The Week of April Fools’ March 31, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , trackbackOkay, so I haven’t actually gotten anything done since I posted last Wednesday, but the project is my only assignment to work on for the next few days, so I plan to spend at least 3 hours on the project by meeting time. Tomorrow (probably for roughly half my work time) I’ll focus on the survey, and Wednesday I’ll do my best to wrap up the visualization code.
EDIT: So here are my thoughts on testing the visualization. Assuming a short survey, it seems to me that the most useful technique for this visualization as it stands would be to run the visualization for a piece of music (perhaps without the music) and then have (is possible) several MIDI files as choices for what piece the visualization was representing. Further, we could ask relevant questions like:
Does the visualization tell you anything about this piece that you hadn’t noticed before?
Do you feel that you could learn more about a piece of music using this visualization?
Which pitch (note) would you say occurred most often during this piece of music? Least often?
Further, we might ask the testers to describe the “action” of the music - what happens, what sort of patterns it follows, etc. Also, it might be interesting to have two pieces ready for visualization and ask if the testers can see the difference between the two, and if so, describe it. It would also be a good idea, I think, to get a general idea of how much music-related experience a user has; that is, has the user ever played an instrument, taken a course in music theory, and so on.
In browsing around the internet I found lots of visualizations of various sorts with papers and plenty of details, but none of them (that I looked at, anyway - I found tons of sites and didn’t have time to browse through everything thoroughly) stated explicitly what they did for testing (if anything). For the moment I’m thinking of going with the above approach, but I am, of course, open to any suggestions that anyone might have about what can be asked about the music visualization.
Approx. time: 1.25 hrs, more tomorrow
EDIT 2: Okay, so I was a little sidetracked by an unexpected project, but I still made progress on coding this afternoon. The visualization is (well, was) all set and ready to run when I discovered that most of the code I wrote last week was missing. I’ve searched through my inventory and cannot locate the code. I assume I’ll just have to rewrite it, which is fortunately only a minor setback; most of the time I spent on it was in design, and since I still remember that part I should be able to re-implement the code in no more than an hour. I don’t have a free hour between now and the meeting, so the code won’t actually be done, but the visualization should be good to go in short order.
Appox. time: 3 hrs.
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