Chris Oh - Week 1 at Gabrieli Lab, MIT

Hello everyone,

So this past week was my first week at the Gabrieli Lab.  It was hectic to say the least but I feel like I have learned so much already.
On Monday, which was supposed to be my first day at the lab, Mrs. Gibbs, the lab administrator, told me that neither Zhenghan, the postdoc who will be supervising me, nor Michelle, who was supposed to cover for Zhenghan during my first week, is here.  So she told me that I should go home and just come back on Tuesday when Michelle comes back.
On Tuesday, I met Michelle, who is Zhenghan's technical assistant.  She gave me a project that Anna, an undergraduate who worked at the lab during Spring semester, was working on.  The project itself was simple.  Within the Nonword Repetition experiment that the lab was conducting, Anna wanted to look at the time it took for the three groups (Typically Developing group, Language Based Learning Disabilities group, and Autism Spectrum Disorder group) to repeat the nonword presented to them.  While the concept of it is easy, the technicality of the project was not so simple.  I had to use a program called Praat that analyzes soundtracks to find the time it took for the subject to respond.  I was supposed to use the scripts that Anna had already wrote to find two different data sets (Scanner Onset and Subject Onset) and put them all in a master sheet.  However, half of the soundtracks that Michelle gave me gave me error messages when I tried running them on Praat.  So I screenshotted the error message and sent it to Anna, who I was scheduled to meet on Thursday.
So until the error was to be fixed, I decided to take Python tutorials on Codeacademy as Michelle had suggested.  Michelle also lent me her college textbooks on Neuroscience.  On Wednesday, the lab has weekly meetings for Undergraduates and High School students where a speaker, mostly graduate students or postdoc, presents their project.  This week, the speaker was Julia, who was studying different intervention methods to help children of all backgrounds succeed in school.  She talked about four different interventions that had demonstrated positive effects on children.  Then in groups, we had to come up with our own interventions that might be most efficient.
On Thursday, I finally met Anna to go over the Praat error.  We played around with the script a little bit and we were able to fix the problem with the Scanner Onset by lowering the Intensity on the script.  However, when I came back to the lab to finish the project, the Subject Onset was giving me problems.  Praat was indicating random noises as the subject's voice, which was messing up the whole data.  And on some soundtracks, the subject was talking to quietly that Praat wasn't even picking them up as voices.  With the Subject Onset issue, I was not able to fix the problem just by lowering the intensity, because the intensity of voices that the program has to pick up varied.  So when I emailed Anna regarding the problem, she suggested that I include an if statement that would only pick up voices inbetween the two scanner sounds.  Although I have been taking extensive course on Python, I was not comfortable playing around with the complex script that Anna had written.  Anna and I both agreed that I should discuss the issue with Zhenghan when she comes back on Monday.
On Friday, we had a guest speaker from Wesleyan, who talked about the neuroscience behind music.  She demonstrated the neurological difference between people who are tonedeaf and people who have perfect pitch.  She also talked about the neurological effect of music and the parts that it stimulates.  During that lunch meeting, I finally met my PI, Dr. Gabrieli.  When I approached him to introduce myself immediately after lunch, he said he would love to meet with me next week.  So I said I would send him an email so that we could set up a time.
My second week looks to become more busy, which I am looking forward to.  I feel like I have adjusted well to the environment and am looking forward to meeting Zhenghan and Dr. Gabrieli to discuss what I would be doing for the next 5 weeks.