Posted on

Team Status report for 9/24

This week finished preparing our Gantt chart, which after the feedback we received from our proposal presentation, was refactored include less work within the first 2 weeks of development. John went out to the piano rooms in the Hall of Arts to gather measurements on the piano we’re planning to work on. Below are some sample images of the measurements he took.

The team met on Friday to discuss the feedback from our presentation. One of the questions in our feedback asked, “Why are you interested in using all 88 keys if you’re replicating speech?”. This was an interesting question, initially we had assumed  we’d need all 88 keys. However, Angela and John noticed that if you look at the Mark Rober video we presented in class, the leftmost 1/4 of the keys on the piano aren’t being played! In order to play music on the piano, yes we might need all 88 keys, but as it turns out, adult speech has a much smaller frequency range.

The voiced speech of a typical adult male will have a fundamental frequency from 85 to 155 Hz, and that of a typical adult female from 165 to 255 Hz [1]. From the recording of Marco’s voice, we can also see that the frequencies that make up his voice might also lie in a much smaller range than that of the 88 keys covered by a piano. So, the original question was “Do we need all 88 keys”, the answer might be no! That is exciting because it means we may be able to look into smaller keyboards (which are also cheaper!).

This question will be investigated and hopefully answered by the end of this following week.

References:

1. Baken, R. J. (2000). Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice, 2nd Edition. London: Taylor and Francis Ltd. (pp. 177), ISBN 1-5659-3869-0.

Posted on

Marco’s Status Report for 9/24

This week I prepared our proposal slides for Wednesday’s presentation with John’s help. I met with John on Tuesday to help prepare before the presentation. After the feedback we received, the team and I met to reshape our project timeline on the Gantt chart. We’ve been contacting suppliers for the solenoids and have started gathering quotes. We’re planning on buying a small batch of parts (5 solenoids, some mosfets, etc.) in order to build the proof of concept physical interface.

Going into next week I will be making some concept drawings for the frame, and building a prototype of the circuit that drives the solenoids. Tomorrow, we will be meeting again to discuss any implementation details we have questions about before we work on our individual parts.

Posted on

Angela’s Status Report for 9/24

The beginning of this week was focussed on preparing the slides and deciding the content of the proposal presentation. On Sunday we met and discussed this, and spent time working on the PowerPoint as well as the Gantt chart.

Unfortunately, I became and still am ill with strep throat, so I wasn’t able to be as productive as I have originally planned. Furthermore, the TA team had issues with the scope of our project so I met with my teammates to discuss that. We also decided that our Gantt chart was too demanding – it was very rushed, and the weeks were all very demanding weeks. Theoretically, the workload I had assigned myself was possible if I didn’t have other classes and commitments. I decided to scale back on the amount of weekly work and reformatted my Gantt chart to reflect this.

I also thought about the modularity of our system. Since we’re all working in parallel, and expect (hope!) that the pieces come together to form a fully functioning system, I suggested to my teammates that we come up with some sort of diagram that outlines all software, hardware, and physical systems, as well as their inputs/outputs and the format they should be in. This way, we can give each other a standard to work off of when it comes to integrating and interfacing with different parts of the design. I have begun writing a list of modules for the performance scheduler as well as the inputs and outputs to each. Next week I hope to help my teammates come up with such a list for their parts and compile all this information into a diagram as a point of reference.

Posted on

John’s Status Report for 9/24

This week I helped prepare our proposal presentation and presented it to the class. Reading up on the feedback really helped realign some of our team design goals and put our project into perspective. I have begun formulating ideas for our piano playing interface proof of concept. To do this, I went to the music technologies classroom in the basement of HOA and took many measurements of the piano we will building our system based off of. These gave us some insight in the overall size of our build. I have also begun planning how  the website to host UI controls for our project. This has involved prioritizing base playback (pause/play) features and organizing our gantt chart to reflect our priorities. Luckily we are on schedule as it’s early on and this next week I hope to finalize our proof of concept circuit design, order some physical interface parts, and begin the website.