Solar Flare

Monday Part II

Monday Evening brought the Solutions Pavilion. Here several Sun technologies were demonstrated over beverages and hors d'oeuvres, including SunSPOTs (Sun Small Programmable Object Technology) and something I have hitherto not seen before from Sun, Search Inside the Music. But let's start with SunSPOTs.

SunSPOT

These small devices come in a development kit containing a base station unit (USB connection to PC) and two remote units. The remote spots contain sensors to detect temperature, motion and light have a bank of leds on the front panel. Using the NetBeans IDE you can develop your own programs, load them onto the remote SPOTS and control their actions and responses.

Click on the thumbnails above to view larger versions of each picture

According to Arshan Poursohi, who demonstrated the devices for us, the ability for individual programmers to tailor the devices' instructional code allows for virtually unlimited possibilities for the creative and ambitious Java developer. Examples he gave of possible utilizations included environmental sensing such as volcanic activity levels, shipment and inventory tracking and even autonomous robotics!

One of the standout features Arshan showed us was the Solarium. This is a GUI interface that combines remote SunSPOTs with on-screen representations of the devices as well. Each "virtual" SPOT correlates with an actual remote SunSPOT "in real life". You drag and drop different programs to the virtual SPOTs in order to load the code on the real one it is bound to. Solarium can also be used to track the state of multiple sunSPOTs, or given a very large number, cause singular remote devices to emit a recognizable signal for ease in locating it.

Want to inquire about getting your very own SunSPOT developer's kit? Click Here. (discounts available for educational institutions)

Have a kit and want to get started right away? Here's the Tutorial.

Search Inside the Music

I offer nothing new in stating that a virtual plethora of digital music is available on the Internet. At any time of day or night one can find, purchase and download single songs or entire albums with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. And talk about choices! Music residing in cyberspace spans from the enduring classics to fresh cuts on the bleeding edge of any scene.

If you're an audiophile like me, your music taste also runs across the entire spectrum, from the forefront of the indie movement to the relics of dusty baroque. Typically, genre and sub-genre tags help us categorize music on a high level. But this doesn't really tell me much about whether I'll really like a particular musician or group. Yes I like some music that is labeled Alternative, but definitely not everything in the genre (What does Alternative mean anyway, alternative to what?). More specific labels, such as Ambient help me to further define my tastes, but I don't like all Ambient music either. Music is an individual human experience. How do we somehow visualize this individuality using technology? Enter the Sun Search Inside the Music Project.

Instead of relying solely on external, tagged data like artist, song or genre; this software, led by Sun researcher Paul Lamere, actually analyzes the content of the music inside the track itself! How? Digital music, like anything else in the digital realm, is simply formed from streams of machine-readable bits. Search Inside the Music creates metadata based upon statistical information extracted from a single track. A few examples include rhythm, tempo, lyrics, energy level, melody and so on. The track is then profiled according to this acoustic content.

This approach shatters the boundaries of the traditional labeling scheme. For example, if a song in one genre shares acoustic qualities with a song in another, this relationship can be displayed graphically for the user. There is also a social aspect where users can share their musical experience with other, like-minded listeners as well.

Paul demonstrated for us a very interesting way of using the software. Imagine you're setting up a playlist for your morning routine. You can set a 'musical path' that starts out with calmer, more sublime tones and gradually builds to music that sets you in motion and ready for the day. Yes, you can use most software to set up a playlist to do this as well, but here you don't risk the possibility of 'shuffle-shock' when a soft melody is suddenly replaced with the screech of heavy feedback.

Interested? Read more about Search Inside the Music here, here and here. (NOTE: The last link is for registered SDN users. Registration is here.)

Posted at 03:55AM Mar 01, 2008 by Gregory Corbin in Personal  |  Comments[2]