View this PageEdit this PageAttachments to this PageHistory of this PageHomeRecent ChangesSearch the SwikiHelp Guide

Project ideas

Here are some general project ideas to get you started:

Wearable Computing


  1. Design and create an audio-only wearable computer
  2. Use a wearable computer to analyze the audio and speech in your daily life to determine context
  3. Explore how audio cues can be used in a wearable environment in conjunction with the graphical display to aid pointing/clicking, typing, finding information, alerting etc.

Data Sonification


  1. Identify an interesting data set and explore novel ways of sonifying it to identify trends
  2. Design and implement an ambient audio interface to aid a person

Accessibility


  1. Design and develop a better screen reader for audio-only browsing of the web. Might be geared to people with visual disabilities, or to people browsing via PDA/wearable computer
  2. Explore how audio can aid a person in navigating a graphical user interface(GUI)
  3. Design and develop an audio-centric PDA that uses speech input and audio output
  4. Aid wayfinding for people with vision impairments, or cognitive impairments.

Virtual Environments


  1. Develop an audio-only virtual environment and evaluate how different users navigate, what they retain from the experience, or their level of immersion. Correlate this with the types of sound cues that are in the environment, the size of the world, the method of navigation, the fidelity of the audio, or whether the sounds are dynamic etc.
  2. Develop a prototype system and use it to analyze how audio and graphics effect users' experience in a VE. Perhaps looking at the issue listed previously.

Augmented Reality


  1. Develop an audio-centric AR experience that might be used for
  2. Experiment with using sound cues in an AR application to make people do what you want them to do without them realizing it. Usually in AR you have no control over where people are looking or moving to. This can be a problem if you need them to see something, or don't want them to miss something important/cool.
  3. Run a user study to see how differing levels of props in the real environment or visuals effect peoples' experience with an audio-only ar experience(do they remember more, navigate better, enjoy themselves more etc.)

Digital Signal Processing


  1. Create a novel plugin or sound processing program that can be used to create an interesting sound effect (maybe work in conjunction with a visual effects group in Irfan Essa's Digital Visual FX class). Might incorporate an analysis of associated video (i.e. automatically synchronizes footstep sounds, processes the sound based on some property of the video such as how fast a foreground object is moving etc)
  2. Automatically determine the tempo of a singer's voice in order to modify the accompanying music during a performance.
  3. Make a bad singer sound good
  4. Use doppler shift of a moving object to do something cool
  5. Build a system that analyzes and characterizes the frequency response of speakers in a particular room.
  6. Construct a granular synthesizer or audio processor. (Simple granular synthesis requires no special DSP knowledge and can generate some very interesting effects)

Musical Interfaces


  1. Explore novel interfaces to create music. This would be especially interesting if the interfaces allowed non-musicians to create music.
  2. Interactive Music. Explore and develop an interactive music system for use in sonification, games, or movies etc.
  3. Explore the use of images as an interface for composition or synthesis.

Music Synthesis


  1. Develop a engine to explore some form of synthesis, such as physical modeling.
  2. Develop a novel interface to something like CSOUND.
  3. Develop an engine for algorithmic music composition. In its most simple form, the engine could generate a MIDI file based on static input parameters. A more expressive and interesting engine could process real-time input from the musician and produce a real-time MIDI stream.

Music or Sound Visualization


  1. Develop an interesting method of visualizing a musical piece, sounds in the environment, sounds generated by a computer interface or a television show/movie(maybe for deaf users). Basically, identify a use for such a visualization.



List your thoughts on possible Group Projects here:

After living over in Europe last year, I got into dance mixes. I was thinking it'd be cool to write a program which took all your mp3s and combined them into an ongoing mix. It could actually produce an output file (i.e. write the whole mix to a new mp3) or just create and play it on the fly. The first would probably be easier but the second would be nicer for home/club/party use. This would require analyzing the songs and determining good locations to switch as well as figuring out what song would be best to transition to from the current song. Finally, if time permitted, some cool transitions could be added as well.
Another thing I've been thinking of... after our brief introduction to granular synthesis, I'd like to explore it some. Perhaps developing some sort of granular synthesizer program would be cool. Maybe we could use some sort of midi type notation for the actual note and timing specification and you could supply it with numerous granules, which are adjusted to create the proper pitch and pasted together to make the whole song. I'm sure we'd have to look into it a lot more, this is just a thought.

Link to this Page