Project Risks and Mitigation
A key ongoing risk on the software side is maintaining tight synchronization between playback events and visual feedback during sheet music visualization. If visual updates lag behind or drift from playback timing, users may receive misleading guidance, reducing the effectiveness of the system. This risk is especially relevant as the visualization layer becomes more tightly integrated with playback.
Fortunately, this risk is being actively and effectively managed in the current design. To mitigate this risk, the visualization system is driven directly by the existing playback event stream rather than introducing a separate timing mechanism. All computationally expensive processing remains in the preprocessing stage, and the visualization layer operates only on precomputed event data. This approach minimizes runtime overhead and reduces the likelihood of timing jitter during playback.
Another ongoing risk is variability in OMR accuracy across different input conditions, such as skewed images, shadows, or lower-quality photos. Inconsistent MusicXML output can propagate downstream and affect both event generation and visualization accuracy. This risk is being managed by expanding the preprocessing pipeline and introducing a benchmark dataset to evaluate performance across varied inputs. Additionally, validation and cleaning of MusicXML ensures that only structurally consistent outputs are passed to the Conversion Layer.
A related risk is pipeline fragility when handling edge cases, such as corrupted files, missing OMR outputs, or malformed MusicXML. These failures could disrupt the user experience if not handled properly. To mitigate this, the system now includes explicit error reporting at each stage of the pipeline, along with targeted tests for invalid inputs. This ensures failures are predictable, easier to debug, and do not silently propagate through the system.
As the system moves toward hardware integration, there is also a risk that mismatches between the software-generated event format and the ESP32 expectations could introduce timing or parsing issues. This is being addressed by clearly defining the event payload structure and validating serialization before integration, ensuring that communication between software and hardware remains consistent and reliable.
Design Changes
This week, the team implemented the sheet music visualization component and integrated it with the playback pipeline. The visualization layer now renders musical events in real time and highlights active notes based on playback position. This change improves system observability and usability by allowing users to visually verify that playback behavior matches the intended musical structure.
The visualization was designed to interface cleanly with the existing event-processing architecture, avoiding changes to the core timing logic. While this adds additional UI complexity, the design preserves modular boundaries by keeping visualization logic separate from event generation and hardware communication.
Schedule Update
There have been no changes to the project schedule. Development remains on track, and progress continues to align with the milestones outlined in the Gantt chart (Gantt).