Category: Daily Living
I'm putting this in Daily life because well, it has profound impact on us, I think.
Yesterday, Voyager mentioned an app produced by SeeingWithSound which sounds tantalizingly attractive: enhance what we already have, sonic imagery, and use it to enhance our knowledge of our surroundings.
There's a developer who created what may have been a novelty app, the developer is Essency and the app is Awareness.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can get it from the app store. There was some controversy apparently, awhile back over paying extra for an add-on to make VoiceOver work. You now only pay $0.99 extra just like for any other add-ons which the app has. I'm not here for the political debate though, I just wanted to try it. My fertile imagination combined with what Voyager posted yesterday made me think: what if we could use this thing like a virtual set of field glasses?
By way of comparison, my wife got me one of those ‘Listen Up’ devices you slip into one ear for Christmas.
You focus around by moving your head to pick up on sound.
Essency's app, on the other hand, lets me just move my iPod in a general direction, with stereo headphones in, just like a sighted person with a set of binoculars.
Maybe not identical, but the ramifications are pretty profound. I noticed it’s pretty sensitive to the backgrounds and textures of the sounds, which is
as important for us as the sounds themselves, just like a sighted person looking at an image set against a backdrop; whether you know it or not, the backdrop
plays a major part. So now I’m going to end up conducting some pretty interesting experiments with this: what kind of distance info does it provide? What
sort of data does it return via sound?
Because it comes through headphones, we get everything a headphones view has – and by simply focusing, moving the device around, we can sonically zoom
into and out of various zones, or areas, if you will.
I went out on my front walk, turned on the application, and was able to zoom in on a building across the street because of the existing sound or wind or
whatever that bounces off.
I then proceeded to home in on one
of the neighborhood birds. I noticed it changed focus very quickly, you can hear yourself moving it if you’re not careful, but still I could home in on
the bird in the tree chirping, normally almost out of earshot but well within range for this device.
So is it possible we can use it to establish patterns, as an extension of what we already do spatially with sound? Already we benefit by ourselves from
a certain amount of sonic imagery, but we can’t do what bats do: emit high frequencies and get the feedback from nearby objects. But, radically, I’m thinking this app could. Not by emitting the frequencies, but us learning just how to tune the sliders and such, and listen to the sounds. Of course, we'll need to learn to focus, the way a sighted person does with a set of field glasses.
Notice how the sound changes just in the air as you move the device. So is this an inkling of what could be for us the closest thing to very rudimentary
distance vision? I think anyone who has messed with this app for awhile ought to add feedback as it relates to pattern recognition: can you tell with it
where a wall starts and stops, etc. The mic on the iPod Touch 4th Gen sure does seem to be sensitive.
I’m not suggesting walking down the street holding your device in the air, not yet anyway till we know about drop-offs which I for one will test, but certainly
to get a feel for the general layout of a large area that exceeds your ability to hear surroundings, like a park or something, or give you the right feedback
to find your way back from someplace, the uses of this app seem to be pretty expansive.
Possibly for the first time, some people who haven't been able to benefit from sound imagery or echo locating, would really be able to benefit from this. This looks to me like a really great and low-cost innovation that will allow us to be able to get a clearer, and broader, image of places.
You won't hear one sound in your left ear and another in your right. You'd have to just move the device in the designated direction. Maybe there is a way to make it do that: I just bought the thing thirty minutes ago and went outside for a couple minutes with it.As I said, I certainly intend on continuing experiments with it, maybe starting in the war zone that is frequently the teenage daughter's bedroom, and instead of having to feel with my feet for strewn objects, so as not to accidentally break something of hers, I can pan around and use the sound ambiance to tell what's where. And for what? 2 bucks, including the VoiceOver add-on?
If you look up Essency in your app store, you'll find the Awareness app.
I don't know if they have made an Android version yet, but hope so for you Android users.
Well I'm obviously ignorant of what it takes to do this. For objects up close I wouldn't use this app, though I have gotten a couple more of it's add-ons for a dollar apiece.
Anyway it's more for distance I think: using it the way I'm talking about here. Cupping the device in your hands, just like cupping a hand over an ear, definitely helps to directionalize or pinpoint a particular sound: could be useful on a hike, or when trying to get back to your group if you've gone off on a walk. Still, although I was reaching, it appears to be very useful for us.