Thesis Progress, week 11 / by Ernie Gerardo

To say I've had a busy week may be an understatement. The catch is, it was busy with outside work. Ah, life. The consequence to this is that the week was a little slow on the development front. But the following got done:

First off, I got to show Better With You at the MAGNET meetup on Monday, which gave me the opportunity to test the work with a few undergrads.  Here's a short video filmed by my friend LaJuné.

I also ever-so-slightly adjusted the Max patch for this after bringing it to my programming professor, who suggested that I simplify the patch to avoid confusing different elements of the patch.

At this point, there are now six instruments with five sample loops each, giving users 7,776 possible combinations of sounds. According to feedback from my older users (that is, undergrads and my fellow grad students), that's probably enough. Although one comment from a classmate suggested that without some sort of rhythmic syncing, it all gets a little cacophonous,  for the most part, people are just having fun experimenting, which is my goal.

Finally, I took a step back from my paper and revised my outline.  It's still a work in progress, but it contains much more detail.

Since we're practicing the second drafts of our presentations, here are my current slides.

I'm also presenting this project in my music experience design class, so I'm including the slides from that here.

While I'm waiting for the schools I contacted last week to get back to me about conducting a second user test with kids, I've been able to test this thing out with undergrads, which at least gives me some great feedback.

Finally, I caught up with Donovan after two weeks of radio silence. The guy is hard at work on his project, and is mostly on his own since he lacks an advisor that specializes in his area of study. Having read his paper and seen the latest iterations of his work, I can say with confidence that he is making progress.