Axtell's Notes: June 25

Today while Tayloe worked on getting a beat finder, I continued to update FFTGUI and BigGUI. We ran some full length songs and got results that were recognizable as that song.

Maple Leaf Rag (Hamming Window)

If you play the song while looking at this, several musical patterns stick out as they repeat. The other song we ran was Freeze Ray from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog which didn't show as clear notes, but did show a very clear rhythm.

Freeze Ray (Hamming Window)

As can be seen from both screen shots, the BigGUI controls got an overhaul today. I'm not sure if I like the new setup, but it seems better than the old one.

I added the same zoom and scroll that the peak graph has on its x-axis to the FFT graph's x-axis. On both of those, the numbers on the x-axis do not scroll with the graph.

I spent more time than I should have learning about keyboard shortcuts today. Java makes it very easy to set a shortcut of Alt+anything, but on Mac keyboards, pressing Alt+anything makes special characters. This means that while trying to use shortcuts, umlauts were added to my sample size and 1024¨ is not a number. To use control, I had to change how my buttons were set up a bit add two lines of code for each shortcut to set them up, but they work! Huzzah.

Lastly, I got my color algorithm to work! Now the same block of code is used for any window. I tested this on several files including an a440 that fades in and then out made by Tayloe:

Fade (Hamming Window)

The colors work the same way: blue is the quietest and progresses through the rainbow until red, the loudest.

Next week we should be starting to play with a beat finder. We plan on adding grey vertical lines on the peak graph showing where the beats are. We are also talking about trying to make a .wav of the beat. I'm also looking at different possibilities for the BigGUI menu as it is sort of a mess.