This past week, Max had a health issue that prevented him from participating in the proposal presentation after previously planning on presenting the team’s slides. The main concern from this health issue was whether or not a similarly large health event would prevent Max from participating in the class for an extended period of time later on during the semester, impacting the group’s ability to complete the project. Given that our team is only two people, this is a significant concern and led to meetings with our professors, Byron and Tamal, and our team’s TA, Lindsey, to discuss potential contingency plans such as breaking up our current team and making groups of four with some of the other teams in the class. We are still exploring this decision, but plan on having a concrete answer on whether our team will stay together or split by early this week. Even as we consider the option of breaking up our team, we have continued to follow our team’s schedule in the case we do stay together, preventing any large schedule or workload changes.
We made one change to the design in that we decided not to do the signal processing in javascript in the backend, we would instead write all of the signal processing in C/C++, and then make all of our signal processing into a npm package and import it into our backend. This change was necessary because latency of the app in terms of how fast it could refresh and do computations was a big worry we had, and so doing the bulk of the calculation in C/C++ instead of javascript should speed up the app considerably as C/C++ is a much faster language than javascript. Additionally, since Max is doing a significant amount of the signal processing, this helps us segment our code more so Max has his own environment to unit test his implementation without having to understand significant amounts of the app design while he is trying to design and implement our pitch detection and rhythm detection algorithms. This change however will increase the complexity of our project, as we now have to integrate C/C++ code into our project and we will likely have to deal with Make files, which we do not have significant experience with. We will manage this increase in complexity through additional research into how we want to set up the C/C++ Make environment and consulting our TA’s, as a lot of our assignments here at CMU have involved Make files and C/C++ so we can very easily consult someone with more experience than us in this domain.
Our schedule has not experienced any changes and we are still making steady progress as we continue to research our tools and implementation methods leading up to our design proposal and presentation. Even with the issues around Max’s health earlier this week, we were still able to stay on track with our research and goals to complete our design proposal this week.
One important factor to consider in our project is its limited scope in terms of the types of music it can be applied to, which impacts the reach of the product. The project is restricted to judging pitch relative to the 12-tone equal temperament system, which is the most common system used in the west, but not the only system used globally, with many cultures across the globe using different systems. This is particularly important to consider as it potentially isolates our product from being used to practice music present in other cultures, and could reinforce a euro-centric view of music for users of the tool.