April 1, 2023

Team Status Report for April 1

Summary 

Our team continued to make significant progress towards our project goals. Last week, we were able to narrow down our subset of features in the signal processing subsystem and test some of these features. Throughout our testing, we realized that some features such as the MFCC and the liveness were not adding much more new information to our analysis, so we decided to shelf them for the meantime. This allowed us to focus on the impact of features such as frequency, amplitudes, and beat detection, which we were able to use to make decisions about the colors, intensity, and timing of the lights respectively. These decisions proved beneficial while determining the lighting logic, and we were able to make significant headways in integrating the signal processing subsystem with the lighting engine. Finally, we made progress in planning for our interim demo and determining the metrics we want to track during testing.

 

Risk 

The primary risk last week were the latency issues that we were facing with the signal processing subsystem, but we were able to address that by preprocessing the audio in its entirety. As of now, the primary risk is being able to make noticeable changes in response to the signal processing parameters that we are generating. While we are confident that we can notice decipherable distinctions between various features in isolation, we still need to spend considerable time testing how these decisions interplay when overlaid on each other. As the logic takes shape, testing subcomponents will be critical to the overall look and feel of the lights.

 

Changes 

We had multiple productive meetings where we fleshed out parts of the lighting logic, which was used to integrate our subsystems. This involved making design decisions about the features that we decided to remove and retain. These changes further translated to changes in some of our internal deadlines, which pushed us a little behind than where we expected to be. However, we are confident that these changes will help us save time in the future, and we will be able to make up for the lost time. Furthermore, due to various other commitments of our teammates, we were not able to dedicate as much time to the progress as we had expected, so we had to take some time to reassess our goals. Overall, we were successful in reorienting our vision for the project, and we are confident that we will finish in time.

Updated Schedule