Home Automation Halloween?

By Rick LaBanca

I used this setup last year and it wasn't even planned well! But it turned out to be a hit! Let some of the little ones push a button or two (or talk into the mic....).

I have a sound blaster live card, microphone, homeseer and good speakers. With this combo, and a palm pad x10 remote, you're all set to go.

First, the Sound Blaster Lives (and other newer sound cards) let you play sounds simultaneously. That's probably a given, but to me it's still a big deal, don't ask me why. The old cards never did that!

First, I play mellow spooky music in WinAmp, continuously. My odd choice of music is... the sound track from HomeWorld! This game has very mellow music in it, but played by itself has a nice ominous feel. I don't see the mp3 files posted any more, and I can't really post them, but you'll find something good.

Second, set your palm and a receiver to a new housecode just for the night. Then add up to 32 seer events (buttons 1-8, 9-16 on/off for each) with just a .wav spooky sound for the action. Check these yahoo listed pages.

Now you can play the music, and from anywhere, trigger whatever effect you want right over the music. It's lots of fun.

Now for the frosting. The sblive has a utility to do effect processing. I get to it from AudioHQ, the Environmental Audio icon. Start with the "arena" setting for big echo, and turn that up. Turn your mic on in the mixer and make sure it's selected as the recording source (the red slider).

This is the screen, not all the settings show, use my file as a starting point.

Next add an effect of pitch shift, and make the microphone use that, for that special satanic sound. This is very hard to explain in the correct detail, so here is the settings file that you can load into your system, if you have liveware 2. If that doesn't work, post a message in the forum, we'll figure it out.

So now what you have are sound triggers, music, mic input with that swell demonic voice, all being sent through heavy echo. It works much better that I'm describing it, give it a try!

If you have outside sensors, hook a sound up to those to for a practical chime as they approach.

Actually, setting the sound triggers up on your current house codes would make for an interesting environment...

Rick