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The Hall of Science had a sound booth that lets you change the
pitch/speed of your voice.  It used some sort of hardware digital signal
processor. It worked OK, but never really thrilled me, since it was kind
of a black box. Nowadays it would make more sense to do it in software,
and Max MSP is probably the way to go.  There are lots of good Max MSP
users out there, check your local university music department.  If you
can't find a name let me know and I can dig up a couple of names for
you.

The Hall also has a very successful station that displays a kind of
statistical output of where the energy in a sound is.  You make a sound
into a mic and a scrolling display shows the distribution of frequencies
of the sound.  So if you whistle, you see a concentration around the
fundamental frequency of the whistle (shown as a brighter part of the
spectrum), whereas if you sneeze you see a more spread out spectrum.  It
really works well, and if you would like more info I can put you in
touch with the people who maintain it etc.

As far as garage band and all that (live, acid, soundtrack, etc), those
could work well in a workshop setting (we are planning those workshops
now), but I don't see how to use them on the exhibit floor.

I would also recommend you look at a piece of software called Amadeus,
very elegant and inexpensive (30 bucks) audio editor, display, and
processing.  Audacity is good too, tho a bit less polished.

Eric Siegel
Director of Planning
   & Program Development
Connections Project Director
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Queens, NY 11368
[log in to unmask]
www.nyscience.org

> > Hello everyone!
> > One of our upcoming projects is creating a sound booth area where
> > people can experiment with sounds.  Specifically, we wanted
> to create
> > an area where people could either utilize a keyboard or
> record their
> > voice.  Then play with the speed of those sounds and maybe
> even alter
> > the wave forms. As such, I am looking for what people consider the
> > most successful exhibits in this vein. More specific questions are:
> > Does anyone know of software packages that do this in a
> user friendly way,
> > or that can be modified with overlays to do this?  any
> items I should
> > avoid?
> > Recommendations for keyboards to use in conjunction with this?
> >
> > Thank you in advance for your ideas!
> >
> > William Katzman                    "
> > Director of Exhibits               "
> > Catawba Science Center
>
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