Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I started today with reading the research paper. I finished it, and moved onto the programming challenge. I finished that, and headed to lunch. After lunch, I found a python programming challenge website, and did those until Edith and I met Michal for a meeting about our presentation at the ASE Symposium on August 20th at 3:30. We talked about what we were going to talk about in the presentation until 4:45, when I posted this.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Today I continued reading the research paper, which is taking longer than i expected, and got a great idea from it. My idea was to have a user controlled sweep, which I posted earlier. I thought about that and worked on it until lunch. after lunch, i tryed a new programming challenge. It was to take in a list of numbers (9 6 5 8, for example), and have a pen go forward the first amount, turn right 90 degrees, then go forward the second amount, turn right 90 degrees, etc. At first I didn't understand it, but then I talked to Michal and got a little bit of headway.

User Defined Sweep

I had an idea today. Earlier, we had problems with an overview of the map, which I will call a gist. We didn't know how to give an overview of the map, but we knew we needed to have one. I thought that maybe we could have the user define the sweep. For example: the user presses a button and sweeps his finger across an area he wants to know more about. The computer will then play a sound for every group of pixels he passes through. For this design, we will need to experiment to get the right settings. we will need to experiment with how big the groups of pixels will be, what shape those groups would be (square, hexagon, triangles, etc.), how fast to do the sweep (same speed as user sweep, or set speed), and what information would be in the sweep. If you have any other ideas, please feel free to post them.

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

First i continued reading the research paper that I had started yesterday. Then, I wrote some thank-you cards that ASE asked us to write. After lunch, i decided I wanted another programming challenge, so I asked Michal for one. He told me to program something that asks for a phone number and gives it back to you in a standard format. For example, if you put in a phone number as 587-9854+985 then it will give it back as (587) 985-4985.

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I started today off by reading a paper called "Sonification of Geo-Referenced Data for Auditory Information Seeking: Design Principle and Pilot Study". At ten, Michal asked to have a meeting, where we talked about the ASE Symposium, and also about ideas to help our blind user understand the map more. After that, I continued reading the paper. After lunch, I decided to work on the Kochs snowflake fractal a little more, but by the time we went to the duck store at 4:30, I had gotten nowhere.

Friday, July 16th, 2010

My first thing to do today was to complete my latest programming challenge. the challenge was to find out if was in a certain list of names. I got that done fairly quickly, then moved onto the next challenge. It was the classes challenge. Michal had written half of the code, then I finished it off. It was challenging, but I learned how to write with classes. After lunch, Michal had me try turtle, which is a drawing application in python. I caught on quickly, and looked at Mr. Leighton (a programming teacher)'s website, where it had some turtle challenges. I quickly completed the first challenge of making shapes, then condensed the code, and made it more flexible. Then I learned what Fractals are, found a python code for a triangle fractal called Koch's snowflake. I played with it, understanding the code more, then changed the code, which used to have only one side of the snowflake, to where it contained the whole snowflake.

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Today, I checked my email to see if Michal had Emailed me since the last time I checked. He didn't, so I started reading "This is Your Brain on Music" again. Then Michal got in, so I went to talk to him about his trip to see Jake, our blind student. After that, I tried learning classes again. It still wasn't clicking. I then put together sound clips for the rest of the soundscapes. After lunch, I read some more of the book, then got another programming assignment that didn't involve classes.

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I started today with reading "This is Your Brain on Music", then tried finding sound clips for the parkland again. I took lunch shortly thereafter when John, another intern came over and asked if I wanted to take lunch. Once I got back, I tried once again to understand classes in python programming language. after I got stuck, I decided it would be easier to wait for Michal to get back from seattle or portland. I continued working on finding sound clips. By the end of the day, I had gathered a horse galloping for the main parkland theme.

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I started today by checking my email, then reading a book called "This is Your Brain on Music". In the book, I read that when a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, it doesn't really make a sound. it makes a vibration that our ears turn into a mental image that we call sound. I read that after lunch, until my meeting with Dr. Steck. I found Dr. Steck in Willamette Hall, (after a bit of confusion) and talked with him about my ideas for a sound cube. We talked for about half an hour, and I got some good information down. We came up with a sound square, and he is thinking of ways to measure purity, which he thought was important, and he thought that those three elements were basically it for the sound cube. This is our first version of the sound square.

Monday, July 12th,

Today Michal is up in either portland or seattle with Jake (our blind test user), and in a meeting. He will get back on Thursday. I started my day by trying to figure out how to put this blog online, then I Emailed Michal about it after I didn't get anywhere. Then I fixed my mouse, because it was driving me crazy with its squeaking. I also gave Lauradel her windows 7 CD back. After that, I worked on finding parkland sounds again but, once again, found nothing suitable. I got the blog online, and started working on the python class challenge, but didn't understand it, and emailed Michal once again.

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Today we went up to corvallis for the ASE Midsummer conference.

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

When I first got to work, I checked my email, and saw that Mr. Steck had emailed me back about seeing him, and the time he had in mind was Tuesday, July 13th, at 4:00 PM. I didn't see any problem with that, so I emailed him back to say that that was a good time to meet. I continued working on the parkland sound clips, but once again, it was hard to find sound clips without extra noise, but I narrowed my search down. I started thinking it might be a good Idea to go out and record some original clips to get exactly what we want. I also took up another challenge of rational number problems and python class operations. I read through the python class section of the python book, but will probably have to read it again, because I didn't really understand it fully.

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Today I Emailed Mr Steck about meeting him to talk about music and sound classifications. Also, I finished my complete square root function program in Python, by making the program stop running after the square root gets within .00001 of the real answer. I also spent some time editing the sound clips from the Water profile of the soundscape project, and started moving into the Parkland clips. I had a little bit of trouble finding a parkland clip that had no excess noise and wasn't annoying. I ended up finding a bird chirp for the boundary sound, but nothing for the internal sound. Today we also had a meeting with our collaborators, where we basically discussed what we have already discussed in the meetings with just Michal, Edith and me.

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

I started off the day by researching some more information about sound, specifically some websites Mr. Steck gave me, which are:

http://www.sound-physics.com/Sound/Longitudinal-Wavelength/
http://www.sound-physics.com/Sound/Sound-Waves/
http://www.sound-physics.com/Sound/Speed-Of-Sound/
http://www.sound-physics.com/Sound/Pitch-and-Frequency/

Then, for the second half of the day, I put together some sound clips for the water profile of the soundscape project. There are almost finished, I just have to edit them a little bit to finish them up.

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Today there was no work because of the July 4th holiday.