Aural media files and their inclusion in your pages involve several components. Components or properties may be related to controlling or on the aesthetic aspect of sound or voice as the case may be. This article will cover the stress, voice-family and volume properties as indicated in the title. The volume property is one of the most important components of sound file and an example on how to specify volume is shown at the latter portion of this article.

Stress property

This property tells the height of “local peaks” in the intonation contour of a voice. This property tells the player which part of a word or sentence should be given more emphasis or stress. Usually, the level of importance of contents as compared to others determines the level of stress allotted to such contents. English is a stressed language, and different parts of a sentence are assigned primary, secondary, or tertiary stress. The possible values are:

• number: A value, between ‘0′ and ‘100′. The meaning of values depends on the language being spoken. For example, a level of ‘50′ for a standard, English-speaking male voice (average pitch = 122Hz), speaking with normal intonation and emphasis would have a different meaning than ‘50′ for an Italian voice.

Voice-family property

The value is a comma-separated, prioritized list of voice family names. It can have following values:
• generic-voice : Values are voice families. Possible values are ‘male’, ‘female’, and ‘child’.
• specific-voice: Values are specific instances (e.g., comedian, trinoids, carlos, lani).

Example:

<style tyle=”text/css”><!–
h1 { voice-family: announcer, male }
p.part.romeo { voice-family: romeo, male }
p.part.juliet { voice-family: juliet, female }
–> </style>

The volume property

Volume refers to the median volume of the voice. This property refers to the degree loudness of a syllable, word or phrase as compared to others. It can have following values:

• numbers: Any number between ‘0′ and ‘100′. ‘0′ represents the minimum audible volume level and 100 corresponds to the maximum comfortable level.
• percentage: These values are calculated relative to the inherited value, and are then clipped to the range ‘0′ to ‘100′.
• silent: No sound at all. The value ‘0′ does not mean the same as ’silent’.
• x-soft: Same as ‘0′.
• soft: Same as ‘25′.
• medium: Same as ‘50′.
• loud: Same as ‘75′.
• x-loud: Same as ‘100′.

Example:

<style tyle=”text/css”>
<!–
P.goat { volume: x-soft }
–>
</style>

Take note that paragraphs with class goat will be very soft.
For more comprehensive discussion on aural media files, please visit, http://www.cssdog.com/css_aural_media.html.

Tags: Aural media: stress, voice-family and volume properties