...
MashCal
Group Members
- Alan Huang, cesium@mitEdgar Salazar, esalazar@mit.edu (mailto: esalazar@mit.edu)Di Liu,
- liudi@mitUlziibayar Otgonbaatar, ulziibay@mit.edu (mailto: ulziibay@mit.edu)
- Daniel Gray, haiiro@mitRyan Lopopolo, lopopolo@mit.edu (mailto: lopopolo@mit.edu)
- TA: Katrina Panovich, kp@mit.edu
Problem Statement
- Composing software is often expensive or highly complicated
- Composing may be inaccessible to users who haven't studied music for years
- lack of ability to recognize notation
- don't know how to play the right instruments
- The majority of people listen to music though, and naturally know what sounds good to them
- linguists note that music springs up everywhere language does
- Even for experienced users, if a person comes up with an idea for a song, without an easy way to "jot it down" they may well forget their tune.
- budding artists or writers can draw sketches or write notes in the margins of their papers when an idea hits, but we aren't taught musical notation at a young age.
- Even for experienced users, the mouse and keyboard aren't natural tools for musical input, so that it takes a long time to write down music. Users can buy MIDI input devices, but this requires learning to use it and lacks portability.
Target Users
- People who want to try their hand at composing or remixing, but haven't bought/don't want to have to learn complicated composer programs to do so (main target)
- More experienced users who want an easy way to record and play with ideas when it wouldn't be worth it to bring out/they don't have access to all their usual equipment.
Proposed Solution
Voices have a pretty good range, and are a natural way for people to produce music. The technology in autotune could be used to convert voices to various instruments (not just pure tones). After this technical step, the challenge would be to create an intuitive and simple interface for editing. We want to create something that works on smart phones, for convenience and by analogy to the popular autotune app. In short our primary goals are:
- Fast Voice-to-MIDI
- Easy to record a melody whenever you need to
- Uncluttered UI that allows basic editing (cut, copy, move, etc. sections of music)
- Allow note twiddling without learning musical notation (raise/lower, shorten/lengthen a tone)
- Ability to manipulate separate tracks of music (overdub, change instrument, transpose, balance, etc.)
- Convenience
Scheduling meetings or events across multiple people can be difficult. It is hard to find an optimal time to host an event because everyone has different schedules. Going to each person individually in order to find good times to schedule an event can be painstakingly long and repetitive. Most importantly, there is always people who do not respond in time or does not respond at all. Since humans are not perfect, they forget or procrastinate. Sometimes, some invitees are not able to respond because they are too busy. As a result, not enough people show up at the events or events have to be rescheduled. There has to be a better way of creating events at times that work best for everyone.
The goal of MashCal is to allow users to create, share, and optimally schedule an event in order to maximize the number of invitees able to attend. By allowing users to create event, invite people, and respond to an event through a mobile interface, they can find optimal times to schedule meetings. With a strong notification scheme on their phone, the invitees are more likely to respond to a request than through emails.Once all people have responded or when the response period closes, MashCal will select the most optimal time that maximizes the number of users able to attend based off their schedule.
GR1 - User and
...