There’s something new on the horizon that anyone involved in audio should be interested in and it’s called Hyperaudio.
Hyperaudio is a way to take audio to another level by integrating some common sense things that haven’t been possible until now, like search, subtitles, versions and translations, and all sorts of additional text info.
In other words, it’s a way of adding into audio all the features that we’ve been using with hypertext for years.
All this is now made possible in the new HTML5 platform that is thankfully replacing Flash as the media platform of choice on the Web.
This is a technology in its infancy, but it holds much promise.
Those that think that Hyperaudio will be the next big thing (maybe only A big thing), hope that it will:
—make audio searchable
—make audio linkable
—make audio navigable
—dynamically generate audio
—convert speech to text
—represent audio visually
OK, some of these we can do already, but require a separate app to do so. The hope is that this will all be built into HTML5 at some point.
An early example of how it works has been done by WNYC’s famous RadioLab program (the link to the example is presently down—we will provide it as soon as it is restored).
Remember, you heard about it here first!
Bobby Owsinski is an author, producer, music industry veteran and technical consultant who has written numerous books covering all aspects of audio recording. For more information be sure to check out his website and blog.
