DEV Community: Jean Carlo Zuniga

Code project for mixing songs together, idea explanation

Jean Carlo Zuniga — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 03:11:45 +0000

This blog contains an idea that I have in mind which combines two of my biggest passions; listening to music and coding. The goal here is to explain the problem and the proposed solution to implement, and gather all the possible feedback I hopefully get here in order to transform the idea into something useful while learning a lot during the process.

Context

I listen to lots of music daily, but I have noticed that given the few free time I have for discovering new songs, I often end up listening to mixes of the hottest music of the week or month to be up to date with trends.
These mixes are a unique kind of art, just like drawings, singing, coding, painting, etc. because they have the essence of the disk jokey (DJ) impregnant all over the place. You can even detect a DJ just by listening to her/his work.
The Djs, in order to have a mix that is enjoyable, work in several basic characteristics about it. I don't know much about musical theory, so I speak from an aficionado point of view, but for example these mixes have to sound harmonic, the songs that compose them have to be smoothly synchronize so they enter in the right time to the loop, they have to show lots of sparks of the dj essence; like effects here and there (scratches, sound effects, etc.) among others.

The idea

Given all these inputs, my idea is to code a solution for creating these mixes automatically and upload them to stream platforms to be listened by anyone.
In order to achieve this; I will build a tool for analysing songs as data streams, and select the ones more likely to sound good after mix them together. This sentence took 3 or 4 seconds to be written, but right there are the biggest challenges of the project:

to select the songs from a given dataset that would create a mix that people can listen and enjoy.
to actually mix songs together and give the "human" essence to the final result so no one can detect it was created by a machine.

After all that is done, there will be trivial tasks like upload the mixes to music platforms. Don't will cover them in this blog.

How to get there?

So as to achieve to select songs that have potential to sound good mixed together, I will be using Fourier transforms. There is a huge theoretical explanation on this amazing mathematical process, but summed up; the wave that represents a sound in a bidimensional space is the combination of several waves that, by sounding together; compounds that very first wave. By using Fourier; we become able to discompone a wave in the ones that conform it.
When I start having songs in such a granular detail and I get to store them in data structures for working with them, the process of finding similarities will become more robust since there are lots of variables to consider to actually find positive matches, meaning songs that will sound good together.

Graphic: Christine Daniloff.

The previous process is going to be executed in a huge amount of songs so I can have a big enough dataset to produce daily mixes with high quality (given the few aspects about a mix quality that we saw before, and more I will find out in the way). The idea is to have some sort of machine learning, with a clear training set of positive matches; that can grab this information and actually find coincidences.
The expected inputs to have in order to create a mix are a set of songs, with the exact time where one can follow the other in order to create a smooth mix to listen. After I achieve this, I will focus in making it sound more "human" by coding the effects (in very general terms) that makes a mix have the essence of a DJ.

Conclusion

At last; we just did a walk through of an idea that is in the process of grab form. I wrote this with the humble goal of collect all feedback from you readers, so I can consider more details of the problem to solve, get to know already existing things that may help, validate if this is a valid approach for solving the problem, and so on. If you have any feedback please reach me out at: jeanczm@gmail.com so we can catch up on whatever topic you want to related with this blog.

Thanks for reading :).

How to boost your strengths in a self awareness way

Jean Carlo Zuniga — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 06:37:20 +0000

As human beings, we all have a set of strengths to use in our daily interactions with other ones in our family, school or work. Get to know them, and having tools to remember them (especially in difficult moments) is really important to give the best of us in any circumstance that comes to our day. In this lecture you can find a set of techniques so you can apply your strengths in a self awareness way; wich means that you are completely aware of your best strengths and the one that better fits for confronting any situation.

Our set of strengths

Based on Synchronicity, here's a list of the most important strengths we all have, please read them regardless of their position, in fact: they are ordered alphabetically, so you don't mind the order (we are going to see next that the order is actually an important thing in our set).

Appreciation for beauty and excellence
Courage
Creativity
Curiosity
Enthusiasm
Equanimity
Forgiveness
Gratitude
Honesty
Hope
Humor
Judgment
kindness
Leadership
Love
Love for Learning
Modesty
Perseverance
Perspective
Prudence
Self-regulation
Social Intelligence
Spirituality
Team work

Self-awareness in the strengths usage

First of all, you need to know your set of strengths. We all have the same items in that set, but in different order. So, you can try programs like the given from Synchronicity in order to know your top strengths. After knowing them, notice that the ones at the top are where you are particularly good at, so; start by using them to solve any issue that hits your life. Up next; we will see different ways to remember these strengths based on different parameters like emotions, and learning techniques.

Gathas

A Gatha is a short verse that helps you in the goal of remembering something quickly. By creating a Gatha, you can remember key strengths for key situations. For example, imagine someone at work being rude with you, but you don't want to respond with the same low energy, that is an important time to remember a strength to help you move forward the awkward situation. For instance, imagine you are really good at Social Intelligence. You could have a Gatha like:

...I'm the master of social intelligence, being part of an argument is nonsense...

Meditation

Meditation is an excellent way of being present in the moment. You can use some time during the morning for meditation, and once you get that awesome energy that comes after a good meditation practice; is an excellent moment for analysing the stuff happening in your life and come with a plan of how you could use your strengths in order to pass through them, the energy and the mood you get after meditation will help you choose strengths wisely.
This is a good opportunity to introduce a couple of well-known meditation techniques you could use to achieve the presented goal of becoming self-aware and pick strengths from your set, they are the following ones:

Belly breathing

Belly breathing, also known as breathing focused on the heart; is a meditation technique that will calm you down when you feel anxious. It consists in taking your full concentration in the exercise of feeling how the air goes in when inhaling, and slowly exhale the air. This will provoke several relaxing feelings because of the movements of your muscles after reacting of this way of breathing.

Labeling feelings

This is a technique where you need to label how you feel about a given situation. There is a list of feelings that you definitely need to know in order to achieve the best results of this meditation, you can find it by visiting the Atlas of emotions website. There's a performance rule that says: "you can't improve what you don't measure", that apply for this context as well, you need to know what you are feeling so you can look forward for picking a strength that could help you in the way of start feeling different. Remember there are no bad feelings, feeling sad or angry is equally valid as feeling happy or exited, we can't get rid of any feeling as they are normal and organic for us as human beings.

Labeling Thoughts

With this technique you will let yourself just go and think whatever comes to your mind. Just be there, think and then label that thought in a given classification that works for you. For instance, you could use the useful/not useful classification, where you simply think in something and then label that something and continue with the next thing in the queue. By doing this, you could write down the things that result useful for you, and by having a list with only the important things, you can then start by matching the best strength that fits with the given thought in the list, so if that thing is an issue or something that provokes stress in your life, you can tackle it sooner and in a self-awareness way.

Befriending fear exercise

This is a technique that appeals to your capacity of accepting a fear you have and try to calm down even thought the fear is there. This is really important in top situations where you really need to calm yourself down in order to make a decision that could severely change how things are looking in your life. By accepting your fear, you will be capable of put in practice your strengths in order to reduce that fear, or even completely eliminate it.

Watch your own movie

In this exercise you will picture yourself in a movie, and you will imagine yourself telling that movie to a friend. The goal is to describe your movie with so much level of detail that you will take yourself to the present moment, self-aware of what you're going thought. In that moment where you are no longer in automatic pilot, you will remember your top strengths and give a conclusion to the movie, which means; imagine that you solved your problem by using your top strengths. Ask yourself then, how did the guy in the movie get to solve the problems? How did she/he used the strengths? That could be the beginning of your answer.

Ask yourself frequently which strength could you, or others, use

This is more like a general learning technique for remembering things that could be used in many contexts, but still is worth to mention here. When you ask yourself questions frequently, you will exercise that path in your brain that makes the answer come faster every time. Now, imagine you constantly use this technique in daily bases by asking yourself explicitly which strength can you use in a given moment of your day. That works for other ones as well, you could see how others act and without judging anyone without knowing all the information (which is actually a bad practice for becoming self-aware) you could ask yourself wich strengths would you use in that guy's position.

Motivation

Don't stop recognizing yourself when you choose a good strength and use if for solving an issue. Can you remember how good it feels when you do great at some task at school or work and the team congratulates you for such an amazing job? Well, this is the same principle, but without the dependency of waiting for others to notice you and give you a high five. You need to be in a constant loop of self-awareness, and when you find yourself applying a strength, start being proud of yourself, that will propitiate more moments like that in your daily basis activities and you will be using your strength more often every time.

Ask for feedback

Mental healthiness is a topic that gets stronger every day. They say it will become as normal as work out every morning and eating healthy, so; why don't you ask for feedback about how you use your strengths in the workplace, home or school? Not everybody is going to know the set of skills, and not everybody will give you any feedback, but just express to your close ones that you are making yourself stronger at X, Y or Z strength, maybe you could pick the ones you want to start growing faster, and ask them to give you feedback about them, either positive or negative, it doesn't matter because both will help you knowing that you are doing good and what you are doing bad, so you can improve!

The Feynman Technique

In this technique you will understand the list of strengths first, and then; you will explain some of them to a friend that doesn't have the knowledge about this topic. In order to make her/him understand you, you would need to use words that don't confuse her/him, for example: probably you wouldn't use concepts like self-awareness, mindfulness, resilience and so on... The idea is to see if your friend understands what you are telling her/him, if there are any gaps in how your friend got your explanation; that are the gaps you need to study and understand better so you can master where and how apply your strengths, and if you are choosing the right ones for the situation you are confronting.

Just in time learning

This means you will pay attention for the things you are experiencing at a given time. For example; if you choose to pick a strength and that didn't result as you expected, pay fully attention on why it didn't work and write that down. Later, you can organize those thoughts and complete them with more accurate information on why that didn't work. That way, you will do better next time, that's the importance of having a journal with this kind of stuff.

Conclusions

In this short lecture we saw different key concepts that will help you in your way of becoming self-aware of your actions and start removing the automatic pilot from your behavior. Also, we saw how we all have a set of strengths sorted in different order based on wich ones are the best developed in your actions.
Given these concepts, we then presented you with a bunch of techniques you could use in order to first become self-aware of your reality, and then; choose the strength that better helps for attending any particular situation.
We encourage you to master at least one of them, the one you feel more comfortable with, and try to apply your strengths every day for problem solving, intelligent conversations, negotiations and so on... The number of places where you could use those strengths has no end!

No hagamos sitios accesibles, hagamos que los browsers brinden accesibilidad.

Jean Carlo Zuniga — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:03:38 +0000

La accesibilidad es la oportunidad que tienen las personas de poder utilizar un objeto, visitar un lugar o acceder a un servicio, independientemente de sus capacidades técnicas, cognitivas o físicas.

Este concepto también es aplicable en los sitios de Internet. Cuando un sitio que visitamos se acoge de ciertos estándares, brinda contenido HTML rico a sus diferentes etiquetas, proporciona métodos alternativos para el contenido no textual, entre otros; encontramos indicios de accesibilidad en él.
Tristemente, muchos de los sitios en Internet no poseen una característica tan importante como la accesibilidad.

Este post busca validar una idea para brindar accesibilidad a un sector en particular que presenta esta problemática: los usuarios que poseen discapacidades en sus extremidades superiores y no pueden utilizar las herramientas clásicas para la navegación en Internet: un teclado y un mouse.

Es necesario brindar accesibilidad tomando en cuenta que existen millones de sitios en la web que no fueron construídos pensando en serlo, y que además no se van a cambiar para que empiecen a serlo ahora. Además, hay muchos más que están en camino y tampoco serán accesibles. ¡No podemos cambiar todos los sitios viejos y no podemos influír en el desarrollo de todos los nuevos!

Ahora, si consideramos que todos los sitios que visitamos en Internet son alcanzables gracias a herramientas que permiten llegar a ellos; los browsers, entonces, ¿no se debería centralizar esfuerzos en los browsers para alcanzar la accesibilidad a los sitios?

¡Hagamos Internet accesible tal y como está ahora mismo! Sin enfocarnos en alcanzar accesibilidad en sitios individuales, sino más bien que sea la forma general en la que los navegamos la que se convierta en accesible!

Idea general

La idea para brindar accesibilidad está basada en la creación de áreas de concentración en la pantalla (SCA) que permitan que las instrucciones brindadas al browser sean más precisas. Esto, aunado a una navegación a través de la voz; hará que el público meta de este sistema pueda olvidarse de teclado y mouse cuando naveguen en Internet.

Las SCAs son delimitaciones de la pantalla del monitor del usuario. Estas se formarán a través de líneas que al juntarse generen regiones debidamente identificadas para que el usuario elija la región con la que necesita interactuar. Veamos un ejemplo:

A su vez, si el usuario requiere que la región elegida sea aún más granulada; podrá hacerlo tantas veces como sea posible en el monitor en uso.

Note que este sistema evitará ambigüedad en comparación a métodos que solo permitan dirigir instrucciones de voz sin ningún otro apoyo visual al usuario. Por ejemplo: en la caja de comentarios de YouTube, imagine que su instrucción es dar like a un comentario en específico. En la siguiente imagen, si la instrucción con la que se debe realizar la tarea es "like the comment", ¿cuál usuario recibiría ese like?.

A falta de un procesamiento de lenguaje natural lo suficientemente sólido para dar una instrucción precisa sobre cuál comentario debe recibir el like, la instrucción puede tornarse en ambigua, o inclusive desgastante, al entrar un proceso iterativo sobre los comentarios hasta dar con el deseado.

Los comandos de voz para la navegación pueden ser tan extensos como se pueda imaginar. Pero los comandos para trabajar directamente con las SCAs serán como los siguientes:

Init SCA: para iniciar el sistema de navegación accesible.
Stop SCA: para salir del sistema de navegación accesible.
Go to {id}: es el comando mediante el cuál el usuario se podrá movilizar hacia cualquier SCA de la pantalla.
Do SCA: creará nuevas áreas de concentración dentro del área de concentración actual.
Undo SCA: borrará las áreas de concentración actuales. Será como devolverse al área de concentración anterior.
Click: emulará un click del mouse en el elemento en donde esté el cursor.
Find {nombre del elemento}: ubicará dentro del SCA el elemento que tenga relación con el comando dicho por el usuario. Si hay más de una posibilidad: el sistema resaltará los elementos uno a uno hasta que el usuario use la instrucción de voz Click, o bien; se acaben los candidatos.
Stop dictation: para que un input de tipo texto deje de recibir lo que el usuario le está dictando.

Caso de uso para los SCAs

A continuación se presenta un ejemplo del uso de SCA en un sitio que la mayoría usamos: el correo electrónico. Veremos cómo sería para un usuario meta el realizar acciones básicas como redactar un nuevo correo y enviarlo a uno de sus contactos.

1- Primero; el usuario activará el sistema de navegación.
Instrucción: Init SCA

2- El usuario irá al SCA en donde está la opción de redactar un correo.
Instrucción: Go to One

3- El usuario dirá el elemento con el que quiere interactuar. Como el objetivo aquí es redactar un correo, dirá "redactar".
Instrucción: Find Redactar

Como no hay ambigüedad; el sistema hará click inmediatemente en redactar.

4- El usuario ahora debe posicionarse en el SCA adecuado para redactar el correo.
Instrucción: Go to Two

5- El usuario llenará el encabezado del correo. Primero llenará los destinatarios.
Instrucción: Find Destinatarios

6- Como no hay ambigüedad, el sistema encontrará el input de destinatarios y hará click sobre él. Entonces; como es un input de texto: el sistema se preparará para anotar los destinatarios del correo. Cuando el usuario haya dado sus destinatarios, dará la Instrucción: Stop dictation para dejar de dictar al sistema.

7- Para llenar el asunto del correo se hacen pasos análogos a 5 y 6.

8- Ahora, lo siguiente a llenar es el cuerpo del correo. Notemos que para hacer esto el usuario no está posicionado en el SCA indicado. Entonces, el usuario debe ir al SCA que le permitirá empezar a redactar ese correo.

9- Para llenar el cuerpo del correo se hacen pasos análogos a 5 y 6.

10- Finalmente; el usuario enviará el correo. Para hacer esto usará la Instrucción: Find Enviar. Como solo hay un input de enviar: se hará click de una vez al botón y se enviará el correo que redactamos.

Casos de uso como este son los que permiten observar que aplicaciones que combinen tanto comandos de voz, como apoyo visual en pantalla; puedan ser una aproximación a que los browsers logren que los sitios web sean accesibles. Los comandos para SCA son amigables y con pocas palabras en ellos, esto permitirá que los usuarios no tengan que esforzarse de más para poder navegar. Además; los SCA son flexibles de acuerdo al tamaño de las pantallas; lo que hace que se pueda extender su función a muchos dispositivos.

¿Qué sigue?

Mejora continua de los comandos de voz: los comandos pueden seguir creciendo con nuevos releases. Una primera fase puede dejar muchos vacíos sobre lo que el público meta aún necesita, así que futuras mejoras vendrían a cubrir esos vacíos.
Áreas de concentración inteligentes: las SCA pueden hacer un pre-análisis de cada sitio para construirse solo en las zonas donde se presenten interacciones con el usuario. Veamos un ejemplo de este aprovechamiento de áreas:

También, si vemos el caso de uso analizado; el usuario pudo haber dado una instrucción que lo enfocara solamente en la pantalla de Redactar. Así, no hubiera sido necesario el paso 8, dado que las Instrucciones Find posicionarían al usuario en el cuerpo del correo sin necesidad de cambiarse de SCA.

Mapas de calor: SCA se puede integrar con Google Analitics para brindar reportes sobre las zonas más frecuentadas por los usuarios en los sitios web. Así; se puede sugerir al usuario las siguientes acciones a realizar a través de predicciones sobre el flujo que está llevando a cabo.

¿Cómo me puedes ayudar?

Si tienes dudas, oportunidades de mejora, comentarios, o si conoces personas a quienes le podría ser útil esta idea, por favor contactarme al correo jeanczm@gmail.com