Week 10: Parabolic

Published on 03.13.2020 in [rc]

Whew. Quite a week. With all the news and everything going on with the global pandemic, its been a bit of an unproductive, chaotic week. I do want to just write at least something about what I did, just to keep these posts going...

This week I have been extending my work on Flights of Fancy in collaboration with Kelly Heaton to take a recording of her electronic bird sculpture and run it through my bird sound classifier to see what bird specieies it predicts.

The work is now up online here: Deep Fake Birdsong

We started by taking a recording of Kelly's electronic bird sculptures:

Then I used my Flights of Fancy software to extract spetrograms from that recording, and ran them against my classifier to see what birds it predicts these sounds came from. Here are some results:

We also produced a bar chart showing the amount of of times a speicies was detected over the 122 segments.

We submitted thr project to Ars Electronica, Hackaday, and Project 61. We'll see how this project develops!

Otherwise, I didn't get much else done programming wise. I did do my first competitive coding contest though! I got one right 8-)

I also started two new study groups at Recurse Center - one on Computational Audio and one on Machine Learning.

For the Computational Audio Study Group, one RC member showed off how to build an in-browser turner, and another showed off this neat in-browesr DSP language called SOUL.

For the Machine Learning Study Group, we are all collectively reading a paper on Independent Component Analysis, and I'm individually going to read about Autopool.

With that, for next week I plan on continuing on with 6.006, fastai lessons, implmenting STFT in JS/React Native for the Computational Audio Study Group, and doing some more audio ML/reading of papers for the Machine Learning Study Group.