Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2023 Project by Anita Ma, Kelly Woicik, Anna Gerchanovsky
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). At this point, our project was close …
What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? As of now, we have fully integrated our system and don’t have many significant risks left. However, we do have …
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).
I spent this week preparing for the final presentation, updating some of the style on our web application, and modifying a midi file a song to suit our needs.
I gave the final presentation this week and spent a few hours polishing up the slides as well as practicing the points I wanted to hit while still staying within the 12 minute cutoff. I wanted to ensure that our struggles as well as successes could be understood by all.
Additionally, I spent some time this week updating the style of our website as we have been working with a bare bones style for quite some time. Currently, I have updated both the registration and login pages (as seen below).
Finally, I found a midi file backing track for the song “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey. This backing track was very high quality and suited our needs, but finding the melody proved to be a very difficult task. I ended up finding one that was mostly correct, but in a different key and off time. In order to join these 2 separate midi tracks together, I had to buffer the vocals to line up with the backing track as well as transpose the vocals down and edit them for correctness. This took most of my time this week, but we now have .wav files.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
According to the Gantt chart, I have finished my personal tasks and am on slack duty. Therefore, I’m perfectly on schedule.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Next week I hope to continue updating the style of our website as well as get some UI feedback.
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). Based on comments made during the final …
What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready? A large risk we had faced, and managed, for a while, was the integration of the frontend javascript audio recording …
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).
A big change we had in the project was a pivot from live feedback to feedback after the fact. As expressed in the last few status reports, we were having a lot of problems with integrating javascript recordings with the python django backend. Unfortunately, because we had spent so much time on this, we decided it was time to pivot.
Because we had valid recording strategies, as well as a working conversion between ogg and wav files, we pivoted to having the user sing, download their singing as an ogg file, upload this same file, and then view the scoring and feedback on this singing input. Although this required giving up our goal of real time feedback, we decided this was worth moving to, as the integration between the javascript recording and pitch detection was difficult, and we haven’t made any progress, despite focusing on this for the last few weeks.
On my end, this required a few things. I set up a web framework that allowed navigation between recording, downloading, and viewing results.
Before this week, the recording user view was very basic. This week, I adjusted it to play the song, show the song process, with lyrics. I added a rudimentary song playing interface. The interface shows the song playing, as well as how far the user is in the current chunk. Afterwards, I changed the view to show a download link to be followed before the user proceeds to the next page.
Upon proceeding to the next page, the user uploads the recording that they just downloaded. Once ready, the user plays their recording. This shows the graphic, as developed earlier, where the user input is integrated with the target pitches, comparing their performance. Again, the interface is somewhat simple, but adding specific information should not be difficult for the final demo. After the user performance plays, the web application displays an overall score. This score is calculated using Anita’s scoring algorithm.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Because we were not able to complete integration between the frontend and backend as planned, we are behind. However, we have adjusted our project accordingly, so it is no longer required, so no actions are necessary.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Next week, I hope to greatly polish the web application user interface. While functional, it is currently pretty rudimentary and not appealing. I would also like to add a lot more feedback on user performance post factum. Lastly, I know there are a lot more checks and safeguards I should implement before the web application can be used securely.
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). Anna and Kelly got the front to …
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). I spent this week, coming up with …
What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
We are still running into some issues with linking the back and front end systems. Data is seemingly getting corrupted when we send over a wav file from the front end to the back end. Anna and Kelly have researched online for ways to address this, but all of the suggested solutions do not seem to be working. They have contacted their Web Applications Professor, but the solution that he proposed does not seem to be too promising. This all sounds pretty doomed and all, but they know what the cause of the corrupted data is: the wav file headers need to be reconstructed when sending the data over JS to python. However, although we know the cause, we don’t quite know what the fix is to this problem.
Because of this, we still are somewhat uncertain about the format of the data that will be fed into the feedback algorithm. This proves to be the most significant risk thus far, as without this we will not be able to take in the user pitch and target pitch information correctly. Without this, we aren’t able to extensively test out the PDA to feedback algorithm pipeline, so progress on that part of the project has also slowed down a bit.
In terms of risk management: In order for this aspect of the project to not completely block us on working on other aspects of the project, Anna created some mock data to test her graph visualization and for Anita to test her feedback algorithms (thanks Anna!). As stated in last week’s status report too, we are taking the integration with our PDA and frontend slowly with thorough testing before adding in a complicated scoring algorithm or more advanced graphics to display the pitches.
Also as stated last week, our contingency plan for us is having the pitch detection and scoring algorithms run on the full user audio after it has been recorded. But we are trying our best to avoid this route.
Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
No additional changes have been made to our design this week.
This is also the place to put some photos of your progress or to brag about a component you got working.
We finished our interim demo! Our professor and TA seemed happy with our progress, and we’re grateful to hear their thoughts and recommendations.
Anita also did her first pulse check on the performance of her feedback algorithm and it rated Anna’s singing at a solid 70% 🙂
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). Sadly, this week we did not make …