Pareekshith’s Status Report for 3/14

This past week, I received the Lavalier microphones from the ECE Receiving office and thus, got a better idea of how to integrate them into our system. When we met with Dr. Dueck and her students, we discussed placements of the wearable nodes and the mics under the costumes, and we will be in contact figuring out how exactly to hide them discreetly. The good news is that the microphones are 6 meters long, so if there is a safe spot on an actor, the microphone can easily clip on and work properly. I also brought up the dilemma that we have with Vox, namely that it won’t work as well as expected with an operatic voice. Because of this, we are considering switching gears and using the sheet music as the script and then indicating where the cues should happen. Although our original plan was to use speech technology, given the collaboration with the School of Music, it makes sense to go with this approach; if we have time near the end, we might also try to incorporate speech technology into our system for drama productions, which typically have more conversational speech than operas and musicals. I’m still on track with my schedule, although I might need some more time to research libraries that can track music in real time; we’ll also have to discuss with Dr. Dueck the situation regarding an orchestra, where multiple instruments will be playing and could cause interference. This upcoming week, I hope to do just that, and I also want to find a way to keep the microphones incorporated so that we don’t waste our budget for no reason; we might end up using the microphones as microphones, and these can then be used to simply store the audio from each actor and be used for post-production processing.