Day 9: Unproven career paths
School and corporate work don’t teach you how to live an unstructured life. They always give you a next goal to aim for—get into a good college, find internships, land a secure job, get promoted up the ladder. It’s like a multi-lane highway that carries thousands of cars every day to the same few designated exits. Unproven career paths strip away all the concrete and asphalt, leaving you with a dirt road and a dense forest.
Highways and dirt roads require two very different vehicles. The same sports car that could speed down a racetrack would struggle on a gravel off-road. An SUV designed for the dirt roads would find its 4-wheel features unused on a highway. I’m quickly learning that I must transform myself into a Jeep if I want to survive the ups and downs of this path I’ve chosen. For example, I’ve always relied on the internet, books, and advice from others to know what the best way to do something is. Now, I’ve realized that a better way to learn is to try what I think is best, and learn based on whether it failed or succeeded.
What I’m working on
As it turns out, chord recognition isn’t a solved problem. I did some experimentation in a Python notebook to figure out what algorithm I could use in the app to detect chords. The main challenge is dealing with the harmonic overtones that every instrument plays. When you play the note C on a piano, it’s actually playing many frequencies at once. So, when you play a chord with notes C, E, and G, the audio waveform contains many more than just 3 frequencies. It’s up to the chord recognition algorithm to figure out which is a note and which is just a harmonic overtone.