Didactyl: 2015-02-20 status

Done

Piotr Gmytrasiewicz has agreed serve on prelim committee. So we have five members now.
I floated the idea to Richard Parncutt for him to be on the thesis committee. I don't think we need him for the prelim, but I think he would be invaluable for the long game. I received an auto-response that he is on holiday. It seems there is no school in February in Austria. Who knew?

Received Arduino board, wires, and one sensor.
Discovered application of vibration sensors to piano fingering detection. This may be the best way to augment CV.
Drafted a some questions for needs analysis survey.
Pinged Anne Laird on survey construction and audience.
Exchanged email with Ivana Bukvich. Plan to meet March 13 regarding survey.
Conceived a text input interface to allow electronic collection of fingering data as part of the survey exercise.
Sketched future of data collector.
Got color tracking code to work with my Kinect. It looks quite promising.
Discovered Synthesia project as potential source for fingering data.
Met with Steven Jordan at Loyola. Trying to define procedures for collecting anthropometric (hand) data.

Stumbled on a significant effort to develop a plugin to Synthesia known as Automatic Fingering Prediction (AFP), expressly building on the Parncutt, Jacobs, and Kasimi papers. This forum thread is an interesting picture of the road we are on. It would be great if we could track down the developer--user name "Frost"--and pick his or her brain. But Frost vanished abruptly from the forum in 2010.

Trying to run finger6 over input file.
Playing with AFP (one .exe, one .dll, and that's it).
Trying to quantify variability in the Parncutt sight-reading corpus.
Trying to interpret the Synthesia data I have collected and translate to my format--or adopt theirs. It is more terse and presumably more comprehensive. Moreover, they seemed to be flirting with a good way to crowdsource fingering data collection. They claim a user base in the millions.
Implementing basic color tracking synchronized with MIDI events.
Trying to get data from IMU sensor through Arduino and into Minion (my cleverly named Mac Mini).
Prototyping Manual Data Collector (MDC).
Learning to solder.

Fighting with edge detection example with PS3Eye camera. App keeps freezing. I may need to explore pricier camera options.
Need to talk to EE/robotics/CV expert sooner rather than later. You mentioned you had some influence with Milos Zefran? Maybe he or one of his students would like to collaborate?