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Kiera’s Status Repot 3/22

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.

This week, after receiving my microphone components, I was able to upload the code I wrote last week onto the Arduino and get the motion data collection aspect of the microphone. Additionally, I began connecting our microphone component to the system and working on accurately collecting and sending audio data to the software.

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

My progress is still slightly behind schedule however I am on track to catch up within the next couple of weeks. I will continue to work on the vocal data collection portion of the microphone system for the next week.

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

By next week I hope to have a fully working microphone prototype.

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Team Status Report 3/15

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 still have worries about getting our components and pieces delivered on time, but we have now placed orders for most of our fundamentals. Because of this, we are feeling on track to be able to overcome this block. A new risk is in recent changes made to our design. We scrapped our original scoring idea and so we are now a little bit behind schedule again and working to get back to speed. As far as contingency, we have our most simplistic method of scoring ready to put in if it does not work.

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?

We have adapted our scoring system from the original method. Our original method would execute the scoring primarily via hardware, subtracting the final speaker output from the original music track. We changed because due to advice from Professor Sullivan, our scoring would be inaccurate and not particularly useful. Even the natural differences in people’s voices would cause unpredictable differences in the output signal. There is only a small additional latency which will come from using software speech-to-text systems, but this will be the only change and will not largely affect our ability to provide a response in real time.

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Status Report 3/15

Accomplishments this week:

This week, we sought to address our number one concern which was not having our parts on time. I ordered most of my crucial hardware components, mainly the speaker and splitter wires I needed to get started building the filter system. In addition to this, after some feedback from Prof. Sullivan, I reassessed our options for scoring the user’s audio. Originally, we had a feedback system which would subtract the final combined output from the original song. Because this would be overly complicated and provide very poor quality feedback, I looked into a new system to do it all on the software side. I helped pivot our design to include a speech to text system that compares the lyrics the user sings which we will now use for scoring instead.

Schedule Update:

I am still behind schedule because we have not prototyped or built anything. The GANTT chart states that I should’ve been wrapping up most of the work for vocal removal and scoring by now. However, we will redistribute because since all of the design work is laid out and most has been tested, I should be able to quickly catch up with the real prototypes for these parts.

Next week:

I will start by trying to source op amps and other fundamental components for breadboarding the filter. Once I know if this is possible or not I will order the components on Monday in order to make progress. By the end of next week, I want to have either prototyped our filter or made the first iteration for our scoring.

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Kiera’s Status Report 3/15

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.

This week, I focused on completing the ethics assignment, reviewing our feedback on the design report, and budgeting/ordering our parts for the microphone. Additionally, while waiting for our parts to come in, I began writing the Arduino code to be synthesized onto our board when it arrives.

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

My progress is slightly behind schedule since we still haven’t received our components.  I will continue to work around this while  we wait for the parts to arrive this week.

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

In the next week I hope to have received my components and begin testing the microphone system.

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Team Status Report 3/8

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?

The most significant risk at our current stage of the project is not being able to get the parts we need in time to build our project according to schedule. In order to mitigate this risk, we have allocated buffer time in our schedule and will use available components for prototyping while waiting for the specific parts we need.

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?

We haven’t made any major changes to the design on the system since our last status report.

Additional Questions

Part A (written by Aleks): JustPerform is designed with consideration for global factors as it is meant to be usable by those who are less technologically savvy. Our interface is simple to use and connects directly to the user’s Spotify library to eliminate the task of uploading files which some users may not understand how to do.

Part B (written by Hugo):  JustPerform is designed with consideration for cultural factors as we take the possibility of the user having a different accent into account in our vocal scoring algorithm. By scoring based on the similarity of the final audio signal of the user vocals + background music and the original track, we avoid the language/accent bias that may come with scoring based on lyrical accuracy.

Part C (written by Kiera): JustPerform is designed with consideration for environmental factors since we aim to minimize our power consumption as much as possible. One design choice we made in line with this goal is using a hardware filter to separate the lyrics from the backing track of the user’s songs rather than running a software filtering algorithm.

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Hugo’s Status Report 3/8

This week I was unable to achieve my primary goal of prototyping the hardware filter for our project. The design report took precedence over everything else, and although we did well on our design presentation, I found there was a significant amount of details missing for my implementation. First, I had written out a base schematic but I needed to make choices about not only the specific components but also how it will be powered. I also selected the specific cables we need to use in order to split the stereo left and right channels. I also was previously unaware of powered vs passive speakers and found that the original speaker was a passive one. This means we additionally had to add in an amplifier to boost the signal to our desired levels. I helped the team flesh out our physical requirements for some of the other systems as well. Overall I have fallen behind slightly and need to do some serious prototyping and catching up when we return.

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Kiera’s Status Report 3/8

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.

This week, my main focus was on completing the design report. The main sections that I worked on were our design tradeoffs, testing and verification metrics, and risk mitigation while filling in information relevant to our microphone system throughout the report.

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

My progress is behind schedule since I spent the week working on the report and do not have any deliverables. To catch up I will spend more time this coming week working on building the microphone.

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

By next week I hope to have a somewhat functional microphone prototype that is capable of capturing the user’s audio and motion data.

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Aleks Status Report 3/8

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
This week I spent all of my time working on the design report. I worked on our introduction and project management sections, updated our block diagram to be more readable, set up templates for some the sections, and filled in the areas relevant to my expertise in our software system, web application, and lyric retrieval mechanisms across the paper.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
My progress is slightly behind, as I forecasted would occur last week. I did not have time to work on any deliverables for this week due to spending all of my time on the design report. I will double down to make up the progress when we’re back, which should be very doable given fewer miscellaneous course deadlines demanding my attention.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I will implement our full integration with Spotify API and do some basic renders of our front end. Given time, I will start work on our lyric scraper.

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Hugo Status Report 2/22

This week I continued working on the specifics of the design for the filter system. I have started to look into the benefits of using a PCB for our circuit instead of the original / current plan which was to simply breadboard it. I am in the process of finalizing the actual design as I completed my matlab tests and am mostly satisfied with the current output of the vocal removal. Before I go into fine tuning, I first want to try breadboarding the circuit and seeing how well the filter works in real time analog. This is going to be my primary work for next week and my priority is finding out whether or not the system will perform with the same level of quality in our actual system. This week I also took time to analyze our new scoring method for the singing. Having pivoted to our new method of subtracting the original from the final signal and analyzing the remainder, I wrote up some additional matlab tests to see what this result would look like. These tests have been promising, but again, I need to test the results with signals in real time. Overall, next week will be centered around developing the first real circuit prototypes for the filter.