Sound, time and platform issues

[anton muhin]

Hello everybody!

I need advice and expertise of the community for the following problem.

I'm going to make a psycholinguistic experiment. In this experiment the
auditor is asked to listen to some text and to press the button when
some event occurs. I need to find out reaction time on different inputs
and, therefore, I need 1) rather accurate (or, at least, constantly
biased) estimates for the moment the button was pressed, and 2)
"real-time" sound playing.

Googling finds out several Python toolkits for dealing with sound, but
they are for Linux, not Windows.

Therefore questions:
1. Does anybody know about Python tools that might help to solve the
problem above for Windows?
2. Is there any C/C++ solution? (in this case I might provide Python
bindings).
3. If there is no Windows solution, what is the simplest way to use
Linux? I have a notebook and rather limited knowledge of Linux. I don't
want to install Linux on the notebook---harddrive is somewhat limited.
However, I heard that there are some variants of *nix that needs only
boot-CD. Does anybody have experience with systems like these?

Sorry for a bunch of questions and thank you in advance.

With best regards,
anton.

[Tobias Pfeiffer]

Hi!

anton muhin <an********************************@rambler.ru> wrote in
news:bk**********@news.peterlink.ru:

3. If there is no Windows solution, what is the simplest way to use
Linux? I have a notebook and rather limited knowledge of Linux. I
don't want to install Linux on the notebook---harddrive is somewhat
limited. However, I heard that there are some variants of *nix that
needs only boot-CD. Does anybody have experience with systems like
these?

Yuz. A little bit, at least. There's two alternatives I know of.
1. Knoppix. There you have a completely free system, basing on Debian
Linux, that boots from CD-ROM and gives you a complete Linux system,
including KDE (graphical user interface) and all the stuff you would need
to write python. But since it won't change your machine at all, you will
probably have to reinstall the desired sound modules at every reboot and
have all of your files stored on your harddisk, or all will be lost.
Normally, you would find information about Knoppix at
www.knopper.net/knoppix, but this site is closed right now due to the
Software Patent Issue of the European Union.
2. SuSE Linux Live-Eval (or something like that). I never tried that, but
this is supposed to be a "Test-Linux" from the german linux distributor
SuSE that is freely available.
(http://www.suse.de/us/private/downlo..._eval_int.html)

Bye
Tobias

[anton muhin]

Tobias Pfeiffer wrote:

Hi!

anton muhin <an********************************@rambler.ru> wrote in
news:bk**********@news.peterlink.ru:

3. If there is no Windows solution, what is the simplest way to use
Linux? I have a notebook and rather limited knowledge of Linux. I
don't want to install Linux on the notebook---harddrive is somewhat
limited. However, I heard that there are some variants of *nix that
needs only boot-CD. Does anybody have experience with systems like
these?

Yuz. A little bit, at least. There's two alternatives I know of.

[skipped] Bye
Tobias

Thanks a lot.
anton.

[Thomas Heller]

anton muhin <an********************************@rambler.ru> writes:

Hello everybody!

I need advice and expertise of the community for the following problem.

I'm going to make a psycholinguistic experiment. In this experiment
the auditor is asked to listen to some text and to press the button
when some event occurs. I need to find out reaction time on different
inputs and, therefore, I need 1) rather accurate (or, at least,
constantly biased) estimates for the moment the button was pressed,
and 2) "real-time" sound playing.

Googling finds out several Python toolkits for dealing with sound, but
they are for Linux, not Windows.

Therefore questions:
1. Does anybody know about Python tools that might help to solve the
problem above for Windows?

The winsound module included with Python? It allows playing wav files.
And time.clock() will provide accurate timing, AFAIK.

Thomas

[Gary Richardson]

[snip]

Anton,

You might take a look at: http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/

Gary Richardson

[anton muhin]

anton muhin wrote:

[skipped]

thank you everybody for input,
anton.