Web Audio Lab (WAL) by Slava Paperno is an online application that can be used with several modern browsers on Windows, Mac OS, Chrome OS, and Linux computers. It helps a language learner perform a variety of steps that would have been more cumbersome, or even impossible, without it. The core event in using a WAL language exercise is recording your performance and making the sound recordings and other data accessible to your teacher, who may be on your campus or on the other side of the planet.
Most recent changes
In 2020-2021, WAL development was focused on streamlining the
authoring process. It is now possible to create a new page by cloning
and then editing an existing one, and work is underway to compile
a library of sample pages to choose from.
Several new features were added in 2018-2020 thanks to the active participation of Yu Yu Khaing, Cornell's teacher of Burmese. The character drawing functions, the word builder, and the sentence builder, among others, were developed to implement her ideas while she contributed her time and talent designing and refining them. Next, similar exercises were created for students of Chinese, and are now being added to Japanese WAL courses.
Waveform navigation for video
Since the summer of 1917, WAL exercises that display video clips
offer a visual image of the soundtrack (a waveform) for navigation. The student
can quickly define regions of particularly interesting or difficult passages
and easily replay them for review. The same easy navigation was
programmed for really long (book chapter size) sound recordings.
This became possible by the appearance
of Wavesurfer Javascript Library by "katspaugh," published under Creative
Commons license.
Insert yourself into the dialog
In the summer of 2017, with Richard Feldman's enthusiasm and
the ideas of a friendly student of Japanese, WAL learned how to offer the student an ability to
insert her/himself into the action by dubbing parts of the dialog in a film clip.
Adding to sound and video
In 2016, to respond to requests from the teachers who wanted to test their students'
comprehension of the sound and video that they study, WAL learned
to present various traditional comprehension questions and pass the answers to the teacher.
Power to the student
In 2016, we programmed an ability for the student to add pages
to the existing WAL exercises and also to send messages to his/her classmates
from the WAL screen.
Recording sound in the browser
Very early on, Mauricio Piacentini, a Brazilian software developer of the highest
standards, programmed for us a library of code to record and
compress sound directly in the web browser using the new features
of HTML5 practically as soon as they appeared.
WAL became airborne
Web Audio Lab became an online application thanks to a grant from Melon
Foundation secured in 2012 by Richard Feldman and others.
Ancient history
Until 2012, WAL was a disc-based application (called "program" in those days)
written by Slava Paperno in what was then called Macromedia Director.
WAL probably would not have happened if Richard Feldman,
director of Cornell's Language Resource Center of many years,
and Slava Paperno, a Russian language teacher, did not win
a Faculty Innovation in Teaching grant from the Distributed Learning Services
of Cornell Information Technologies in 2003-2004.
That was when it all started, and over the years, teachers of Arabic, Bengali,
Burmese, Chinese, French, Hindi,
Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil,
Yoruba, and Zulu, while creating WAL courses in their languages, contributed
to the evolution of this tool. Their ideas, experience, and needs
made Web Audio Lab what it is and will continue to define its future path.
The WAL home page is at https://wal.lrc.cornell.edu.