Progress on Report

I have finished with the product testing phase, and now I'm still working on the second draft of the Report. I have took the evidence of my interviews with the experts, except one with my guitar teacher. The evidence is their signatures.

I have sent the first draft, and now I am still working on fixing parts on my report for the second draft. What I have to do next is making sure that I fixed the parts on my report that my supervisor had told me to fix.

Update on Progress

Currently I am still on the phase of testing my product with different people. Those people are my friends who lived in Sentul. I haven't tested my product with teens whose age are different.

So far, I have only tested 2 people, and that's only the beginning tests. Those tests are only recording the heart rate for the 1st, 3rd, and 5th minute after the two people jogged for 5 minutes. This one is still the trials without the songs. I am planning to test my product with the same and different people tomorrow, and also throughout this holiday.

 This is a photo of one of my friend who's jogging. This is done so that the person's heart rate will increase

 This is a photo of me counting one of my friend's heart rate, by checking his pulse in his wrist for 60 seconds.








In 14 December which is on last Friday, I tested my product with my guitar teacher. He's an expert in music since he's a musician and he's experienced with recording and playing guitar. I asked him about the quality of my music in terms of sound quality from the recording, how I composed the songs, duration of the songs, theme, and how I played the guitar. He gave his comments and feedbacks about my product, and rated the songs from 1 to 5.

Below is a photo of my guitar teacher listening to my songs. He gave plenty of comments about my product, so I think it'll help a lot for feedbacks and knowing my product's quality or success rate for how good or bad the songs are. But this is not to test whether the songs are relaxing, because to know whether the songs are relaxing or not, I must test the product using a different method, not surveys.

Other than only testing my product, I am starting to write the report. Below is the plan from the timeline for this month.

I have finished editing the evidence movie for the product submission day. I have also checked my movie and final product. Now, I'm testing my product, and have already started writting the report before the 3rd week of this month. I am actually earlier with my progress. What I have to do next is to finish the product testing and also finish writting the report until next month.

Update on Product Testing

I have started to test my product by interviewing Mr. Scott, who's an expert on Psychology, and also by giving out surveys to some of my friends.

I interviewed Mr. Scott 2 days ago, which is on Tuesday 11 December 2012. I interviewed him about how good is my product in terms of Psyschology. I asked him how much will he rate the song from 1 to 5, and then his comments about the songs, feedbacks, and then he told me that my songs could be good for relaxation, and also for background music. He rated 4 for my song, and then he told me that I could add more variations to the song.

I interviewed Dr. Iskandar today. What I have learnt from him is that to determine whether my songs could help people feel relaxed, I need to do trials with the songs by measuring people's heart rate after they listened to my songs.

I surveyed my friends yesterday, which is on Wednesday 12 December 2012. I surveyed 6 of my friends that day. The survey contains:

- Rate the song quality from 1-5
- Their opinion whether the song is relaxing
- Comments

I did another survey today with my friend at school.










I am now in the product testing phase. Interviewing Mr. Scott is to know the Psychological effects from my song. I have learned from Dr. Iskandar from the interview with him about how to know whether my songs are relaxing by comparing the heart rate after resting without my songs and with my songs after doing several exercises or activities. From this, I must plan to test my songs with my friends. I must do more than 3 trials to proove the success rate. My target audiences are teenagers, so I'll test the songs with my friends during the upcoming holiday so I'll have more time. What I need to do next is to interview Ibu Marina, who's a music expert. From her interview, I could learn whether I have created good quality songs or not from how good are the compositions and equipment used. I must also arrange time with my friends to test my product.

Reflection on my Progress

So far, I have still continued my progress based on my plan. I have followed my plan well. I have finished working on my product. My final product is complete, so now what I have to do is preparing the stuffs for the Product Testing which would be survey questions, camera, and other things. I also still need to edit my Evidence video which will be also due with the final product. My supervisor said that the video must be burned on a CD. I have burned my songs on a CD, and convert it to an Audio CD.

What I did well so far is keeping up with the planning, and what I didn't do well enough is I didn't have evidence such as pictures or videos of my interview with the experts when receiving information for my research.

Update on Creating Progress

I have found a problem on my songs that I have recorded. I found out that I did a mistake after recording, and when exporting the songs. I should have selected the sound as Mono instead of Stereo, so that both Left and Right speakers or microphones would have the music. If I selected Stereo, only one of them only have the sound.

Fixing that problem is simple. What I did is using Audacity to change the sound wave into Mono. After that, the sound in both Left and Right microphones/headphones, and speakers would work.

Below are screenshots of what I did using Audacity to fix the problem.

In this picture, the red highlight shows that the waves are still in Stereo. The sound only comes out from 1 part in my earphones.

 In this picture, I am changing the sound into Mono by splitting into Mono.

 In this picture, the sound is already Mono, and works in both earphones that I'm using.

Reflection on Progress

What I've learned after recording all those songs is that I need to be careful when playing the guitar, I need to use good equipment, and understand how to use them as well.

What I meant when I said being careful playing the guitar is not to pick the strings too hard, or not picking the guitar steadily like playing too hard and then playing too soft. When I picked too hard, the wave in audacity when recording will go out of range and create an unpleasant buzzing sound. That made me recording songs over and over until I get the good one without much buzzes.

When I said using good equipment, I meant that I must find good cables and the jack converter. I bought the bad jack converter, it creates buzzing sounds when recording. The microphones must also be the good ones which doesn't record too much background noises, which I had some at home. I must also understand how to connect the cables from the microphone receiver to my laptop, or using the receiver in order to record. Luckily using them are easy.

This is the timeline of this month and what to do for the next month:

So far, from this month, I have worked according to the timeline I made. I have now finished recording and since early of this month I have finished composing my songs. Now I still need to compile the evidence videos and edit them on this last week of the month as written in my timeline.

During recording, I noticed that if I used different guitar playing techniques for recording the relaxing songs, the songs wouldn't be always relaxing. Because of that, I decided to not follow the design specification of using different techniques, so that the songs would be flowing well, not too complicated, and always maintain the slow and soft guitar sound.

What should I do next is to start editing the evidence videos and then burn the songs into an audio CD so they would be ready to be tested as a final product. I already bought a CD so what I should prepare next is knowing how to edit the videos by using the fast-forward effect, which I stil didn't understand how.

Progress

Today, I have finished recording the seventh song, which I decided it should be the replacement for the fifth recorded song, because that fifth song has the keys not combining well. The new song used better keys and it's a little different from the other songs, because this seventh song has more melodies instead of just playing the chords.

This is the seventh song that I wrote.

This is a photo of me recording the seventh song with the guitar and the laptop.






What I need to do now is only to burn the songs into a CD, and convert the CD into an Audio CD. I can burn those songs with iTunes, or Windows Media Player. After that, I will do some interview with the experts to find out whether my prouct is successful or not.