大象传媒

This week the team completed another office move. Oddly, I'm writing this week's weeknotes from the very same desk I first sat at upon joining the 大象传媒 three years ago. It's easy to say that things move slowly, easy that is until you read this week's action-packed project news round-up!

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This week's featured project is ABC-IP, a two year collaborative research project, part funded by the , examining ways to automatically link together different sources of metadata around large video and audio collections.

One particularly interesting dataset we have access to is the entire World Service audio archive. This spans several decades, and consists of about 26,000 hours (three years in total) of audio content.

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This week Sean, Dan and Chris Lowis have been busy preparing for next week's European Broadcasting Union . Following our work on the RadioTAG specification and its success last year at the Radio Academy Awards there is considerable interest in the broadcasting community about what RadioTAG can do for listeners and broadcasters, and how engineers can go about working with and contributing to this new standard for radio interactivity.

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Welcome to issue 94 of our team's weeknotes. 94, of course, is the atomic number of Plutonium, but also the identifier of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's form for which first question has had me pondering the meaning of 鈥渕oral turpitude鈥� for the past ten years or so.

This week's featured project is a 13-partner EU-funded research project about the future of Web and TV, which came to a formal end this week after three years. It involved collaborations with other broadcasters, universities, and small and large companies in Europe and Korea.听

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Following our binaural experiment using听"Nine Lessons and Carols" at Christmas听we are now inviting you to participate in a second experiment, this time using the radio drama "Private Peaceful".

To find out more and to take part please follow听this link.

The video below provides a brief introduction to what binaural is and how it works, there are also some FAQs about binaural and surround sound here.

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What follows is a brief overview of the results of the binaural experiment we conducted over Christmas.听

We used measurements of three peoples' heads in our listening room using the process described in the video above. Each person was measured with two different sets of headphones, hence the creation of 6 different versions of the service. These versions were made available from the 大象传媒 Radio 3 blog [link] over the Christmas period and listeners were invited to respond to a short survey about their listening experience.

About 200 people took part in the questionnaire. There was a mixture of ages, but majority of respondents were male. Most were people who care about sound quality, 21% having a 5.1 surround setup, and 43% willing to spend over 拢100 on a pair of headphones.

It felt like I was at the event

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As we expected there was no 鈥榦ne size fits all鈥� solution. However, the responses were very positive with most people saying their preferred version sounded spacious, clear or that sources were easily locatable. 60% of the respondents agreed that their preferred version of the service sounded like they were at the event, 87% agreed that their preferred version sounded spacious.

It sounded spacious

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These results are illuminating but there is still much to learn. A number of respondents commented that the effectiveness of the binaural varied depending on where they were listening, or even whether their eyes were opened or closed. The radio drama experiment we are conducting is intended to explore some of these issues.

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In our previous post on implementing startOffsetTime in HTML5, we mentioned that Firefox and Chrome do not agree on a common interpretation of the currentTime attribute. This post expands on that point to explain in detail what the differences are (and why we think Firefox is right).

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