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Melina’s Status Report for 2/22/2025

Schedule

Official Project Management Schedule Updates

  • COMPLETED Design Presentation
  • IN PROGRESS Design Report
  • IN PROGRESS Pitch Analysis

My progress from goals from last week. Any DOING tasks will be rolled over as goals for next week.

  • DONE Present Design Review Slides
  • DONE Drafting wireframes for the frontend with feedback from Susanna
  • DOING BLOCKED Draft code for pitch analysis
  • DOING Draft Design Review Report with the team
  • DOING Ensure the team has a repository set up along with agreement on code style/organizational expectations

Most of these tasks were ahead of schedule, so we’re not worried about them being in progress. The official schedule would suggest Pitch Analysis should have been done this week, but this was misleading; I will elaborate below in Pitch Analysis.

Design Report

We are in the process of drafting the Design Report.

I have shared a Google Doc with sections for us to draft content in, as well as setting up the latex file we ultimately use to format our final design report.

I have drafted a revised block diagram that integrates our hardware and software systems. This reflects a proposal I made to the team that changes our software design; I propose we use Dear PyGUI instead of TKinter. This tool is well documented and provides more

DRAFT EGGceptional Vocals Block Diagram

This diagram reflects a proposal I made to the team that modifies our software design; I propose we use Dear PyGUI instead of TKinter. This toolkit is well documented and provides more support for app development and data plotting which is an important aspect of our project for visualizing users’ CQ time series analysis.

I am also currently drafting the following sections

  • Design Requirements
  • Software Design Specification or Subsystem
  • Tests for Use-Case Specification Software
  • Related Work

Pitch Analysis

I realized our scheduling of “Pitch Analysis” was slightly out of order since it should be after we have a processed microphone signal to work with. Tyler very recently acquired the full-version authentication code for VoceVista, so as soon as  Tyler sends me at least 1 digital audio signal recording, this task will be considered unblocked and I can continue working on it this upcoming week.

Git Repository

I confirmed with Fiona that we can set up our own repository, and prepared a discussion with the team about repository management expectations and code style. This discussion will be brought up on Wednesday since we are currently focusing on drafting the Design Report. By Wednesday I will at least have the repository created so it’s ready to clone.

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Melina’s Status Report for 2/15/2025

EGG Hunt

  • Picked up all hardware components associated with the EGG EG2-PCX from Prof. Helou, along with the corresponding digital user manual
  • This includes a simple microphone which we plan to replace with a more sophisticated microphone

Ground-Truth Research

  • Annotated reading “Results from a pilot longitudinal study of electrolaryngographically derived closed quotient for adult male singers in training” (David Howard)
  • Annotated reading “The Physiology of Vocal Damping: Historical Overview and Descriptive Insights in Professional Singers” (Marco Fantini)
  • Annotated reading “Musical Theater and Opera Singing—Why So
    Different? A Study of Subglottal Pressure, Voice Source, and Formant Frequency Characteristics” (Eva Björkner)
  • Concluded that identifying a “proper” CQ would not be the most appropriate solution approach since the number of years in singing experience and genre would be required for such a metric. This data is limited at this time and would not be reliable for the purposes of our project
    • Because of this we have adjusted our scheduled tasks to reflect this change
      • Understand/identify improper CQ CANCELLED – we want to stray away from defining a universal truth for what a proper CQ is, instead focusing on helping vocalists track and understand their formant tuning
      • Inform about change in CQ ← changed from detect/warn about improper CQ
  • Proposed our project solution approach should shift from warning of “improper” CQ to providing more flexible analysis tools (2) for tracking CQ over time
    • Analysis tool 1: Allowing user to view their CQ at a given moment for a specific recording playback
    • Analysis tool 2: Providing user with a visual representation of an evaluation of their CQ range over time
      • This would be approached by asking the user to record a controlled vocal exercise, such as an octave warmup that covers their tessitura (comfortable vocal range)
      • The CQ ranges for these controlled (constant) exercises can be summarized visually over time as suggested by David Howard’s graph of idealized changes in CQ
    • Proposed our use case and solution approach should shift to focus on advanced vocalists in one genre, opera singers
      • CQ can be significantly more difficult to measure for untrained singers, in fact, David Howard had to completely throw out some data samples from untrained singers due to unreliable CQ measurements
      • Unreliable CQ measurements are detrimental to our project, as an incorrect analysis could mislead a vocalist to make unhealthy decisions
      • CQ has also been found to vary significantly with genre, and as of now, we only have guaranteed access to opera singers
    • Created a ground-truth metric
      • EGG passes calibration test with the laryngeal simulator before and after usage
        • This is handy dandy calibration hardware component that came with the EGG itself thanks to Prof. Helou
      • Use built-in Larynx Tracking & Signal-Strength indicators
      • CQ measurement must be at least 20% to be considered detected

Schedule

  • COMPLETED Acquired sensor
  • COMPLETED Create a “Ground-Truth” metric

My scheduled tasks are on time, and have been slightly adjusted as described above (I will reiterate below)

  • Understand/identify improper CQ CANCELLED – we want to stray away from defining a universal truth for what a proper CQ is, instead focusing on helping vocalists track and understand their formant tuning
  •  Inform about change in CQ ← changed from detect/warn about improper CQ

Next Steps

My goals for this next week include the following deliverables

  • Present Design Review Slides
  • Draft Design Review Report with the team
  • Ensure the team has a repository set up along with agreement on code style/organizational expectations
  • Drafting wireframes for the frontend with feedback from Susanna
  • Draft code for pitch analysis
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Melina’s Status Report for 2/8/25

Ground-Truth Research

  • Found a collection of EGG-related research articles available for free through CMU account login at ScienceDirect
  • Annotated research article “Variation of electrolaryngographically derived closed quotient for trained and untrained adult female singers” (David Howard)
    • Found important data that will likely be useful for deriving a ground-truth metric of ideal CQs for men and women
    • Identified methodology concern about basing ideal CQs off of the data presented in this paper
      • The researchers note that the ideal CQs they derive are based off singers who are already trained, but that more research should be done to confirm these ideal ranges
      • Researchers suggest following changes in CQ ranges for singers being trained over time. If by the time those singers are considered “trained”, their CQ ranges matches those of the trained singers in this study, that would suggest their proposed ideal CQ ranges are a good basis for ground-truth
    • Identified methodology concern about CQ measurement for singing that includes varying frequencies
      • The laryngeal significantly changes between low and high pitches which can cause inaccurate CQ measurements from the sensors
      • Researchers in this paper addressed this by asking singers to adjust the placement of the sensors with their fingers as they were changing pitch, but this would be a problem for us since we are trying to develop a methodology that is comfortable and does not significantly impact singing physically or psychologically (i.e. making the singers overly self conscious while they sing)
    • Identified statistically significant CQ trends observed in trained singers
      •  Trained singers were significantly associated with higher CQs across the board; “Howard et al. (23) suggest that an increase in CQ with singing training/experience could be interpreted in terms of a more physically efficient voice usage”
      • Trained male singers tend to have a CQ range that remains constant
      • Trained female singers tend to have a CQ ranges that increases with frequency

EGG Hunt

  • Met with Prof. Helou at Forbes Tower to pick up the EGG, but she had not actually had a chance to find it yet; it is most likely in her other office at PMC
  • Prof. Helou plans to pick up the EGG from her PMC office on Monday and drop it off at CMU campus either Monday or Tuesday
  • During my visit, we discussed the CQ measurement methodology concern that the research article “Variation of electrolaryngographically derived closed quotient for trained and untrained adult female singers” (Howard) brings up
    • Prof. Helou confirmed this is an important methodology concern that she encountered, where she also mentioned it was difficult to move the sensors with the changing laryngeal height
    • Prof. Helou suggested considering limiting the variation in frequency range for a given measurement, however this would also mean our app would no longer be geared towards providing visual feedback for any music the user chooses to sing, since the change in frequency of sung notes would have to be limited
    • As described in Ground-Truth Research, asking the user to support the sensors manually is another proposed solution, but other approaches should be researched and considered for appropriate and comfortable sensor calibration