I recently discovered a ruby gem that acts as a wrapper for the Mac Core Audio API (it’s written in C) and decided to play around with it. I started by using an example from the gem’s github repo and just tinkered until I ended up with something cool. You can find that repo here.

A few weeks ago I built a single purpose website for my school displaying whether or not it was open or closed at the time. A lot of people like to arrive early and it was becoming a nuisance to have to text the instructors every morning, so I thought a website might make it easier. The site was a hit, but I thought it could get better. Avi, the instructor, and I thought it would be cool if we could automate the status update by using sound to detect whether or not people were in the room. Here is the script that I wrote.

First, I had to require the coreaudio, debugger, and logger gem. I also required the mechanize gem for sending a POST request to the website. I set the variable dev to the default audio input device (the internal microphone on my mac) and then set the variable buf to the buffer size I thought appropriate. Here is a good explanation of buffer inputs if you’re unfamiliar with them.

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require "coreaudio"
require 'debugger'
require 'mechanize'
require 'logger'

dev = CoreAudio.default_input_device
buf = dev.input_buffer(1024)

Next, I kept the output from the example the same so that when it is going through the loop I’m about to set it will start by printing out “RECORDING…”. I then set x = 0 for the while loop.

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$stdout.print "RECORDING..."
$stdout.flush
x = 0

I instantiate a new array called level, which will keep track of all the times the input records over a certain volume. Later, I will use this array to set my baseline.

Next, I call buf.start to begin recording. Then I set a while loop to run for a specific amount of time and to push any sound levels above 500 into the “level” array that I created earlier. After the loop, I stop the recording by calling buf.stop

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level = []

buf.start
while x < 500
  w = buf.read(1024)
  puts "still recording #{x}"
  level << w[0] if w[0] if w[0] > 500 || w[0] < -500
  x += 1
end
buf.stop

Now that we have our array full of of instances and volume levels above the 500 that I specified, we are going to cycle through them and get the sum of the array. This sum is going to be my measurement for whether or not students are in the room.

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a = 0
level.each do |sound|
a += sound
end

As you can see, It’s pretty easy (and fun) to use the CoreAudio gem. You can do a lot of things with this gem if you choose to, so in the next coming weeks I will be posting more cool examples for you to play around with.

COMING SOON – An article on using mechanize to easily send HTTP requests