138: Best Song Around!
I don't remember if I mentioned it, but my EE368 class (that's "Discrete-Time Signals and Systems") had a competition last week to see who could make the best song out of just MATLAB (that's a math-focused coding software), and our entry was amazing (because one of my groupmates and I locked in on it hard), and we won! The competition was all voting-based, between the 10 groups in the class, and there were some very good entries (someone did a great Take On Me rendition, I voted for them), but we won! I think the nostalgia value was honestly like half of the win, with the execution being the other half.
Here's a screen recording of the song, with the code in the background
The code honestly wasn't that complicated, the hard (arduous, not difficult) part was mapping the notes to exact frequencies, and then my lab partner Sam (same Sam as Saturday night) cooked up a reference piece where the system would take the resonant frequencies of a real piano note and map them to the frequency of the note we were playing, so that it sounded like a real piano, which was dope as hell.
We got 110% on that lab for our win, and my grade in the class is now like a 95%, which is great.
Today was our last lab for that class, and it's one that I'll miss. The professor was great, the topics were interesting, but understandable, and my lab group was great (we finished the entirety of today's lab, including the report, during our 3 hours today). We have a "lab final" that's due December 2nd, but it's essentially just the pre-lab for the lab that we would have done, and I have a whole two weeks for it, so I'm not at all worried.