Sampling Short Sequences From Long MP3 Recordings?

mehl writes "I am a professor for social psychology at the University of Arizona and I am looking for help with finding / developing a special program. In my research, I ask participants to carry around a digital voice recorder while they go about their normal lives. The voice recorder then tracks the ambient sounds in their environments and produces an 'acoustic log' of a person's day. We then use these ambient sound recordings as source data for various person perception studies. For privacy reasons, we are required to sample brief snippets of ambient sounds instead of recording an entire day continuously ('Big Brother is listening to you...'). So far, we have achieved this by modifying the hardware of a digital voice recorder (triggering it with an external microchip). With the high turn-over in player models, however, this strategy has turned out to be short-sighted (every half a year we have to build a new chip). I am thinking about switching strategy, recording continuously in the first place (no problem with the current generation of flash memory) and then sampling (random) snippets after the fact from the continous recordings. Does anybody know of an existing program that can randomly (or pseudo-randomly; e.g., 30 sec every 10 min) and automatically sample short sequences from a day-long (18 hours) mp3 recording? What would it entail to develop such a program (for Windows)?."

Comments

Re:Still big brother

[schodackwm]

Amen....

the OP said as much

For privacy reasons, we are required to sample brief snippets of ambient sounds instead of recording an entire day continuously ('Big Brother is listening to you...').

compare, for example, to the latest (federal) medical privacy rules, www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/

what batteries do you use?

[mantera]

You ask a person to carry an 18 hour voice recorder... I'm just curious what batteries you use.

A few things.

[g0bshiTe]

To solve your problem(s) here are a few suggestions.
You are at University.
Is there a music lab?
Is there a Computer Science dept?
Is there an electronics dept?
If you can answer yes to 3 of these question most of your problems can solve themselves.
Talk to the Deans of those departments, explain your needs and suggest that the students in these depts may participate in the construction of what you need for their labs or projects.
I'm sure you would have students banging down the door to work on a project.
My point is, use what you have available.


I read a few posts down that someone "couldn't handle, dropped out of college because of professors like this". Well to me this sounds like a lesson with a deeper meaning than just some sort of useless project.
Perhaps it is an effort to show how even the simplest of experiments present difficult logistical problems.