if 0 {
Brian Theado - 21Oct03 I have been reading Win Wenger's fascinating Einstein Factor http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/076150186X/qid=1066784962 . This book is full of fascinating creativity and problem solving techniques. The author's website (http://winwenger.com ) contains dozens and dozens of articles about topics similar that found in the Einstein Factor (http://winwenger.com/winsight.htm is a good starting point). One article [L1 ] gives details for a Babble-Back Machine in which two reel-to-reel tape recorders are rigged together to record and then play back the same sound with a few seconds delay. Read http://www.winwenger.com/feed1.htm for more details on learning from feedback from your own output.
I decided the power of the snack sound extension would make implementing a similar device in Tcl easy. Below is the resulting code. It plays back all sound received on a computer's microphone with a 2 second delay. The delay can be changed to 1 second (for example) by hitting F2 to bring up the console and typing 'set delay 1000'. The units for the delay variable is in microseconds.
I introduced this program to my 2 year old daughter and she is utterly thrilled with it. She laughed, squealed, talked and babbled for over an hour and a half and still wanted more.
I have packaged this code along with snack together into a Windows starpack at http://tkoutline.sourceforge.net/babbleback.exe . }
package require sound
proc play s {
$s stop
$s play -command "$s destroy"
record
}
proc record {} {
set s [snack::sound]
$s record
after $::delay "play $s"
}
proc createGui {} {
wm title . "The Babbleback Machine"
pack [label .label -text "Speak into the microphone"]
pack [button .exit -text Exit -command exit] -fill both
bind . <F2> "console show"
}
set delay 2000
if {$argc == 1} {set delay [lindex $argv 0]}
createGui
record