Articles Natural Sound:
1) A+
Multi-media studio 86
BY ANTHONY REVEAUX
The manufacturers suggest that you record your sounds on tape in preparation for digitizing. I found my dubbing deck to be a great help in assembling a variety of sounds on one master source cassette. You can use microphones directly with these, digitizers.
Magnum's Natural
Sound
The compact Magnum box is 2 x 2 inches, and the hard-wired control cable ends
in a 1/8-inch jack plug. Natural Sound comes with an Editor disk, and two
volumes of Sound Effects are available separately. They include sounds such
as trumpet fanfares, an ocean liner, a dog barking, and a cash register. Some
of them, extended through repetition, lack polish, but they all succeed in
providing instant clip art for the ears, ready for experimentation. Natural
Sound was designed to work directly with Magnum's Slide Show Magician program.
Natural Sound's Macintalk facility works with any Macintalk-compatible program,
such as VideoWorks, but otherwise Natural Sound works only with Slide Show
Magician at the time of this writing. If you have ever seen a product
demonstration or users' group introduction running by itself on a Mac, you
were probably being entertained by Slide Show Magician. Slide Show
Magician provides the means to produce audiovisual programs easily on a disk.
You can take any image that you can access on the Mac screen, enter it into
a MacPaint file, and then link it to other images in controlled, timed sequences-just
like a slide show.
With sound digitizing now a simple, inexpensive reality,
computer voice recognition is "more than halfway there."
Creating and manipulating digital sound with Natural Sound is in many ways
similar to that method of using SoundCap, and the same principles apply. Instead
of a single screen, Natural Sound uses four, based on the same formats as
those that underlie Slide Show Magician. Edit Sound Files shows the recorded
sound along a horizontal, scrollable window with location numbers at the bottom
of the screen (see figure 4). Level bars at each increment
can raise or lower the volume of the sound at that
segment. You initiate recording commands by clicking buttons, and the recording
levels of the incoming sound are controlled by software, rather than by a
knob.
Natural Sound's mixing-board screen has the sound window at the top, and two
control panels at the left control the tracks (see figure 5).
The Tricks screen has controls that let you manipulate the sound with volume,
reverberation, echo, playback repetition, expansion, and compression (see
figure 6). When you capture sound, open and load files, and mix and
manipulate sound, a gray bar at the bottom-like a thermometer-indicates the
rate of action and the amount that has occurred.
The Macintalk screen hosts Apple Computer's licensed speech-synthesis program. In the foreground window, you type in the lines you want spoken and then
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