Little chattering people and machines

[FJ and G]

Nonrandom chatter would be pretty neat. If you could install speakers around the layout, you could make recordings of people talking and play conversations with the push of a button. That would be a pretty cool future project. The little people would need to be standing or seated, not in the act of walking or running or lifting, as they appear frozen in place. People who are in a stationary pose look much more natural on a layout and their chatter would be much more believable.

Other chatter could come from inside a factory, people unseen. Also, I thought of recording sounds of machineery related to that industry. Could become a while new subhobby.

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(I'm one of the 5% who find the random chattering annoying. The biggest advantage of DCS, for me, was being able to shut it off. Now I'm not against noise. I enjoy the engine sounds, horn, whistle, and the bell (if not run incessantly) but the chatter is so annoying because of its randomness. Also, I'm using a Santa Fe Northern to haul freight and the crew chatter is passenger.)

Dave Vergun

[Big_Boy_4005]

I was thinking of doing some of that kind of stuff with CMRI and the computer. The concept is simple. Have CMRI open a relay to the speakers you want the message to come from, and play a MIDI file. DONE.[swg]

[Anonymous]

Elliot:

Sorry, I think I woke up this morning with my pedantic hat on. It's probably because the weather & my allergies have me feeling miserable.

You want to play a WAV or MP3 file, not a MIDI file, to the speaker. A MIDI file is very much like the paper roll on a player piano -- it isn't a recording of sound so much as it is a recording of musical events. You an play a MIDI file back on a synthesizer, and you can send the same exact MIDI file to another MIDI enabled device, like strobe lighs.

Some electric guitars come equipped with equipment that transforms the notes played into MIDI events, when can then be used to drive a synth and / or lights. The end result is a pretty cool show.

Some synths let you input a pre-recorded digital sound & turn it into musical notes. If you've got this kind of a synth hooked up to a MIDI output port on your computer, then you could play back a MIDI file & get your chatter. But if you're just talking about playing back digital sound, you want to use another format.

Tony

[Big_Boy_4005]

Oops, thanks Tony, that's a little of my ignorance showing, but you got the idea. WAV or MP3 files it is then! Cool concept huh?[swg]

[FJ and G]

Tony, I have oak pollen allergies since I was 33 and it's always bad in April & early May.

Your and Elliot's ideas sound utterly fascinating. To hear the conversations and noise of machinery and equipment from trackside industries, you'd have to scale back the locomotive sounds. Also, there is the question of directional hearing. If you have a big, fat layout, it would seem to be more difficult detecting where the conversations or sounds are coming from. In my case, it would appear to be much simpler, as I'm building a looong, narrow layout.

Also, the CMRI opening a relay; would that be programmed to occur, given a preceding event or would you be able to manually activate the sound sequence; or both, perhaps. Again, this sounds extremely fascinating.

dave

[Anonymous]

i cant figure how the chatter/noises will add to most layout i have ever seen/known. any time a train is running i can hardly hear anything but the engine sounds and the wheel noise of a rolling train. i can appreciate the stuff tony is talking about though...

with a sampling keyboard with a midi interface and a controllor that would accept triggers you could...

1)load all your train sounds as a sample into the keyboard
2)program the controller to play the appropriate sound with the specified trigger
3)use infra-red, relays, toggles, or pushbuttons to "trigger" each sound.

neat idea!

[Anonymous]

David:

The list of allergies I have is longer than my arm (I wear a 34 inch sleeve). Spring & early fall are miserable times for me. I happen to like winter best because it's the one time of year I have the least trouble with the allergies. Usually, I get runny eyes & a few sneezes, but today, it almost feels like I have a cold. Not cool at all.

The program we're working on is in the planning stages. I'm writing minimal code, just enough to get some basic, non-train logic into place for things like saving the data to disk & reading it back in & returning the values of properties.

At any rate, there's currently an object in the program model called a Macro. A macro has a Trigger associated with it and a sequence of Commands. The valid Trigger at this point are going to be TMCC key sequences. It is probably possible to have another type of trigger be an event on the layout, such as a train entering a given block. This is an idea that just occurred to me, so I'll have to think about how to add that to the architecture.

At any rate, the full set of commands hasn't been finalized, but I intend to make it possible to transmit data out to the C/MRI ports. Playing an MP3 or WAV file is something that hadn't occurred to me before, but shouldn't be too hard to incorporate.

However, we need to get this program to crawl before we can make it walk, and to walk before we can make it run. I'm trying to work out some implementation details concerning Visual Basic 6.0 & multitasking.

I also have to spend some time this week & file & generally clean up the huge mess sittign on my desk at home. I have over 6 months of unfiled stuff that I just have to get off of it or I'm going to scream. I'm surprised my wife hasn't screamed about it yet.

Tony

[Big_Boy_4005]

My opinion is that the locomotives should only make locomitive sounds. None of this other crap. Actually it would benefit the train manufacturers, because they could sell seperate sound units for stations and such. I think there are a couple of companies offering seperate free standing sound boxes.

There is an advantage and a disadvantage to my concept. The advantage is unlimited sounds, and files, the disadvantage, only one could be played at a time. But maybe you don't want or need too much going on all at once.

[FJ and G]

Getting the program up and running first is a good idea. Seems that one of the big advantages of computer programing is the ability to modify the codes and add more "bells and whistles" later on. There are all sorts of things that could be programmed. The lights could be dimmed and an outdoor theater (mini-TV w/DVD) could be turned on with a 50s sci-fi movie; a CD with nature noises or a thunderstorm could be turned on. Basically, you could program an entire "Day in the Life."

Your imagination is the only limit. I envy what you are doing. Please DO keep us updated.

dav

[Big_Boy_4005]

Tony, there are a lot of different triggers we can use. We could have event triggers or push buttons or sensor triggers through CMRI. Does anyone know if all of the chatter can be turned off, leaving only the engine sounds.

I hate to say this, but I have 10 engines that I have NEVER played with. Not even a test.

[Big_Boy_4005]

At enterTRAINment we had the room lighting controlled by the computer. 4 different banks of track lights could be mixed to simulate the different times of day. The big problem was that I didn't write the software, I paid someone to do it. He had me over the barrel every time I wanted to make a change. He wrote in assembly language. Never again. Live and learn!

[Anonymous]

Elliot:

You don't get any chatter from a TMCC locomotive unless you send it the command for the chatter. There are basically two sequences: AUX1 + 2 and AUX1 + 7. The first causes the locomotive to play an inaudible radio communication, presumably between members of the train crew. The second causes the locomotive to play a clear recording of a dispatcher giving the train clearance to leave.

Regarding trigger events through C/MRI, all that needs to be done is specify the node ID, port # & which bit(s) to watch. When the system detects the bit(s) in a certain state, it fires off the Macro. From an application perspective (that is, from outside the software), this could be a block occupancy detector, a push button, or even such odd things as a temperature or a light sensor. So long as it can be maped to one or more bits in a C/MRI port, it won't matter.

And, with modern technology & C/MRI, you don't necessarily have to limit yourself to one sound, either. I believe that you can buy digital "dictaphones," that is, hand held recorders that use things like FLASH memory to record sound. Utilizing a C/MRI port and some special purpose circuitry, you could record sounds on one of these things have it played back anywhere.

Heck, if all else fails, comptuers have been used to control cassette players in the past. Why not in this case?

Tony

[Big_Boy_4005]

Back at enterTRAINment we had telephones that visitors could pick up and hear a pre recorded message up to one minute in length. We had 6 groups of phones, each driven by a different chip, and scattered throughout the display. I'm sure that the cost of this technology has come down in price, as it was fairly new back then.

CMRI could ring the phone, and a crew member would pick it up and hear a pre recorded message from the dispatcher (computer). Real train orders!!! The messages could be stored on the chips or as wav files on the computer.

[FJ and G]

Combining computer controls with recording devices could give you the ultimate in audio pleasure. One could take recordings of conversations at Union Station, at friends houses, at industrial complexes, nature sounds such as wind thru pine trees, heck, even the screeching of flanges on curves, and program this into the computer to be played at predetermined intervals or called up on demand.

Making the recordings too would be so much fun. Before PCs were popular, my friends and I used to make our own radio "movies," or skits using simply a tape recorrding and sound effects such as walking down stairs, speaking, breaking glass, and other nifty things. It's amazing what we would do to entertain ourselves before the advent of cable TV and the Internet.

The train orders thing is a good idea as well. I'm sure there are literally thousands of ways to make a layout come to life with sounds; other than the generic, oft-repeated train chatter.

[Anonymous]

Before this project gets a case of "feature creep", let me get something that actually changes signal states! [;)][:D]

There aren't enough hours in the day....

Tony

[fjerome]

z-stuff has a station announcement system that is normally triggered by the train (car with barcode strip underneath) arriving. a good thing is that you can modify the announcements. however, it works for two tracks and my station has three. i am hoping dennis comes out with version that is TMCC controlled.

in a similar vein, i really like the lionel stationsounds diners. i have two. one is the UP 50th anniversary set from last year. unfortunately, the arriving/departing announcements identify it like that! i would rather have it be the City of Portland. i think it would be cool to have a way to modify these sounds.

as to david's background sounds, it seems like a good idea, but i worry about clarity or even the ability to pick up these sounds in a layout as large as mine or as large as david's will be while multiple trains are running (with all their recording sounds and actual physical sounds). not sure it would be worth the effort.