Investigating and Prototyping

The team has been pushing forward with more setup and confidence-building with tech during the past few days. We plan to have basic functional components to show for quarters next week before we begin integrating everything together into a single plan of design / execution.

Design

The team had a big design meeting this week to help solidify our direction as we head in to quarter-semester presentations next week. With the help of this meeting we outlined an ideal experience that we want users to have. However, there are of course decisions that can’t yet be made until we test with the tech, and we have been working hard to get to that point.

Tech

The majority of work this week went into getting tech even more up to speed to help us prepare for full design and production.

Programmers now have a Git server set up for code sharing and access. Moreover, provisioning profiles have also been set so that the team can now deploy our prototypes on to our iPhones and iPads for testing. Our physical infrastructure is all there at this point, and we have begun looking at the technical challenges ahead of us.

Everyone has been making great progress in learning to use Objective-C and Sparrow. Romain has integrated FMod into Sparrow as well as begun to investigate how to drag and draw. Mike has found a very promising line-drawing extension for Sparrow as well, and the two of them hope to have a good sense of what our visuals and UI can be capable of by next week.

Some of the most exciting work has been in voice input. In addition to pitch detection last week, Cheng has done further work in quantization of the tones. As our voice-processing function improves, we are looking at the possibility of converting sung input into a proper melody. This seems promising, though perhaps not with completely proper musical notation. The work required to make algorithms that catch all possible cases (for example, beaming or flagging eight notes) are probably outside the scope of this project.

The team also met with Roger Powell again this week. He spoke about and showed a specific example of sequencer implementation. His knowledge about important variables to store and keep track as well details to be aware of in the routine itself has helped the team immensely. Intimidating problems have become much clearer with Roger’s advice and we look forward to his help in the future as well.

Looking Forwards

Next week is quarter-semester presentations. Our team will present to other ETCers as well as some EA staff about our progress so far as well as our planned course of action. We hope to gain valuable feedback about our direction before we make final decisions about it.