Risks
We’re continuing to face the risk of some part of the EGG potentially being broken or damaged. As mentioned in the last report, the EGG was able to turn on, but was unable to read a signal through its electrodes, in contrast to prior tests where the electrodes had successfully been able to pick up a signal. As a troubleshooting step, we first wanted to check on the EGG by inputting a signal using our larynx simulator. The larynx simulator plugs directly into the EGG and doesn’t use the electrodes, so this would tell us whether the issue lay with our EGG or our electrodes. Unfortunately, our larynx simulator’s battery was drained, and it took us a couple days to find a replacement battery of the correct type. Once we had replaced the battery, we plugged it into the EGG, which still read no signal, meaning that the issue lay with the EGG rather than the electrodes. As our troubleshooting continues, we’re now draining the battery of our EGG in order to do a complete factory reset. We also reached out to Glottal Enterprises, the manufacturers of the EGG, and are in communication with them about the details of our issue.
Microphone Audio Interface
Initially, we thought that the EGG would act doubly as an audio interface for our microphone: that is, processing the audio signal from our microphone and acting as an intermediary between it and our computer. We made this assumption based on the microphone ports supplied in the EGG. Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case: our understanding is that the microphone is used to contribute to EGG data, but the EGG does not act like a normal audio interface. We weren’t able to get the audio signal to our computer via the EGG, and were forced to improvise, using a laptop microphone. This week, we borrowed an audio interface from Professor Sullivan, and tested using it to record with our microphone. We successfully connected our microphone to VoceVista using this interface.
VoceVista Software Connection
One of our concerns has been how we’re going to integrate VoceVista with the backend of our own application. VoceVista documentation mentions an option for triggering a VoceVista recording to start via the command line. This would have been an amazing way to integrate VoceVista seamlessly, preventing the user from having to manually start a VoceVista recording each time they sang. Unfortunately, we were unable to figure out how to get this to work. We reached out to VoceVista, and this turns out to not actually be a currently released feature: the documentation we were looking at was in error. There is an option instead for setting up VoceVista such that it starts recording automatically when the application is opened, which is a potential way that we can minimize the work that the user has to do to start the recording.