MARIN ACADEMY RESEARCH COLLABORATIVE​
STUDENT BLOGS
Blog Post #1
01.14.19
Hi everyone.
I’m Sam, and this is my first blog post for my MARC project. So to begin with, I’ll tell you a bit about myself. I’m a junior in the MARC program. I chose to join because I’ve always loved science. Figuring out how things work has always intrigued me, and I’m really excited to be doing just that at MA. I also love to play piano and guitar, and I listen to a lot of music. And I think that’s a pretty good segway into my project, whose title is (tentatively) “On the Possibility of Attaining Absolute Pitch by Means of Sensory Association Induced by Mechanized Wearable Technology.” What I’m essentially attempting to do is to train people to be able to hear a note in the western tonal scale (the 12 semitone scale we’re all familiar with), and immediately know which note it is. This skill is one that a small percentage of people have naturally, and is often called “Perfect Pitch,” or more accurately, Absolute Pitch (AP). The fact that some people have it suggests that it is something we all have the capability of possessing, but we can’t use it because it is not “unlocked” in our brains. My goal is to unlock it using our sense of touch. Researchers have been able to link senses together before. For example, scientists from the silicon valley based company Neosensory use a vest with motors inside to vibrate different parts of the back and torso in response to sound. If, say, a deaf person uses this vest and trains their hearing and feeling enough, they will begin to be able to understand what people are saying around them; they can essentially “feel” words. My hope is that if I can use the vest or something like it to train people to feel pitches instead of words, the part of their brain that has the capability of AP will be unlocked. Then, by either gradually reducing the vests intensity or removing it immediately, I should be able to see if their AP remains, and if it can function properly independent of the external stimulus. So that’s the gist of my project. Hopefully it makes sense and hopefully you all are as excited about it as I am!
Hey all,
This past week, I finally emailed with Mike from Neosensory and set up an appointment with him for next friday. I’m going to go down to their office in Palo Alto and he is going to show me all of the cool stuff that they are working on. One of the things that he is going to show me is the “musical tuner” vest, which is exactly what I hope to use for my AP training. If it is in good enough shape within the next few days, I’m going to send him my proposal so that he can look at it and come up with some ideas for us to discuss regarding my next steps in the project. Ideally, I’ll be able to borrow the vest or one like it for my experiments, or at least buy it. If that doesn’t work, though, I’ll see if I can alternatively borrow the bracelet, which is similar to the vest, but it uses vibrations on the wrist, which makes it cheaper and lighter, albeit slightly less effective. And if I can’t get my hands on one of those, well, then I guess I’ll just figure things out from there. Anyway, I’m really excited to meet with everyone at Neosensory, and I really hope that Mike or one of his colleagues can help me with my project, or even be my mentor. Until next time!
-Sam
Blog Post #2
01.25.19
Blog Post #3
02.01.19
Hey all,
I finally went to Neosensory! I got to meet with Mr. Mike Perrotta and Dr. David Eagleman, and I got to try on the VEST. I learned a lot. I haven’t mentioned it before in my blog posts I don’t think, but the vest that I want to use, the one that can train you to identify pitches by feeling it, has already been made. A prototype exists at Neosensory, and it is actually Mike’s project. On it, there are 24 motors all around the torso, and each is mapped to a semiton (a half-note) from D2 to D4. Then you run the smartphone app that’s wirelessly connected to the vest (with bluetooth, I’d guess). When the app is 95% sure it detects a pitch, it vibrates that pitch’s corresponding motor on the vest. It feels really cool actually. The structure of the visit was as follows. First, mike gave me a quick tour of the office. He showed me the products and introduced me to the team. Then we went into the conference room, where we about my project and the theory and ideas behind it. That went on for about half of the meeting, and then we spent the remaining half trying on the vest and messing around with a guitar, and talking about my project from a logistical perspective. The problem is, as Neosensory tries to move towards mass production of their products, everyone who works there has been super busy. Additionally, the vests are quite expensive to make in their prototype stage, so the bottom line is that getting my hands on one won’t be easy. Mike posed two main options: one, since he mostly works on his musical vest on the weekends when he has time, he could lend his to me for a month at most for free. And two, if I or MA were willing, we could pay Neosensory to make one of the vests for my project. This would be quite expensive, but I think it could really be worth it. But that kind of thing isn’t really blog-worthy, so I’ll just leave it at that. Anyway, I think I’m in a realy good place right now with my project, and I hope that I’ll be able to get my hands on a vest soon. Until next time!
-Sam
Hey Everyone,
It’s been a little while, but there hasn’t been much going on, in all honesty. After my visit to Neosensory, Mike got back to me and said that I could either rent out a VEST that they would make for me for $100 per month, or otherwise I could have them make one that I could keep for $900. Ideally, the latter option would be best, as it would allow for the most flexibility, but procuring the funds for that seems like a bit of a stretch. I think I’ll probably end up going with the renting option, but if I can find a way to get enough money, I’d like to buy it. Of course, before I can get to that, I first need to get a complete and solid experimental design down. I have a rough version from my proposal, but based on what I’ve been talking to Shawn and Mike about, I’ll definitely be needing to make some changes. My dad did a bit of research at a UCSF fellowship before I was born, and he said that there’s always something that you don’t expect that will come up. And if I’m not careful enough in planning out my experiment, something like that could potentially sabotage my project; if there’s something I realize I should have been recording after months of gathering data, if it’s essential, then all of that work will have gone to waste. So I’m going to be really thorough about designing my procedure methods in the next few months. I’ve begun to consider my next steps at this point as well. For one thing, I’d like to learn more about how the VEST works before I get it, because if I end up getting my own, I may want to change it around to better suit my needs. But in order to do so, I should have a firm grasp on how it works. I will have to study the motor system, the sensors, and the circuitry to begin with. I’ll probably get some help from Mike with that, or someone like John Bretan (he’s the Electrical Engineering teacher here at MA). Another thing I’d like to do is learn C sharp, the coding language that Mike uses to program the tuning vest. This will certainly be a challenge, but I think that it will be attainable if I can find the right online course. And the last thing I need to do to work on my procedure is to get the proper training for using human test subjects. This would probably entail things like learning to write consent forms and how to address people’s concerns in the research setting. Obviously my research isn’t going to be anything dangerous, but I’ll still need to go through the process. Ok that’s about it for this update; sorry it was a bit long winded. Until Next time!
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-Sam
Blog Post #4
03.08.19
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Blog Post #5
03.15.19
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Hey everyone,
So I haven’t been doing too much actual work with my project this past week as much as planning out my next steps. So basically, not much has changed since last time. The one thing that’s different, though, is that I’ve come up with a good Science Symposium project and proposed it. What I plan to do is give a bunch of students at MA a perfect pitch test, and then also record their age, sex, years of musical experience, musical taste, race/ethnicity, and first language. Once I gather all the data from this, I will put it in a spreadsheet and analyse it to see what trends, if any, emerge. This way, I will be able to more carefully chose my sample group when the time comes to do my experiment with the vest in a way that will hopefully reduce the margin or error. Who knows, maybe I could even get it published to help others who are studying perfect pitch. The other thing I did was email Mike from Neosensory to see what coding languages I should learn and what specific pieces of them I should focus on in order to learn how to program the vest if I want to. But that’s pretty much all for this week. Until next time!
-Sam
Hey Everyone,
The trend of uneventfulness continues! Not much has really happened. I got an email back from Mike, where he told me that I should work on learning the coding languages for android apps, since that’s what he used to program his vest. But I’m not quite sure if that’s the direction that’s best for me to go in, because I have an iphone, and I don’t know if the code is the same for the iphone and the android. I asked him that and am still waiting for a response from him, but in the meantime, I have been learning some bash code which could in theory help with data collection and organization. I hope to hear back from Mike soon, and I plan on learning how to program the app as quickly as I can. My goal is to have all the knowledge and skills related to my project down before I start testing, because I can’t afford to waste time if I’m going to be renting the vest for $100/month. That’s about it for this post. Until next time!
-Sam