My project is one that is showing me lots of the different challenges one has to overcome in order to get an experiment off the ground.
The overall idea is to study music and motor learning in a neurobiological context. By exploring musical learning in a physical sense, we’re trying to gain a better understanding of the neurological processes behind it. To look at this, we are applying knowledge of other experiments which have tried to measure music empirically – in terms of the both the required muscle movements themselves and the gradual improvement over time. It’s been a challenge over the last few weeks just to find a means of collecting some kind of data. Our method of collection was the first difficulty. Initially, we were trying to take advantage of the built-in capabilities of an Xbox Kinect camera to track the depth of objects in the visual field, allowing us to perceive hands as objects as they pressed down keys. However, that didn’t give us as much detail as we wanted, so one of the other members of my team managed to write a completely new script which could track red objects with the camera, allowing us to make charts mapping the movement of individual fingers on each hand. It’s the little advancements like that which have kept me going through the ongoing struggles of constantly correcting and testing along the way. Hopefully within the next week this budding project will have taken more shape and become a full-fledged experiment capable of gathering scientifically valid data. But if my experience so far has been anything to go by, it won’t be easy.
