As part of our work on the Spoken Word project we have developed a web-basd audio annotation tool as part of the Project Pad collaborative system. Audio annotation helps students analize and organize their notes about spoken word materials and lets students and scholars share their obversations with others.

Our audio annotation tool can be used to play and annotate MP3 clips playing directly through the interface or may control a Real Player elsewhere on the page. Using the external player a user can annotate both audio and video timelines.

Above is a screen shot of the audio annotation tool. Users play a clip with the Play / Pause / Stop controls on the right end of the lower bar. The user may also set playback to start at a specified time by clicking or dragging on the timeline above the scroll bar. The red indicator shows the playback time. The scroll bar is used to control the segment of the timeline displayed by the interface. Attached notes scroll with the timeline.

The zoom buttons (In / Out on the left end of the lower bar) control the time scale. Users can halve or double the displayed time interval by clicking on these buttons. The scroll bar handle shows the size of the displayed interval in relation to the duration of the audio clip.

The user may add a note to the timeline by clicking the Add Note button. The new note is initially positioned over the current playback indicator. The user can position the note (change the start time) by dragging the bar at the top of the note or by dragging the left end of the interval mark (the line and arrows under the note.) The user can set the duration of the note by dragging the right end of the interval mark. As the user drags these the software displays the start time and/or duration is hh:mm:ss.s format (leaving out any unneeded parts of this, for example one minute, twelve point one seconds is displayed as "1:12.1".

The user can play the audio associated with the note by clicking on the speaker button at the bottom of the note. The user can change the size of the note (independent of the interval position and duration) by dragging the handle at the lower right corner and may set the color of a note using the color buttons in the lower left corner.

The audio annotation tool, like other Project Pad clients, relays changes to the server the moment they are made. Any change is immediately visible to other users who are looking at the same region of the timeline. This makes it possible for several users at add notes to a single timeline at the same time. Each will see the other's changes right as they are made. Not yet implemented, but on out list is a feature would separate "layers" of notes added by each user.

An additional tool is in development that will provide fine-grained coding and transcript synchronization for use in spoken word research.