Week 8: Inflection Point

Published on 02.28.2020 in [rc]

This week felt like more of a continuation of last week. Instead of much coding, I was coming down from my talk at the Experiential Music Hackathon, and spent most of my time/mental energy on my talk for Localhost and my performance at the Un/Sounding the Relational City conference - both of which went really well!

Animated GIF of spectrograms generated from the calls of the golden-capped parakeet
Animated GIF of spectrograms generated from the calls of the golden-capped parakeet

Batch of spectrograms generated from calls of the Golden-capped Parakeet, found in Brazil and Paraguay and currently threatened by habitat loss

This week felt like the first time in a long time where I could take a breath and try to sit back without heads-down working. I'm going this signals a move from me being aggressively inward facing to a space where I'm a bit more loose and relaxed while at RC, open to new things and finding time to work in a more loose, less structured way. We shall see...

This week I finished the Audio Signal Processing for Music Applications course on Cousera, which was pretty amazing. I feel like I got exposed to a lot of fundamental audio signal processing concepts, as well as had the opportunity to practice them programatically. Moving forward with my real-time audio classifier, I'll definitely need to implment short-time Fourier transformations and log-mel-spectrograms, so I feel like with this course, I now have the tools to not only implement these algorithms but to deeply understand them from a theoretical point of view, as well as how and why they are used.

Vocaloid
Vocaloid

It also turns out that the MTG group worked on Vocaloid!

In 6.006 news, we learned about shortest path algorithms this week - from a more general point of view and with Dijkstra's algorithm.

Graphs
Graphs

What I thought was a beautiful diagram about graphs

Starcraft
Starcraft

Using starcraft early game / rushing build order as an example shortest path problem

My plan for the following week is to bring my real-time audio classifier app back to the fore front and use all the programming I learned in ASPMA to help implement any of the audio signal processing I come across to finish the project.