Only at Tech
Launched on November 4, 2009, Only at Tech is a site that allows Georgia Tech students to share the unique culture experienced on campus. Submitters post stories about funny or amusing things they see, and readers rate the stories they feel best represent Tech culture. The site is also closely linked with a Facebook group and Twitter account. I started the site with three fellow students — Holden Link, David Turk, and Kaliyana Finney — as we looked for ways to procrastinate on a group assignment in Smalltalk, and have been astounded by the popularity of Only at Tech and the stories that we receive on a daily basis.
Indian CBR
In the spring of 2008, I took an introductory course to Music Technology with Professor Parag Chordia, Music 3450 HP. After becoming interested in Music Information Retrieval and learning that a Content-Based Recommendation group was starting up in the newly-formed GT Center for Music Technology, I spoke with Professor Chordia and became involved. I then submitted a Research Proposal to UROP, and now I will be able to dedicate a significant portion of my time in the Spring 2009 semester to working on this research.
We hope to implement a CBR system that is specific to Indian music, taking advantages of unique features in this body of music. An immediate application of the research is the creation of a streaming radio station tuned to each listener’s personal taste. For an upcoming research symposium I have written an abstract, which gives an overview of the process we are using to create recommendations.
Piano pitch tracking
My final project for the Music 3450 course looked at the problem of pitch-tracking a one-line piano melody. My goal was to be able to load a sound file containing a melody and produce a musical score displaying the notes that were played in the file. In a series of Matlab scripts, I was able to complete the project, by using onset detection via the harmonic product spectrum technique and a standard FFT on a signal, after it was cleaned up with a Hamming window, zero-padding, and a slight down-sampling. I was able to learn the fundamentals of sound and some of the basic techniques of pitch-tracking for this project, and was introduced to the incredibly-interesting world of Music Information Retrieval.