The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph : Roadmap

Roadmap of the project's current and future developments (as of August 2008)

Priority ranges from 0 to 5, 5 being the highest priority.
A delay of 0 means the feature is as of now being worked on, a delay of 1 means you can expect to see the feature in a couple of months, a delay of 5 means a 1 to 3 year delay, depending on the amount of prior research and work required, as well as the task's priority.

Please note that this list is only there to give you a global idea of where this project is headed and doesn't list every feature that will be implemented. However if there's a feature you would like to see on this list feel free to e-mail me about it.

Priority Delay

Combinatory Multi-Resolution Analysis
             A super-resolution technique. Analyses the same sound many times with different settings and combines the spectrograms into one which would contain all the details previously available and attain a time-frequency resolution never reached before and mistakenly believed by some to be theoretically unattainable.
5 0

Faster improved noise synthesis (done in Photosounder 1.0)
             Revamping noise synthesis and in the process making it a few times faster.
5 0

Filtering mode (coming up in Photosounder 1.4)
             Resynthesis mode based on an original sound and its user-modified spectrogram. Would allow to edit a sound to a certain extent without any loss of quality in the result and thus provide new possibilities by allowing the use of new sound processing techniques with practically perfect quality results.
4 1

Combinatory Multi-Angle/Resolution Analysis
             A more advanced super-resolution technique. Based on the same principle as the CMRA technique (see above), except using a Discrete Fractional Cosine Transform (or similar) to rotate the sound in the time-frequency plan and thus access to details out of reach from the CMRA technique, by improving tremendously the diagonal resolution. I have every reason to believe that this technique will allow us to represent every single feature that makes up a sound into an image, which will solve countless problems in the field of signal processing caused by the uncertainity principle.
4 2

Memory-limited operation mode
             A modification to the ARSS that would allow it to process extremely long sounds without consuming excessive amounts of RAM in order to avoid wasting time on swapping or even running out of memory.
2 3

Real-time operation mode
             A modification of the processing algorithms somewhat similar to the memory-limited operation mode which would allow the ARSS to process sound in real-time.
2 4

Making a library out of the ARSS
             Adapting the ARSS' code into becoming a library so that its processing functions could simply be called from another program. This would ease the creation of spin-off projects by third parties or even to be used as a sound library by a video game or multimedia application and thus allow advanced sound effects or synthesis in real-time. We can easily imagine a game which would generate spectrograms and play them on-the-fly, or a multimedia player that would use the ARSS' functions to slow down or speed up sounds in real-time.
3 4

Basic Graphical User Interface (done in Photosounder 1.0)
             A basic graphical front-end to do everything that can be done in command-line. I as of now don't have much plans for it, so despite how important it might be to some people don't hold your breath, although I do have plans for a more advanced GUI (see below) which in its early stage may or may not be a satisfying basic GUI. Third party contributions are welcome.
2 5

Support for various other file formats (MP3, OGG, PNG, JPEG) (done in Photosounder 1.0-1.3)
             Thanks to the scripting capabilities of the ARSS I am currently working on scripts that provide seamless support for these popular formats. Also in order to keep the number of dependancies down I have no immediate plans to implement native support in the program.
2 0/5

Advanced GUI (dedicated mouse/touchscreen-using spectrogram editing program) (done in Photosounder 1.0)
             A Photoshop-like program which would contain all the tools needed to create or edit spectrograms. The ultimate goal being to obtain a fully-featured spectrogram-centric sound studio, a sort of Photoshop of sound if you will, except with well suited tools that I consider necessary for such tasks that are not present in regular general purpose image-editing programs.
3 5

	Priority	Delay
Combinatory Multi-Resolution Analysis A super-resolution technique. Analyses the same sound many times with different settings and combines the spectrograms into one which would contain all the details previously available and attain a time-frequency resolution never reached before and mistakenly believed by some to be theoretically unattainable.	5	0
Faster improved noise synthesis (done in Photosounder 1.0) Revamping noise synthesis and in the process making it a few times faster.	5	0
Filtering mode (coming up in Photosounder 1.4) Resynthesis mode based on an original sound and its user-modified spectrogram. Would allow to edit a sound to a certain extent without any loss of quality in the result and thus provide new possibilities by allowing the use of new sound processing techniques with practically perfect quality results.	4	1
Combinatory Multi-Angle/Resolution Analysis A more advanced super-resolution technique. Based on the same principle as the CMRA technique (see above), except using a Discrete Fractional Cosine Transform (or similar) to rotate the sound in the time-frequency plan and thus access to details out of reach from the CMRA technique, by improving tremendously the diagonal resolution. I have every reason to believe that this technique will allow us to represent every single feature that makes up a sound into an image, which will solve countless problems in the field of signal processing caused by the uncertainity principle.	4	2
Memory-limited operation mode A modification to the ARSS that would allow it to process extremely long sounds without consuming excessive amounts of RAM in order to avoid wasting time on swapping or even running out of memory.	2	3
Real-time operation mode A modification of the processing algorithms somewhat similar to the memory-limited operation mode which would allow the ARSS to process sound in real-time.	2	4
Making a library out of the ARSS Adapting the ARSS' code into becoming a library so that its processing functions could simply be called from another program. This would ease the creation of spin-off projects by third parties or even to be used as a sound library by a video game or multimedia application and thus allow advanced sound effects or synthesis in real-time. We can easily imagine a game which would generate spectrograms and play them on-the-fly, or a multimedia player that would use the ARSS' functions to slow down or speed up sounds in real-time.	3	4
Basic Graphical User Interface (done in Photosounder 1.0) A basic graphical front-end to do everything that can be done in command-line. I as of now don't have much plans for it, so despite how important it might be to some people don't hold your breath, although I do have plans for a more advanced GUI (see below) which in its early stage may or may not be a satisfying basic GUI. Third party contributions are welcome.	2	5
Support for various other file formats (MP3, OGG, PNG, JPEG) (done in Photosounder 1.0-1.3) Thanks to the scripting capabilities of the ARSS I am currently working on scripts that provide seamless support for these popular formats. Also in order to keep the number of dependancies down I have no immediate plans to implement native support in the program.	2	0/5
Advanced GUI (dedicated mouse/touchscreen-using spectrogram editing program) (done in Photosounder 1.0) A Photoshop-like program which would contain all the tools needed to create or edit spectrograms. The ultimate goal being to obtain a fully-featured spectrogram-centric sound studio, a sort of Photoshop of sound if you will, except with well suited tools that I consider necessary for such tasks that are not present in regular general purpose image-editing programs.	3	5