Anna’s Status Report for 03/18

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, we worked on the ethics assignment for the capstone project. The first part of the assignment covered research about another recent technological development and what ethical considerations are relevant for it, and the second half was exploring ethical considerations of our project. The first part was done solo and the second half was done partially alone and then discussed in our capstone group.

For the recent development, I researched e-cigarettes and vaping products. I thought that the ethical considerations of e-cigarettes was interesting, because the worst case customer and best case customer are attracted by both things. Considering what can be done to avoid attracting nicotine non-users while still appealing to cigarette smokers was challenging and highlighted how difficult ethical considerations in engineering can be.

For the considerations of my project, it seemed, at first, difficult to come up with ways our project affects public health, safety, and wellbeing. What I thought of first was the public health implication of helping users achieve more confidence when participating in karaoke. Dealing with insecurity over public performance can be helpful especially for those who have anxiety. This consideration also highlighted the need to make KaroKey accessible and affordable, more so than its alternatives. After discussing with my team, we discussed more considerations. For example, we considered users potentially using KaraoKey while driving. We also considered potential effects of excessive negative feedback. We want to avoid repeating feedback more than necessary, which could discourage users and worsen their self image.

We also worked on reorganizing the schedule and structure of our project. We are planning to save the stream continuously as a small chunk, which will then be opened by the python backend and forwarded back to through AJAX. At the end, the full stream will be saved as a file. We have also found that the wav filetype will be compatible with both, as MediaStream Recordings can be saved as this type, and this filetype can also be read by the pitch detection algorithm.

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

So far, I am on pace with all the benchmarks we are meant to hit. However, I do wish I was a bit further when it comes to AJAX. This week, I will refer back to my previous notes on AJAX early in the week, and aim to have a portion of it complete by next Wednesday.

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

Next week, I want to keep working on the target melodies. However, the bigger goal for the demo is to have the pitch recognition of user recording work, so I will focus on recording and saving the user input, and triggering a response in the Python backend.