The tutor shares some discoveries he made while producing a sound file.

 
In my Feb 2 post I mentioned that the bell (‘\a’) is apparently disabled in my flavour of Ubuntu (14.04). Yet, I want a bell-like sound for an upcoming experiment.

Today, I decided to create a little “bell sound” file which will be played by Perl’s exec function. (Once again: my Feb 2 post for details.)

From man aplay I learned about the arecord function. From the terminal I keyed in

arecord sounds/beep0.wav

then the terminal would message back that recording had started. I’d make the “bell” noise for around ten seconds, then kill the process with Ctrl+c. Next I’d key in

aplay sounds/beep0.wav

to hear the result.

While the laptop had a built-in microphone, I also had two old headsets that each had one. The jack one didn’t work, but the USB one did, and conveyed a nice clear recording.

To make the actual sound, I didn’t have a bell. I settled on clinking a spoon against a large coffee cup.

Everything seemed to work out fine; I’ll share the implementation soon:)

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.