7/2/10 Daily Journal of AT

Today was kind of slow. Primarily, it was spent testing different multipliers and size ranges for the Beat Finder. The multiplier is how the threshold for determining whether something is a beat or not is found (if the given data is higher than the average times the multiplier, it's a beat). The tutorial I found said that the most reliable multiplier is within a function relating to variance, but after getting a lot of screwy data, I decided to work with a base multiplier for now. Trouble is, it works differently on different files. With something with a strong base beat, like the Thunder intro, it does quite well, but on anything with a more even sound, it usually doesn't pick up the beats.

I was able to successfully implement the Bark sizing to the frequencies. Previously, when I wanted to find the beat in a given range of hertz, I used a multiplier, which worked well on low frequencies, and poorly on high ones. The Bark sizing works on a semi-logarithmic scaling, so low ranges are still accurate, but high ones can also be found. For example, here's the base beat of Thunder Intro:


The handclaps are still imperceptible ):

We also tried putting together our GUI and FFTs, and found out that we don't actually know what the height of the peaks is in, other than relative loudness. Presumably, since we're using the magnitude rather than the direct data, there is not necessarily any correlation between heights, volts, or decibels, other than relatively.