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.

Making Sound Data into 3D Printed Jewelery and Bells

Greetings from the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National Unviersity in Canberra, where Stephen Barrass from University of Canberra is talking about "Physical Sonification Dataforms". He converted data about the hearing characteristics of ears and rather produce the usual graphs, converted into a 3D printed metal object. He started by producing a medallion and then bells. He found that it was possible to hear the differences in the data in the ring of the bells. The bells can be ordered from Shapeways 3D printing service. It occurred to me that such objects might be of use for people who can't see graphs.

ps: One comment Stephen Barrass made was that the 3D printed metal was extremely hard, as it has been laser sintered.

Surround sound for an Apple Macbook?

I was asked what sort of surround sound speakers to get for an Apple Macbook. These have a combined optical digital audio output in the output/headphone minijack. They therefore don't work with cheaper models of 5.1 surround sound speakers, which require a sound card with multiple analog plugs. Some of the more expensive home theater systems have optical input, but these tend to have a built in DVD player, increasing the size and cost for a PC addon.

A useful alternative seems to be a set of USB surround sound headphones.