Jason Wood software, music, graphics, television

The song, This is Halloween is the result of a collaboration between myself and my housemate Luke Cotton.

Lyrics by Jason Wood,
Additional Lyrics by Luke Cotton
Music by Jason Wood and Luke Cotton.
Production Mixing and Mastering by Luke Cotton
Video Editing by Jason Wood

The video is a "souvenir" video for people who came to our halloween 2009 party. Enjoy!

Jason Wood at IBC 2009Well, IBC 2009 is over, and although attendance was down, the quality of people there was up so it was worthwhile being there!

For the RT Software Booth, I produced a news-style countdown to introduce the virtual reality presentation that went out on the hour.

After my experimentations with Windows Mobile, I am back on my linux box for some slightly more serious experiments with audio. At some point I will port them to windows mobile.

A brief coding session later and I have a basic audio framework which can generate sound and route modules together in various ways.

My first port of call is a guitar tuner module. In it's most basic form, this will take an input audio signal, and determine the most prominent fundamental frequency of that signal, and display it in some way.

There are a number of ways of doing this, some more suitable than others, depending on the type of audio signal you expect to receive.

The first way I have implemented is by using a fast fourier transform (using wikipedia as my link feels very lazy considering the wealth of sites out there with information on it). This is very quick and easy to do, assuming you find a library that can do the transform for you and ignore the maths behind it! Luckily there are several such libraries out on the web, under various licenses ranging from GPL to commercial.

The fast fourier transform takes your incoming audio signal, and transforms it into a spectral analysis - it shows how much of each frequency the audio signal was made up of.

For example, if you feed it an audio signal of a sine wave at 440hz, the output data will show a flat graph with a big spike at the point that represents 440hz.

That's about as far as my knowledge of FFT goes, but since it is a fairly fundamental part of digitial signal processing, I am reading up on it. I have found a good looking online book that at first glance at least seems to be well worth a read. You can find it here :

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/mdft/mdft.html

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Last month I got a new smart phone, the Sony Ericsson X1. I won't try and review it here, suffice to say I fell in love with the hardware when I first saw it and played with a model of it, and now that I have one, I am pleasantly satisifed with the windows mobile operating system that it runs on. More to the point, developing software for it is a breeze.