Thursday, March 12, 2015

Synthesizing Ambient Sound for Webinars?

Greetings from the Australian National Unviersity in Canberra, where Miles Thorogood, PhD Student at SFU, is talking about his research on generating ambient sound-scapes for films and video games automatically. The idea is that a computer program can take the text description in the script "haunted house" and produce suitably creepy sounds.

It occurs to me this technique might also be used for webinars. At present typically most participants will have their microphone turned off to prevent interference. As a result the ambient sounds changes greatly from speaker to speaker, often with disconcerting completely silent sections then very loud distracted sounds. Perhaps the ambient sound software could be used to synthesize a consistent background sound, which is less distracting.

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