Daily Stuff--9/16/2012

Languages--Chinese:

I watched episode 59 of Travel in Chinese. This episode was a review of everything from visiting the Great Wall to exploring the various hutongs of Beijing.

Articles:

There was an interesting article in the New York Times about analyzing music with computers. The goal of this study was to find trends in popular music from as early as the 1950s up to 2010. What's changed and what has stayed the same? The study confirmed that since 1955, music has steadily increased in volume and a lot of people would say it has declined in quality. Also, the article where the findings of this study were published suggest that old popular music is so old now that if it were played today, with a few adjustments, it would be popular again. And this suggests that the same techniques that were used to create popular, catchy songs back in the 50s are still used today. Cover songs tend to be fairly popular but they're not exact replicas of the original songs. Sometimes the rhythm changes, or there's more distortion on the guitars, or sometimes actually instruments aren't used at all and the music is generated by a computer. There's always something that makes the cover unique to the artist that covered the song.

Philosophy:

I read about metaphysics and why it's important in philosophy (Importance of Philosophy). Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with existence and what everything is. It's the foundation of philosophy for the fact that it encompasses just about everything you could possibly question.

Internships:

I looked at a software quality internship on internships.com. The company is RedPrairie Corporation and the job requires doing periodic software testing in order to ensure that the product does what it is supposed to before it ends up with the consumers.

To-Do (9/16/2012):

• For app: 
• Password box
• Wrote code but every time I deploy it, I get an error code of 1. I'm trying to figure out what the problem is.
• Register section (with username, password, etc)
• Read papers on particle filters and speech processing
• Speech processing: This was a chapter about speech processing taken from a book. The chapter outlines what human speech is, how it is quantified, and how it is processed. Speech is produced by the lungs, larynx, vocal folds, teeth, and oral and nasal cavities. Air vibrates in the lungs and oral and nasal cavities, which produces sound. These sounds form phonemes, which then form words, by manipulating the articulators (the teeth and tongue). Phonemes are the second smallest sound patterns, and are usually comprised of one or two individual sounds. Phonemes form morphemes, which are the smallest discrete sound patterns that have meaning (for example the -ed suffix. It means "past tense" in most cases) and morphemes get put together to form words. Each phoneme, depending on the speaker, has a different pitch. Some sound higher, some sound lower, depending on where in the mouth the vowel or consonant is placed. These pitches can get graphed due to the different frequencies of each, which gives a better picture of how an individual sounds compared to another individual.