Week Five

Week 5: Color Music

          Colors have long been associated with moods and feelings as researchers have attempted to incorporate them into the field of psychology and therapy treatments. Greens and blues are most often associated with peaceful and calming colors. Reds and oranges are said to be energetic and lively. After gathering these general tendencies in color psychology, we are leaning towards associating higher bandwidths of audio signal with the red side of the spectrum, and the lower bandwidths with the violet end. This seems reasonable, because lower melodies tend to have a dismal and relaxed mood, while higher pitched melodies tend to feel more energetic. This specific relationship is intended for the spectrum shield direction of the project, where the audio signal would be broken into several bandwidths. 

          Today we received news of a major setback in our schedule. The shipment containing our Arduino Leonardo and Spectrum Shield had complications during delivery and were returned to sender. Working with the company we ordered from, we were able to pay half price on express shipping via a different courier so that we can get the delivery by the end of this week or beginning of the next. This further delays our project, because these are the two most essential components to building and tweaking our final deliverable. 

         While waiting for out packages, we have been keeping up on the blog and brainstorming ideas to further our project once we obtain all of the necessary components. We found an open source guitar tuner MATLAB script that we hope to modify and incorporate into our project. This script listens to audio input through computer microphone and visually displays how close an audio tone is to a pre-designated note. The visual components and GUI interface in this script will be eliminated, because they are unnecessary for our goals. Instead we would like to use the core components of this script to output the raw frequency of musical notes received by the computer microphone.

          The creator of the guitar tuner script also included a folder of custom built functions for dealing with converting between frequencies, musical notes, and ranges. This will be helpful while customizing the tuner to fit our needs.

          It is apparent that we are behind the tentative schedule which can be viewed on our design proposal page. The shipping delays have been our primary set back, and by now we have completed nearly all relevant tasks that do not require the Arduino or Spectrum Shield. It appears that we will need to work vigorously as soon as these components are delivered and overlap the three final components on our schedule during the last three or four weeks of this term.