Senior Design Projects

ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2023

Earworm Tracker

Email **********
Name Petr Janata
Affiliation Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis

Project's details

Project title Earworm Tracker
Background Recent research demonstrates the capacity for music that gets stuck in your head (a.k.a. earworms) to help remember associated non-musical information. To improve assessments of how often individual earworms occur, it is necessary to have an interface with which to easily and quickly indicate which of several possible music loops has been repeating in one's mind. This interface should be implemented as an experience sampling application that uses push notifications to probe users randomly within designated time windows.
Description The Earworm Tracker has two major components to it. The first is the Earworm Trainer, which is an interactive memory game during which users learn to associate an icon with a music-loop, until they achieve an accuracy criterion. The second is the Earworm Prober, in which a user responds to a push notification to indicate whether they have in the recent past experienced and earworm and, if so, whether it is for any of the loops corresponding to an icon in the array of icons from which they can select. Clicking on the icon should play one iteration of the loop to confirm the selection.
Deliverable 1) App prototype (for smartphones). This app should implement the functionality described above, along with communication with a backend server for retrieving parameters governing 1) which icon is associated with which music loop and 2) the time windows and frequencies of push notifications, and for sending earworm report data to.

2) Clearly and thoroughly documented source code maintained in a janatalab GitHub repository.
Skill set desirable Experience or strong interest in: Mobile app development, web-server backend (in Python)
Phone number **********
Client time availability 30-60 min weekly or more
IP requirement Open source project
Attachment N/A
Selected No
Team members N/A
TA N/A