The last two weeks have been spent sporadically making improvements from the Interim Demo. Playing with features like the silence threshold seems to have dramatically increased accuracy on the basic music pieces as well as some improvement on Fly Me to the Moon from before.
We also had our first live functional demo with the School of Music musicians and have identified some issues in the data pipeline that have been worked on. The following changes have been made to better pre-process the audio data:
Extending rests – Some rests, also denoted as midi = 0 in our program, left a gap between the start of the rest (silence) and the start of the next note. These have been fixed so that the rest takes up the entire duration between the two notes. This allows for easier and more consistent comparison in the timing algorithm.
Concatenating Silence Values – Any repeated portions of “silence” are now joined into one larger period. This removes extraneous note objects that cause desync in the timing algorithm.
Normalizing start time to zero – The output of any audio processed now begins at time 0.0000 with all other values correctly shifted to match. This ensures all data starts at the expected time since any output from the music XML side expects a start at t=0.
Stitching noise and notes – As mentioned in prior reports there was an issue of. audio spikes causing peaks in the data that were good for timing data but bad for pitch. These peaks have been joined with the note they precede allowing for a cleaner output that still maintains the consistency of the timing data.
Fixing the silence threshold at -45dB – Previously this had been operating under the default value for Aubio at -90dB which detects most onsets. Changing this value reduced the number of onsets and cut out a significant amount of noise. This is still ongoing for experimentation but ideally I could find a way to normalize the audio level so the noise floor isn’t too low (noise gets through) or too high (notes are cutoff or removed).
As usual updates to the DSP test files and main process can be found here
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
The project is on track for the final presentation.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Fixing audio recording issues and preforming more detailed analysis on complex music piece results.