unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 15/04/10 21:20, Jim Rorie wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 16:40 +0100, Conor Curran wrote: 
>
>   
>>> State type information that Charlene is referring to would be something
>>> novel like the musical pitch of the entire sound theme could being
>>> lowered by an octave as battery power drains to a critical level.
>>> Something easily done with a DFT audio processing routine. 
>>>       
>> This would be very nice indeed but are you implying we should schedule
>> real-time signal processing of a sound event on a machine that is
>> already dying because of lack of power :)
>>     
> I should think it wouldn't cause too much overhead, as the duty cycle
> should be pretty low.   Anyone generating continuous sound events has
> got bigger problems than a dying battery. IIRC, a good DFT transform for
> octave shift isn't too expensive, computationally.
>   

It's a cool idea, but I don't think it meets the cost-benefit
requirement. There are better ways to signal battery low (including
sound events for folks who are more in tune with that) than reshaping
ALL sounds.

A major problem we have with sound events, classically, is latency. You
click, and half a second later the bell goes. That makes the sound theme
feel arbitrary and cheap. Let's work out how to make it feel real and
immediate, which means cutting latency out, not putting more in.

Sound is certainly an area where less will be more :-)

Mark

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