Using SoundIndex to transcribe fieldnotes.

 

SoundIndex is software produced by Michel Jacobson at LACITO to archive sound resources (see an example of the outcomes of this project at http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/Archivag/EXEMPLE/STARTe.htm.) I have been using it to transcribe my field tapes. This is not what the software was designed for, and in fact MicNotePad is better at transcribing digitised audio. MicNotePad has the functions of a transcribing machine as you can see from the window below. However, the advantage of using SoundIndex is that you can link your sound and audio while you are transcribing.

MicNotePad window

Other software (for example SoundEdit) lets you label sounds, or mark parts of the audio in some way. The problem with this approach is that the labelling is very labour intensive and there is no way to export your labels from within the software in a way that maintains the links to the audio data.

SoundIndex produces a text file that indexes the relationship between your transcript and your audio file. It looks like this:

You work with a visual image of your sound file and mark the relevant section, then link it to the transcript by selecting the transcript and clicking a button, which enters the link into the index file. I have incorporated keyboard functions (using Keyquencer) to speed the process of adding links.

SoundIndex allows you to convert your labelled file as xml, with the promise of a simple browser interface to your audio and text files. The author provides a Perl script to produce the xml, but I found that it was limited to less than a hundred links between the text and the audio. As my 45 minutes of audio had 346 links I had to cut and paste the output of the Perl script.

 

Pros: Easy to learn, free, clearly written with a particular function in view and clearly addresses that function.
Cons: Some of the functions could be streamlined by providing more key equivalents. Converting the data to xml is not easy, and I have yet to figure out how to use the resulting DTD in an xml browser.
Current version: 1.0.0
Platform: Macintosh (68k and PPC versions)
Application size: 260kb
Suggested minimum RAM: 2Mb
Documentation: Online documentation
Author: Michel Jacobson
Available from: http://www.multimania.com/jacobson/SI/Index.htm

Review by:

Date: April 1999

 

Go back to the The Computer Assisted Language Worker (part two)