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RubyConf 2018 - Cats, The Musical! Algorithmic Song Meow-ification by Beth Haubert How are you supposed to sing along with your favorite TV theme song every week if it doesn’t have lyrics? At my house, we “meow” along (loudly). We also code, so I built ‘Meowifier’ to convert any song into a cat’s meows. Join me in this exploration of melody analysis APIs and gratuitous cat gifs.
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In the talk titled 'Cats, The Musical! Algorithmic Song Meow-ification' presented by Beth Haubert at RubyConf 2018, the speaker explores a creative intersection of music, coding, and humor through a project called 'Meowifier,' which converts any song into cat meows. The session opens with an introduction to the speaker's background in software engineering and a playful warning about the lighthearted nature of the talk, which includes poor singing and cat GIFs. Key Points Discussed: - **Introduction to 'Meowifier'**: The application allows users to upload a song and receive its melody transformed into cat meows, highlighting a quirky and entertaining use of technology. - **The Challenge of Melody Extraction**: Haubert explains the complexity of extracting a melody from a polyphonic song, illustrating this with examples of songs that lack lyrics, such as the 'Game of Thrones' theme, which sparked the idea for 'Meowifier.' - **Technical Implementation**: The speaker discusses leveraging existing APIs, particularly Sonic API, to extract melody data. She outlines the critical aspects of handling MIDI data, which includes ensuring correct pitch mapping for playback. - **Duration Matching**: Haubert elaborates on the importance of matching the length of meows to the corresponding notes, explaining how she used FFMPEG to adjust audio files to fit the required lengths for the melody. - **Creating a Collection of Cat Meows**: The development of a custom library of meows across different pitches is detailed, emphasizing the creative process involved in sourcing audio clips and creating a diverse set of meows for different notes. - **Future Expansions**: Looking forward, Haubert expresses interest in developing a reverse melody analyzer to further enhance the functionality of 'Meowifier' by allowing it to recognize songs and convert them into meows automatically. Overall, Beth Haubert's talk is an entertaining blend of technical explanation and humorous anecdotes that showcases how programming can be applied whimsically. She concludes by encouraging further exploration of her project and emphasizes the joy of creating silly, yet technically challenging, applications like 'Meowifier.'
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