Homework 7 - Using Sound
Due: See Schedule

Singing "Los Pollitos Dicen" by Nancy Hall and Jill Syverson-Stork.

In this assignment you are asked to create a one-screen director application similar to the ones typically used in kids' CD-ROMs. In your application, the computer "sings" or "reads" aloud a verse from the book Los pollitos dicen to the user, highlighting (animating) synchronously the appropriate words and the appropriate notes (when present). When the reading is over, the user has the option of clicking on a word and hearing again the word's pronounciation.

To get a feeling of what you should be producing, take a look at these sample implementations:

• Caballito Blanco, by Agnes Chang
• Un Elephante, by Chloe Fan
• La Panaderita, by Joan Huang

To start, you are assigned one verse of a song from the book attached to the back of this handout. A copy of the book is left in SCI-160A for your reference.You should scan the appropriate color page to use it in your song. The songs are all saved in mp3 format in the directory LosPollitosAudio. Download the appropriate song, extract the portion that corresponds to your assigned verse, and insert cues at the audio signals corresponding to the verse's words. (Important: Keep the marks over the spanish letters!) Now you are ready to do the word animation.

One way to implement this homework (there are several other ways, of course, use whatever seems more intuitive to you) is to have two "sections": One that plays the whole sequence with the right timing over a number of frames; the other that loops within a single frame and, when a word is clicked, it hilites the word and plays the sound portion.

To hilite the word you can use a command that would make a hilited image of the word visible and then invisible. To play a sound piece you could use the sound().play() command. For example, the PianoCue.aiff file used in the sound synchronization example has 2 cues. You can tell Director to play the portion between the two cues by executing

sound(1).play([
#member:member("PianoCue"),
#startTime:member("PianoCue").cuePointTimes[1],
#endTime:member("PianoCue").cuePointTimes[2]
])

For your text, you can use the font used in the book, or select another font that matches better the application you are creating. Think of your intended audience to help you select the appropriate font type and font size.

Name your file name-poem.dir where name is your puma account name and poem is the title of your assigned poem (no spaces in the filename!), and save it, along with the published html and dcr files inside a directory named hw7 in your home cs215 directory.