This was the first week when we started having the musicians come in and play the music live for us. To this end, we worked hard on getting our models ready and the system working close enough for us to get useful feedback from the musicians.
Before we could do this, we had to make sure that our system recognized the notes correctly. Christina worked with Victor and Nayoung and came up with a fingering chart for the flute and clarinet. This helped both Victor and Nayoung to animate the instruments’ buttons according to the note being played. Now it only remained to be seen if our study and animation would be accurate.
Flute fingering chart
Clarinet fingering chart
We had the first musician, Annie Gordon, the flutist, come in on Tuesday. She found the system pretty responsive, but after playing for a few minutes, identified a glitch in the system for us. The notes that were being identified, were an octave lower. We consulted with her about the way we were identifying our notes, the fingering chart that we were using and identified what buttons are pressed on the flute for the particular notes. We even recorded the flute sections of the pieces for further internal testing.
Flute visualization in action
On Thursday, we were expecting our second musician to come in, Allyson Edington, who plays the clarinet. For this, we had to get our clarinet system working in time. While not as polished as our flute system, we were able to get it up and running before Thursday. We had a similar experience with Allyson, who helped us fix bugs in our system with respect to the animation of the instrument and the notes being played. We even got her to record her pieces in all four movements.
It was really helpful to have the musicians come in and critique our work. The fact that they were an “educated audience” helped us. While we were making educated guesses thanks to Christina’s expertise in music, having the musicians who would be playing the instruments on the final day giving feedback was very valuable. They helped us in refining our fingering charts for their particular instruments, telling what buttons are absolutely necessary and what we could do without animating.
Clarinet working explained
Next week would be spring break, so we had to make sure we got most of our work done this week.
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