Marise van Zyl

Acoustic Perception Study

220C, Spring 2021

For the project Google Drive, see here.

Please see below for weekly updates on my Acoustic Perception study.

Week 1

In week 1, I worked on narrowing down my goals for the quarter. I also had to decide between two different projects that I could do for 220c. I settled on completing an acoustic perception-related behavioral study that I created a proposal for as part of 251. I plan to submit an IRB proposal for a second iteration of this study as well as present the current results at ICMPC this July. See the abstract here.

Week 2

For week 2, I focused on revisiting the survey I sent out for the original data collection. I reconsidered some of the phrasing of the questions and worked on improving the methods to support the questions I am asking or want to ask. I asked the class to compelete my survey. I also asked for some feedback on the survey via a google doc. See the survey questions here.

Week 3

This week I will be working on creating slides for a short presentation on this project that I will be doing in the Neuromusiclab meeting next week. I am also writing a grant application which explores how this topic can be expanded in` future, possibly dissertation, research. Ideas are welcome! I also created a timeline for some important deadlines and goals that I set for myself. See my schedule here.

Week 4

During week 3/4, I submitted my grant application and presented my project summary at the Neuromusic Lab meeting. In both cases, I had to find good ways to summarize my research and to get my point across clearly and concisely. I do not include the grant in this webpage, but it can be found in my google doc linked below.

Week 5

This week, Dr. Fujioka and I started to put together an IRB protocol that we would submit to get permission to run the full study (as opposed to just a pilot. We will submit a detailed description of the project to Stanford's internal review board. The process can take a while so we wanted to make sure to submit it as soon as possible. I worked throughout the week compiling the necessary documents, including an info sheet for participants, an advertisement we can use to recruit participants for the study, documentation of the task/survey itself, neatly organized files of all the stimuli, and a project webpage. The project link page can be found here.

Week 6

After reviewing the IRB protocol with my advisor, I had to make some small adjustments in the beginning of the week and then we submitted it. I also used this week to run a fun experiment in the 220c class, since I was at a place where I couldn't really present anything of interest to the class. I got feedback from the survey session in week 2 that some participants wanted to have the opportunity to try to match the visual and audio samples when they are all presented at the same time and you can re-listen to different examples, rather than just saying whether specific samples match or not. I decided to make such a test and give it to the class to see how they'd do.

Week 7

In the first class of the week, I reported back my findings from the previous week's experiment. It was a fun activity and showed some interesting results. Categorically, the class did really well, but within the categories, they actually got very few pairs correctly matched up.

Week 8

Over the weekend, we received feedback on our IRB protocol application. There were 2 minor tweaks that we had to submit regarding advertisements and the use of mechanical Turk. We decided to leave out the Mechanical Turk part because it would prove to be both unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated. I spent much of the first half of the week just making the necessary changes to the IRB and then resubmitting it. I also asked for poster samples from other members of the Neuromusic lab, just to get an idea of the type of posters that are usually part of the lab's research.

Week 9

I spent the week working on the poster and deciding how to present the statistics on it. I used an existing poster template and changed some elements to best fit my research. I made a bare-boned mock-up to show to the class and get feedback. I wasn't really happy with it and I got a great suggestion from Lloyd about a Youtube video that explains a new way of poster-making. I decided to scratch the original design and try something else. The first mock-up can be found in the google drive. I chose to make even more adjustments to the design that the video suggests, because it doesn't really take Zoom as a platform for poster presentations into account.

Week 10

I presented my final poster and short presentation to the class. It went okay. I had some technical difficulties with my computer not being able to share the sound clips as examples of my stimuli, but luckily the class had heard them before. I will need to sort out this glitch before the conference, but other than that, I liked how the design of the poster ended up. I will tweak it some more but overall I'm happy with the result! The final poster can be found in the google doc.