For most of the summer now I have been developing software to allow for the visualization of sound files. Other products such as Wavesurfer and Audacity already accomplish this task along with other capabilities. What differs between those programs and the one I have been working on is its use is for the Microsoft Surface. Bringing this type of technology to the Surface will allow groups to analyze dialogue(and perhaps other types of data) on a large multi-touch surface.
The main purpose of this program is to import a sound file(.wav) along with the dialogue associated with it. Below you can see the interface with a visualized sound file of a conversation, as well as the measured pupil diameter of one of the participants(lower graph). This conversation was part of another experiment in which two participants played a game of taboo over voice chat while one of them was using the driving simulator here at Project54.
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You can also see a quick video of the software’s capabilities. A user can play, pause, and stop the sound. Also, the transcription file from the recorded dialogue can be displayed within the visualization. The purposed use for this is to visually analyze the relationship between the spoken tasks and pupil diameter(cognitive load).
As you can see, the software’s capabilities are very limited and there is much more to do. This project is in active development so there will be more to come!
~Nick Sjostrom