Creating custom pages to collect singing data.

Source: vignettes/sing_happy_birthday_page.Rmd

As mentioned in our paper, the SAA is built in a modular way, meaning functionality can be used from its dependent packages, like musicassessr.

musicassessr has a special page type called record_audio_page, which does just that: allows you to create a page which records and stores audio data.

We’re going to harness this and make our own function which returns a “Sing Happy Birthday” page. This is really just a record_audio_page with some custom text:

library(musicassessr)

# Create a "Sing Happy Birthday Page"

sing_hbd <- function() {
  record_audio_page(label = "sing_hbd",
                    page_text = "Please sing happy birthday!",
                    get_answer = musicassessr::get_answer_simple_pyin_summary,
                    auto_next_page = TRUE)
}

Note that, for the get_answer function, we use a function which summarises what the user sung with some descriptive statistics. Type the following in your R console for more information:

We can now include our new page, or a list of pages, if we wanted, by using the append_trial_block_before or append_trial_block_after arguments to the SAA functions.

  1. Launch the SAA with the new Happy Birthday Page at the beginning of the protocol:
library(SAA)

SAA_standalone(app_name = "sing_hbd", 
               append_trial_block_before = sing_hbd())
  1. Or the end of the protocol:
SAA_standalone(app_name = "sing_hbd",
               append_trial_block_after = sing_hbd())
  1. Or even in your own custom timeline!
library(psychTestR)

password <- "demo"

timeline <- join(

  sing_hbd(),

  # Make sure results are saved to disk
  elt_save_results_to_disk(complete = TRUE),

  # A "final_page" is required at the end of a psychTestR timeline
  final_page("You have completed the study!")
)


make_test(
  elts = timeline,
  opt = test_options(title = "Melody Singing", admin_password = password))

By the way, a “Sing Happy Birthday” page is already packaged as part of musicassessr. Type the following into your R console for more information: