Hello,
You could technically force recordings to all be 3000ms, for example by chopping them if necessary, or maybe even by writing a code optimized well enough that it would practically always produce a 3000ms audio file on most if not all configurations, but I don’t think that is feasible within PennController as it is currently written: there are just too many computational steps going on around and in parallel to the recording process
Even if the recordings are elicited through the same template within one trial block, you have no guarantee that the cycles will always align perfectly. Say your browser notifies your Timer elements every 20ms. What if one Timer element for one trials starts 10ms after the start of a cycle, but the same Timer element for the next trial starts 15ms after the start of a cycle? You’ll have a 5ms difference. And that’s assuming that performance is constant throughout the experiment, which is an unreasonable assumption. Performance will vary depending on what tasks the browser (and the OS more generally) processes in parallel, and even the simple fact that as the experiment progresses, the browser needs to maintain audio recordings in cache can impact performance (although, admittedly, it shouldn’t have a noticeable impact under normal circumstances)
That being said, since the script of your experiment calls log on all the relevant elements in the trial, you can get a pretty good idea of when the various trial events happen wrt the audio recording. The Start timestamp of the MediaRecorder will very closely coincide with position 0 of your audio recording (maybe a few ms off, but it’s unlikely it would reach 10ms, unless the browser is lacking processing power). Then the Print timestamp of the “training_pic” Image element will inform you when the image becomes visible on the page, so subtracting the Start timestamp of the MediaRecorder from it will give you a very good approximation of how many milliseconds in the audio recording that event took place. Same thing for the “fixcross_training” Image element
At the end of the day, as it is currently written, PennController won’t provide you with the means to conduct analyses of events wrt audio recordings with a precision to the millisecond. For most psycho-linguistic questions, a precision to the centisecond is usually sufficient, but I have to concede that this is a limitation of PennController at the moment
Jeremy