Of course everybody remembers the scene from 2001 when Dave Bowman removes HAL´s memory banks.

While being shut down HAL sings the song ‘daisy’ and his voice continuously pitches down while his ‘mind fades’.

With this little test app you can sing like HAL!

…provided you installed the Flash Player 10.1 beta and have a microphone handy.

Yes 10.1 – as the new year is coming, so is the next subversion step of the flash player, bringing among other features video playback and p2p/streaming enhancements.
The beta2 has been released at the 17th December and brought also the long-awaited debug version.

But aside from the global error handling, the new feature I was looking forward to the most is the access to binary data coming from the microphone.

This will allow to develop a bunch of pretty interesting applications that make use of voice input – like voice recognition for example.

This little demo records data from the mic and plays it with an adjustable speed offset, pitching the sound.

You can download the source here.

Note: to be able to compile the project you need to download the updated “playerglobal.swc“.