work was a series of rapid development projects for Fannie Mae. These e-Learning projects included awareness training for some of their internal systems, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance, and E-Learning guidelines. The guidelines were in the form of a quick start guide they could give to perspective internal clients. Platform tools were Articulate, Articulate Quiz Maker, PowerPoint, and Audacity. (I'll get into Articulate in the next blog. In the mean time here's the link for Audacity. I had the best luck with Audacity's alternate Site.).
Let me leave this cool insightful quote that certainly describes the ISD approach and interactive Socratic teaching:
"...a master is not someone who already knows the answers and has the solutions but someone who is able to ask worthwhile questions and direct the process of learning, problem solving and creativity to form new maps of the world that lead to useful new answers and possibilities." Modeling With NLP, p 16, Robert Dilts.
I've been working/playing with some cool applications lately. In December, I had a chance to get back to some digital recording and sound editing using the open source program Audacity. It's functions and interface are almost identical to other apps I've used so the transition was very easy.
Rather than go into a full-scale article on recording, I'll focus on one important aspect of the audio work; clean-up. Here's the technique for Audacity. Highlight a blank section of the wav file to sample room noise, breaths, etc. The first pass of the noise reduction effect creates a profile of this "noise. Set the amount of clean-up you think you'll need the program to use in its profile. This is for searching and removing the noise across the wav file. Unfortunately, you may get some squirrely electronic noise as a side effect.
My cohort at the time was talented designer Michael Heroux, who suggested a nice noise reduction approach. Since the annoying electronic sound is most apparent in the pauses between words, simply select these "spaces" and set the volume level to minus 10. This avoids the sudden drop-off of a true silence, and softens everything selected to a natural point. Geekin'!
By the way, the context for this work was a series of rapid development projects for Fannie Mae. These e-Learning projects included awareness training for some of their internal systems, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance, and E-Learning guidelines. The guidelines were in the form of a quick start guide they could give to perspective internal clients. Platform tools were Articulate, Articulate Quiz Maker, PowerPoint, and Audacity. (I'll get into Articulate in the next blog. In the mean time here's the link for Audacity. I had the best luck with Audacity's alternate Site.).
Let me leave this cool insightful quote that certainly describes the ISD approach and interactive Socratic teaching:
"...a master is not someone who already knows the answers and has the solutions but someone who is able to ask worthwhile questions and direct the process of learning, problem solving and creativity to form new maps of the world that lead to useful new answers and possibilities." Modeling With NLP, p 16, Robert Dilts.
posted by Mark at 10:38 PM
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