I’ve unfortunately been knocked out with illness this entire week, and wasn’t able to make project progress. This puts me further behind on my goals. I will more thoroughly assess what needs to be done once I fully recover, hopefully in the next couple of days.
Tyler Status Report 3/15
This week me and Melina were able to get several different recordings of the opera singers to test various features of the pitch detection. Sadly, the electroglottograph ran out of power so we were unable to get the electroglottograph running for them, but next week we plan on utilizing it with them. I had another trial run with myself using the electroglottograph as well so that the next time we have the opera singers it will run smoothly. With the material we got from the opera singer, we focused on having segmented singing so we can ensure pitch detection works properly, as well as having the singer sing smoothly so we can watch the pitch detection gradually transition as well. For next week, we plan to collect the EGG data necessary and start designing a way to get the EGG data into a spreadsheet with similar format as the pitch detection. I have emailed Bodo, the lead designer of Voce Vista who has been quite helpful but he has not responded, another option that we might consider is paying 50 dollars for an hour of his time to tutor us on Voce Vista so that we can find where the EGG data is stored.
Melina’s Status Report for 3/1/2025
Schedule
Official Project Management Schedule Updates
- COMPLETE Design Report
- IN PROGRESS Pitch Analysis
- NOT STARTED Match Microphone Data to EGG
Personal Task Updates
- DONE Draft Design Review Report with the team
- DONE Ensure the team has a repository set up along with agreement on code style/organizational expectations
- DOING Draft code for pitch analysis
- TODO Propose modification to Pitch Analysis Testing
My tasks are on time, and given that nothing new was currently scheduled, I have Week 8 to complete pitch analysis.
Pitch Analysis
An initial attempt has been made at utilizing Librosa for pitch analysis. I learned how to load an audio file and extract basic information such as tempo, frequencies and their magnitudes. The current issue is that the pitch detection algorithm outputs a lot of frequencies, with some that appear to be noise. Overall extracting frequencies at the correct times is difficult, however, after reading Tyler’s updates, I saw that Voce Vista may already output the frequencies in a cleaner manner. This would help the algorithm more accurately map those frequencies to a note based on a standardized chart. The algorithm will have to take into account that there is some natural variance in pitch for the human voice compared to instruments. For example, the standardized chart marks G4 at 392 Hz and G4# at 415.3. An appropriate range has to be considered to distinguish adjacent notes. I’m currently thinking of approaching this by providing some slack in the range of frequencies that map to a note. This means our testing would likely be modified to include having a vocalist sing a series of notes, such as “Happy Birthday” and have the vocal coach verify that that the pitch detected agrees with their perception of the pitch for 90% of the notes sung. Proposing this modification for testing to the team has been noted as a new personal task.
Tyler’s Status Report 3/1/2025
Not a lot was accomplished the week before spring break, as I primarily focused my attention on working on the design report but I was able to spend a couple hours working through VoceVista. Right now I am trying to think of the best way to transfer the information we get from VoceVista into our software component. VoceVista can output the files into an excel sheet or an image and it has a lot of different capablities of different data we can output. Not only can we output all of the EGG data we can also output pitch as well as statistic results. Now, I need to decide on how to export the data with Melina and Susanna to decide what is the easiest way for them to process this data as well as decide easy ways to transfer the audio recordings from VoceVista out as well.
Progress is mostly on schedule, I feel like I could be a little bit more familiar with the VoceVista interface but I will get better as the semester goes on. Focus now will be finding ways to output the VoceVista files into useable information.
Team Status Report for 3/1/2025
Sensor Adhesive
We had previously thought that the electrode gel, which is applied to the neck sensors before the sensors are fixed to the neck, might function as an adhesive. However, the electrode gel serves as an aid in conductivity, and doesn’t have adhesive properites. Established methods for attaching the sensors include a neck band, tape, and simply having the user hold the sensors up physically. Holding the sensors is obviously cumbersome and a violation of our use-case requirement of comfortability. Discussing this issue with our vocalists, we confirmed that a neck band would also be uncomfortable and could impede movements necessary for singing freely. As a result, we are purchasing some specifically designed skin-adhesive tape to tape the sensors in place, which will hopefully maximize both comfort and secure sensor placement.
Schedule for SoM Meetings
We determined a schedule for our meetings with our School of Music partners following break. We’ll start with a week of practicing using the electroglottograph with vocalist users, then start gathering weekly warmup data so that our final presentation can include the data over time for five weeks for two vocalists. At the same time, we’ll start experimenting with repertoire recording, likely with piano accompaniment, in week 10.
Future Test Users
While we have the opportunity to work with two vocalists in the School of Music (a soprano and a mezzo-soprano), our hope is to ultimately test our product with a larger number of vocalists to get more meaningful data for our user feedback survey. This will depend on whether or not more vocalists are willing to sign up for the music course we’re currently a part of. There’s also the question of whether we’d be interested in expanding the target audience of the product slightly to include singers who are trained, but aren’t necessarily vocal majors or opera singers. Even though our current use case is more specific, other singers might still be able to offer feedback for things like the ease of setting up the device. This decision will depend largely on whether or not more vocalists are willing to join the class.
Data Privacy
One issue we were considering is that of securing user data, since some users might consider their CQ data or vocal recordings to be private. However, with the advice of Tom and Fiona, we’ve concluded that this actually falls outside of our use case requirements: like any recording software, this application is meant to be used on personal devices, or in a controlled lab setting, and all the data is stored locally. As a result, we will not be worrying about the encryption of user data for our application.
Product Solution Meeting a Specified Need
A was written by Melina, B was written by Tyler, C was written by Susanna
Section A
Our Product Solution considers global factors by including users who are not in academia or do not consider themselves technologically savvy. Although our product utilizes specialized hardware and software, our solution includes a dedicated setup page that aims to facilitate the use of these technologies for users who will be assumed to have no prior experience with them. The feature pages of the app will also include more information about how to interpret the CQ in the context of a controlled exercise time series analysis and a distinct repertoire. We have also considered that the accessibility to our product beyond Pittsburgh is limited by the purchase of EGG hardware and Voce Vista software. Our product solution makes use of a shared lab that can be duplicated with these purchases for any other local region.
Section B
Some of the cultural factors our product solution take into account is how opera singers normally sing and what the accepted practice is. We spent a lot of time conducting research on the vocal pedagogy of opera singers to ensure that when we output data it does not contradict what the user’s vocal coach instructs them to do. On top of that, we have taken into account that it is usually taboo to try and get a singer to change the form of how they sing and have decided to instead just output the information in a useful way so that the opera singer can decide whether or not to make changes, instead of originally suggesting form changes for the opera singer.
Section C
The physical components used in this product (electroglottograph, connector cables, microphone, etc) were created by extracting materials from natural sources. While the overall goal of the project is not directly related to environmental concerns, the overall impact of the product can be minimized by using durable and reusable components where possible. Notably, we found a preexisting electroglottograph to borrow rather than buying or building our own. This certainly saved us considerable cost and effort, but is also notable for significantly reducing the amount of new material that went into building the project. While we did need to purchase a microphone new, we purchased a high-quality model that will be able to be reused in future projects.