PDI Studio 5

PDI Studio V Feedback

David Haggerty

• Add a low pass filter for <70 and >500, https://playground.arduino.cc/Code/Filters

Matt Stormer

• A good way to display the Serial Monitor information, https://processing.org/

 

Conner Green

Temple University 2019

B.S. Sound Engineering

Conner is majoring in the field of music and sound engineering, and is currently in a band. Originally the concept was described to Conner who gained a lot of interest almost immediately. He was able to provide some interesting insight for the device, saying that one thing that he would really like to see is our team to get together with someone studying in the field of musical theory who could give us some helpful information about how to better solve our problem with reading the frequencies since they don’t stay constant and for upper level musicians multiple strings will be played at once which will affect the frequency. He loved the concept saying that he shared the idea with a couple friends in his band who also thought it could be a very beneficial tool for rising musicians. They also expressed interest in the possibility of using the same technology to come up with a game like guitar hero but with real notes that could help people learn how to play instruments, there was also a good deal of interest in the color association of the project which they said could be really interesting as a visible way of enjoying music.

 

Liam McBain

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

B.S. Electrical Engineering

Liam grew up playing many instruments, guitar included. We reached out to him for some help with our code, and pitched the project idea to him. He thought it would be a great idea that he would have loved to use while learning guitar and piano especially, and he would use it to this day because of the fun, colorful aspect. He explained how unique a guitar is, which was the root cause of our issues with calculating the frequency (or frequencies) of a single chord. The initial sound from a chord being strummed is called the attack which resonates and gradually diminishes. However, there are many variables as to how a chord is played. It could be played slower, in which case there are multiple attacks as each string is plucked. This resonating sound may not have the same frequency as a regularly played chord since the first string played by fade more quickly before interacting with the last strings played. It could be up-strummed, which means the order of the strings being played are reversed, and the attack is different, but the resonating frequency may be the same as the chord being down-strummed at the same speed. Another incalculable variable is the buzzing noise a string makes if the player is not pressing the string to the fret hard enough. A solution to this would be to catch this sound’s frequency and display some sort of error message for the device user. Another issue we haven’t considered yet is the use of a capo, or barred strings. Overall, Liam liked the concept, but for the sake of our project, he advised us to work on finding the string frequencies since chord frequencies are so complex.

 

Collar City Guitars

Peter, John, Mike, & Scooter

199 4th St, Troy, NY 12180

Collar City Guitars is a guitar store in Downtown Troy, NY. They are very open to talk and learn new things, and give out what they call “free opinions.” They are a great resource to discuss our concept with, since music shop owners are typically very well informed and love what they do, especially in small companies. We reached out to them over the phone to request to speak in person. Unfortunately, we were not able to meet up with them due to class and/or work scheduling conflicts. We did not feel like we could properly communicate about the concept over the phone since it was during shop hours and we did not want to take them away from actual customers. In the future, we hope to meet at the shop to further develop our project.