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Akash’s Status Report for 3/14

Before spring break we were working on the design review document and through our presentation, we got some new ideas and metrics that we could potentially include in our project. So in the week before break, I was trying to come up with ways we could possibly implement those ideas into our project, if at all. At the same time, I was continuing my research on the Android step detection functions and working on the details of the song selection algorithm. One important decision I think we came to as a group, that should be noted, is that we would rather play the same song multiple times than a song that doesn’t warp well.

Over the break, we found out that classes would be moving online and we would likely not be meeting each other for the rest of the semester. It will make it a little more difficult to work on the project, but because we split it evenly, it should still be doable to finish.

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Mayur’s Status Report for 3/14

These last two weeks have been pretty wild. As I stated as the goal of my last post, I wanted to finish up the design report on Monday as my goal for the week. This ended up taking both of Monday and Tuesday, as we had a sick member of our team. We got a PDF for feedback, with a couple points highlighted. I think it will be beneficial to discuss it with our mentor and TA(s), since the scan did not turn out that well. One thing I noted was that we increased the 60 seconds for music changing to 90 seconds, as we believe that long-distance runners will prefer less warping. Furthermore, from testing, we are aware that a minimum of 60 seconds is needed for accurate pace measurements, with more time preferred.

Our group is currently in discussion on how to proceed with our project in light of COVID-19. Our group members will no longer be on campus, so we will need to be more careful with how we coordinate pieces of the project. The virus has introduced a couple dangers to our project. For one, we will need to reevaluate our team member responsibilities. The previous division of tasks assumed that we could have face-to-face meetings, but now that is not possible. Another pain point will be the integration phase, as we cannot physically meet. Finally, testing will have to be reevaluated, since each member will need individual testing equipment and a complete repository of the project.

This week, we will be hashing out all of these ideas. Individually, I plan on creating the new UI for the main page of the app.

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Aarushi’s Status Report for 2/29

This past week, I heavily focused on the Design Presentation – ensuring a few slides, in particular, were clean, consistent, and logical. These few slides were complex and contained a lot of information that was difficult to aesthetically fit (i.e. slides 2,  3, 7). Additionally, I was the speaker for the design presentation. Thus, I spent considerable time rehearsing since our presentation was on Wednesday which allowed for more practice time.

Additionally, after working with the group to delegate portions of the design report, I have been working through my portion of the document. This will continue past Saturday night.

Other than meeting tasks assigned by the class, I took this week to really understand the benefits and drawbacks of the ‘wavelet transform based’ phase vocoder in relation to other time-scale modification methods we could use. This involved reading (very slowly, haha) numerous research papers and their findings on tradeoffs between the various methods. I now understand the high-level processes behind each of these methods, what distinguishes them from each other, and how exactly each of the more advanced/more accurate techniques builds off of the closest simpler/less accurate method considered. (These methods were explained in the design presentation & will be in the design report).

Next steps, following the completion of the design report, will be to complete a base portion/’method’ of the described phase vocoder.

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Team Status Report for 2/29

Our team spent most of our group time this week working on the design presentation and report. We wanted to incorporate the feedback we received from both the course staff and our peers after we finished the former. Some good comments we got from Professor Sullivan and the TAs was that we needed to consider some edge cases with how we will be switching songs and to look into the wavelets more. Accordingly, we have decided to allow more time in our Gantt chart for completing the wavelet transform algorithm.

We got some good feedback from our peers as well. In particular, we would like to add a power consumption metric to measure the battery usage of our app and made us consider how other apps play music off of phones.

The biggest obstacle for our project the next couple weeks is balancing the midterms that come right before vacation. Furthermore, our members may not have access to computers during Spring Break, which puts us out of commission for another week. Our plan to work around it is to possibly use some of the slack time from our Gantt chart to extend our timeline for pieces of the project.

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Mayur’s Status Report for 2/29

I spent most of my time for capstone this week working on the design presentation (finishing touches) and the design proposal. Our team wanted to ensure that we incorporated the feedback from the proposal that we received from both the mentors and our peers. We discuss this more in depth within our team status report. For the design proposal, we split up the paper into portions to work on individually. I am tasked with completing a piece of the system decision, part of the design specification, and part of the tradeoffs section.

In terms of deliverables, my top goal is to finish the design with the team. Finalizing each portion of the project is important so that we can begin the actual creation.