About Me
I am a senior Computer Science and Mathematics major at Oberlin College, Ohio. I grew up in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
For details about my recent activities, check out my CV.
Interests
Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction
My Honors thesis focuses on providing an effective visualization for real-time information about musical audio. There are more details below and on my CV. In working on this project, I realized that the field of Human-Computer Interaction is where my main interests lie. I am interested in how computers can best serve the needs of users, in this case studying the effects of different visualization techniques on the process of learning a musical instrument.
Robotics and AI
I've been interested in robotics and artificial intelligence for a long time, and since taking an AI class in Spring 2009 and working at a robotics development company (RE2) this summer, I've seen some theoretical and practical aspects of the field. I am interested a wide spectrum of AI problems including machine learning, data mining, and vision.
Music
I play classical piano and flute, and I tune and repair pianos for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Current Projects
A Tool for Real-time Music Analysis and Visualization
This project is my Honors thesis in Computer Science. The goal is to develop a software tool that would help musicians practice more effectively. It will use a microphone to record their playing and will provide real-time, visual output about such features as what notes are being played, intonation, tone, and rhythm.
I have been reading about pitch, rhythm, and tone quality detection algorithms, as well as techniques for visualizing that data. There has been some prior work specifically on the topic of making such data available to music students in real time, and I hope to extend that work.
Since the program is meant to be used by musicians, it needs to have an interface that displays exactly what most musicians will want to know, while hiding the irrelevant technical details. Since I am a musician myself, I have a reasonable idea what this might entail, but I'm planning on collecting the opinions of musicians both in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and in the College.
I have extensively documented my work so far, including readings and other project notes, at the main website for this project.
Website design by Katie Kuksenok.