2023: Teaching Robots how to Drum
or Robots Rest Ye Merry Gentleman
30 Dec 2023 - atrodo - Song: God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman by Lidsey Stirlin
Another year, and another New Years blog. This year, however, is a bit different since there have been no other blog posts this year. It is a bit representative of the past year as there was not much teaching of robots happening for most of the past year.
First, some hard statistics:
- Made 31 commits
- Changed about 48 files to the tune of around 6,500 inserts and 400 deletions
This year had a bit of unfortunate turn of events. Towards the beginning of the year, I fell into a deep rabbit hole of perfection; what was being produced was all of a sudden well below expectations. It was at that point that I was feeling burnt out and decided to take a short break to work on some other projects.
That short break ended up lasting most of the year as I ended up working on multiple other side projects. At one point I was at 4 additional projects deep. While I’m still slowly digging out of all of those projects, I have been able to finally returned to working on teaching these robots to drum.
To actually start tackling how to tune and improve the training process, I’ve taken the time to reorganize the streaming features I first created in 2019. This time, instead of streaming an entire song from start to finish, there is now an intelligent process that ensures that the pipeline is filled with a raw audio stream. This allows for a uneven amount to be played while I figure out what’s going on and what I need to do. To get this far, I also needed to work on cleaning up some of the uncommitted code and add some more niceties.
The most interesting bug to come from that was the case when it would read/write an odd number of bytes. Since the stream input is in 16-bit raw PCM data, writing only 1 byte instead of two would cause a misalignment. Normally, it would work fine since the next read will cover the odd byte, however if the odd byte was the last in a file, and the next byte was in a new file, for example when swapping files, then static would erupt. I discovered this because I would be listening to the 5 second silence file, and randomly it would get replaced with static.
And that’s pretty much where I’m at at the end of 2023. It is unfortunate that more had not happened, but I can only look forward to doing more in the upcoming year.