Project Proposal

Last semester I was planning to do Senior Design on a 3D-scanning project. This semester, I decided that since I really like sound, I should do what I like. I met with Robo cup and Professor Badler (+Pengfei). I think I am going with the graphics project over the robotics project because I don’t know I have enough background in hardware to deal with the numerous hardware failures in robotics. (pasting my 1 page project brief) Jiali Sheng Project Brief: I’ve always been interested in sound, and I decided to change my project to something relating to sound this semester. I’ve talked with professor Badler and Pengfei, and became interested in “SPREAD”, and would like to work on how sound distorts over distance in the system. Most specifically, how speech (English) distorts over distance. I would first test the system with the 40 phonemes in English and evaluate the cohesiveness of these phonemes as they distort in the simulation over space. The prediction is that because different frequencies of sound will distort differently in SPREAD, the level of distortion will be different with different phonemes. As a result, speech will sound strange (at best), or incoherent through the system. My project will be focused on making English speech more coherent in the system. Without really knowing how SPREAD works, I am unable to give a concrete plan for the actual algorithm. However I do know that similar problems have been looked at by phone companies because higher frequencies distort more than lower frequencies. To solve this, they sample voice at at least 8 kHz. Voice transcription services also have dealt with similar problems, and they employ a guessing system where if one syllable isn’t clear, they will calculate a list of possible syllables that is likely to appear there and take a guess. To me, I think this problem is a lot more interesting than the problem of scanning better frescoes via a better scanner. And I hope that I will have approval to do this project as my Senior Design. My project blog will likely be located here instead: http://soundgen.tumblr.com/ . This is the blog I used for my physics based animation final, but because the topic is more similar, I think it’ll be a better place.