Recurse Center - Batch 1 - Week 9 - Unsounding


This week started out with a continuation of last week's Un/Sounding the Relational City conference. On Monday I got to see a wonderful talk put on by Cathy Van Eck, and then in the evening there was a performance by Jenn Grossman, Viola Yip, Cathy Van Eck, and Keiko Uenishi.

Back at RC, I started working back on my real-time audio classifier mobile app. One of the things I need to work on is generating spectrograms in my app. I opted to use React Native in order to have it work cross-platform, so for now I'm working on implementing some essential DSP algorithms in Javascript (which is not really a programming language I use often or feel very proficient in). I'm hoping just by doing this project I'll get a lot better at DSP, Javascript, Reactive Native, and eventually doing real-time audio ML on embedded/mobile devices. Quite a tall order / high mountain to climb, but I know its going to feel great once I get there :)

For now I'm researching how to perform the FFT in Javascript. Here are some of my current research notes:

DFT in Python from the ASPMA course

numpy's FFT module

FFT as implemented in librosa (which essentially uses numpy's fft module)

dsp.js

Nayuki's post on how to implement the DFT

Nayuki's post on how to implement the FFT

3brown1blue's visual introduction to the Fourier transform

Intuitive Understanding of the Fourier Transform and FFTs

I didn't get very far with it this week, but having done some initial research I feel good about moving forward with it more next week (especially now with more free time now that ASPMA is done!)

On the audio ML front, I've gotten back in touch with the fastai audio library team and I'm looking forward to contributing to something starting next week. For now, I put my bird sound classifier up on Github, to share with others: Flights of Fancy

As always, I kept up with 6.006 again this week as well as the fastai pt 2 video lectures. Looking forward to continuing that work next week!