2016-03-09 status

Done

Data Collection

• Fixed problem with Survey III in Safari. I reinitialized the editor to be empty when NEXT is clicked, and everything seems to work normally. This should help our response rate a lot.
• Validated data entered in abcDE.
• Entered Czerny's recommended fingerings for Prelude 9 and 17 and Fugue 17. Fugue 9 posed too many problems for me to finger from Czerny. Decided to leave it in survey to see if people working from other editions fare better.
• Drafted recruitment email for Survey III.
• Finalized Survey III and asked IB and AFL to review.
• Transcribed 7 of 60 studies from Czery's Opus 821. 
• Fixed several abcDE bugs and warts.
• Dropped computer vision plans for automatic data collector (ADC) in favor of more straightforward electronic approach inspired by suggestion from Alex Demos. Dr. Demos suggested that using the MIDI data and closing a circuit tied to a particular finger should be enough: attach wires to the fingers and foil to the keys and just use finger-to-key contacts as switches. But I think the problem is a little more complicated than that, as having multiple fingers resting on the keys when a note is struck and the timing granularity of MIDI would likely leave us with considerable ambiguity. I think this needs to be handled as a patch-bay circuit, where a specific finger is tied to a specific key at the point of contact just as two parties were connected on an old switchboard.
• Found incredibly informative book explaining a patch-bay circuit using the Arduino and Pure Data (Pd), a graphical programming language I have actually used before. So I have a pretty clear plan in mind for prototyping ADC. It should take more soldering than thinking.
• Ordered about $300 of components and tools needed to build the system.
• Reached out to a EE friend to sanity check my plans. Waiting to hear back. Will reach out to Dr. Zefran if push comes to shove.
• Met with Dr. Demos and discussed my research plans and musical phrasing at some length. He thought WTC was a good corpus choice, and the missing annotation (fill-in-the-blank) problem seemed to resonate with him (as it did with CR). We concluded that we did not need to address phrasing in the WTC data collection, as we can make assumptions about phrasing because of the style of the music. Anyway, we will be leaving this for future work. By the way, he teaches advanced statistics in the Psychology Department. Hail fellow, well met.

Data Analysis

• Analyzed a number of descriptive charts and clarified some methodological matters.

 Doing

1. Discussing each descriptive chart in detail--its purpose, insight (if any). Top priority now because I want to share with subjects, as promised.
2. Transcribing Czerny Opus 821 to use in missing annotation study. 10% done.
3. Determining predictive value of one fingering sequence choice on another--initial Chi Square foray.
4. Calculating mean edit distance as measure of IAA and "influence."
5. Calculating adoption rate as measure of "influence."
6. Performing Chi Square analysis of exploratory dataset to correlate abbreviated Parncutt fingerings with gender, reach, age, Hanon usage, technical practice, preparation actions, injury, etc.
7. Finishing Parncutt algorithm implementation.

Struggling

• What, me worry?