Vibration with music beats

[trishul]

hi... do you all think its possible if the phone (any windows mobile 5.0 device) vibrates with the beats when we play a mp3 or audio file on the device? can any program be written for it such that with every audio bass output the phone vibrates simaltaneously so that it gives a nice effect ? just an idea :)

[funkus]

i dont know how phones vibrate these days but last time i checked it was achieved by runnning a very small motor with an off-balance weight to make the vibration.

If thats the same method that they use today then it would probably drain your battery life after an hour of music playing.

Im sure its possible, just probably not wise :P

[oplitic]

i know one of m friends 'candy bar' phones vibrated tot he beat when it rang. that's what I thought of when I first read the post. anyway think that mgiht be possible? it would be a weird program. cause i dont see how t would know the beat.

[NetHead]

I've had a bit of experience with making polyphonic MIDI ringtones.

Nokia phones supported a special function for having the phone vibrate in sync with the ringtone. Essentially, the vibration was just like another instrument in the MIDI file. It had its own channel and responded to a certain note event; essentially, the phone "played" the vibration just as it did the rest of the "real" instruments.

In order for this to work, the ringtone had to be a properly-formatted Scalable Polyphony MIDI (SP-MIDI file), and the author had to have actually created a vibration track for the song.

As far as I know, our Windows Mobile devices don't support this format. They do support MIDI files, but not SP-MIDI. As SP-MIDI is somewhat backwards compatible with MIDI (it's really just an extension), the melodic instruments would play. However, the vibration track may be ignored, or it may even be rendered as a normal instrument depending on how it interprets the file's initialization messages (really nothing more than System Exclusive messages).

[hanmin]

Well, certainly using the MIDI way would be much easier and, file smaller in size. However, still, theoretically, it is possible with any music format, depending on the implementation. E.g. If you would like to have the ring tone to be vibrating with the deep base, you would just get the signal, do a FFT, and get the sound spectrum (those things you get from a graphical equalizer withs bars jumping around?). If you were to use your PC's WMP, you can get the sound spectrum by choosing the visualization to 'bar' (I think). Bars at one of the ends (usually the left) reflects the base sounds. If there could be a vibrate-controlling-mech that reads these bars, you can switch the vibrating on/off if these bars exceed a certain height.