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Keep Ruby Weird 2018 - Cats, The Musical! Algorithmic Song Meow-ification by Beth Haubert Beth is a software engineer at Flywheel, a web infrastructure startup in Omaha, Nebraska. She’s also a former airborne cryptologic linguist for the US Air Force, fluent in Mandarin. Things you can ask her about include Ruby, cats, board games, BSG, karaoke, and building applications that convert songs into auto-tuned cat meows. Things she’ll have to kill you if you ask her about: the airborne linguist part. Also, she likes to make emojis look like they’re farting.
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In her talk "Cats, The Musical! Algorithmic Song Meow-ification" at the Keep Ruby Weird 2018 conference, Beth Haubert, a software engineer, discusses the whimsical process of transforming songs into cat meows through her application, Meow Fire. She begins by expressing her excitement for the opportunity to present at the conference and introduces her background, including her recent move from Omaha to San Francisco where she will work at Thoughtbot. Key points of her presentation include: - **Introduction to Meow Fire**: Beth explains how her application takes a song's audio file and outputs it with meows instead of vocals. - **Challenges Faced**: She identifies three major challenges in creating the application: extracting the melody from a song, adjusting the lengths of the meows to match the melody, and assembling a comprehensive meow library that covers the necessary musical ranges. - **Technical Decisions**: - For melody extraction, Beth initially relied on an external tool rather than creating her own algorithm. - To ensure note lengths matched, she utilized 'ffmpeg' to modify the duration of the meow files. - She encountered the limitation of her meow library and decided to expand it by exploring online resources and ultimately recording her own meows. - **Iterative Development**: Through experimentation, Beth shifted from a basic melody extractor to robust tools like Melodia, indicating her adjustments based on real-world performance across different music genres. - **Future Directions**: She shares her aspirations for further improvements to Meow Fire, including a client-side interface and possibly a reverse melody analyzer akin to Shazam. Beth closes her presentation by inviting the audience to connect with her on Twitter and shares that they can find her slides on Speaker Deck. She emphasizes the playful nature of her project while highlighting the technical challenges of music processing and software development, culminating in her quirky yet technical approach to meowing musical themes as a creative endeavor.
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