Kelly’s Status Report for 2/18

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).  

This week, I researched microphones a bit more and purchased one, modified the design proposal presentation, fleshed out the details of our project with my group mates, and worked on the UI a bit more. 

After talking with our TA Ankita and our Professor Sullivan, it became clearer to me that the mic I had picked out last week, while not expensive, would not be feasible for the clear signal we’re hoping for. After the meeting, I started to look into what kinds of microphones live musicians use and ended up coming up with this headset microphone, wireless transmitter, and receiver pack from Shure. However, after discussing it more with Professor Sullivan, he suggested to look for a wired headset with a good microphone as well as an interface so that the computer is able to read the signal coming from the good microphone properly. He advised against this wireless option that I had come up with as the signal can get distorted this way and a wired option could save some money. I took this advice and it pointed me in the direction of equipment that professional streamers use. After quite a few more hours of research, I landed on the Audio-Technica BPHS1 headset and the Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3rd Gen Interface. As we didn’t intend to spend money on anything other than this equipment, I had quite a bit of liberty when deciding and so in the end I went with picks that came highly recommended by streamers and at home music producers alike. The headphones and interface got delivered yesterday and so I spent a few hours connecting them to my laptop and testing out the sound via garage band. Overall, I am quite pleased with the sound I am able to achieve in a quiet room with a fan running and I plan to test it out in a noisy environment on Monday.

As stated in Anita’s Report, we spent a good deal of time this week modifying our Gantt chart and refining our goals to prepare for our design proposal presentation. After determining that creating a homegrown algorithm in python under our latency constraints didn’t seem feasible, we had to pivot and restructure the division of this project accordingly. This lead to many in depth discussions about what features we need to be focusing on and who is going to take lead of which section. These discussions culminated in Anna sticking with implementing the Web Application and figuring out how exactly to display our chart as well as our singing graphics, Anita taking the lead on our scoring and real time feedback algorithms, and me sticking with developing and testing the aubio pitch tracking algorithm as well as developing the UI for our website. 

In terms of UI, this week I tackled the mode selection screen, practice mode song selection screen, and song mode selection screen. These can be found on our figma.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule? 

As of now, I am still on schedule according to our Gantt chart.

Please list the particular ECE courses (if any) that covered the engineering science and mathematics principles your team used to develop your design? If there are no courses please tells us how you learned those principles over the last week ?

A lot of this week was spent figuring out how to taper an idea into actionable goals. I have been able to develop this skill in the following classes:

• 15-112: End of semester 4-week long term project
• 18-213: Malloc Lab – required breaking down a large problem into smaller pieces
• 18-240: Mastermind Lab – required breaking down a large problem into smaller pieces
• 17-437: End of semester 4-week long project
• 15-418: End of semester 4-week long project

Additionally, I spent a lot of this week sifting through information in order to get the the headset microphone and interface that would best suit our needs. I learned this through the following courses:

• 76-101: writing argumentative essays based on papers
• 79-345: writing argumentative essays based on books and readings
• 18-300: writing a state of the art research report

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week? 

Next week I hope to focus primarily on testing out our pitch detecting algorithm on our practice melodies “Happy Birthday”, “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” as well as have a preliminary way to compare them to our sample containing the actual pitches, which will either be found online as a midi file or recorded by yours truly :).