Mobile EQ Application

Posted on Monday, August 1st, 2022

Client	Riverwood Acoustics- Ben Seaman
Professor(s)	Leanne Seaward, Laura McHugh
Program	Computer Engineering Technology – Computing Science
Students	Wing-Fai Winfield Chan Jing Hu Andy Nguyen Christiano Ricci Moe Wehbeh

Project Description:

Riverwood Acoustics of Renfrew, Ontario manufactures beautifully handcrafted speakers out of dense birch wood found and recovered from the bottom of the Ottawa River. The wood used is a result of the logging boom in the 1800s in Ottawa, where the river was used as a natural way to transport logs. However, some logs were too dense and sank to the bottom of the river, only to be reclaimed over one hundred years later to be crafted into elegant speakers. This well preserved and solid wood not only looks great but actually favours a fuller and richer sound compared to other materials when making speakers.

With a high quality product, our client Ben Seaman of Riverwood acoustics wanted a mobile application to compliment their premium speakers. This application is to control the and tune the equalizer of the speaker to the user’s preference. The software is mainly targeted for use with Riverwood Acoustics wireless Bluetooth model named “The Hudson” but is compatible with any Bluetooth speaker on the market.

The application has many features that Riverwood Acoustics customers can use. Using the sliders across the different frequency bands, the user can manually adjust the equalizer of their speaker. For ease of usability, there are a few automatic features that are designed to improve the sound quality of the speaker with minimal intervention. The automatic genre detection feature detects what type of music is playing and adjusts the EQ accordingly using preset EQ pattern profiles. Finally, the auto-calibration tool takes a recording of white noise output from the speaker and adjusts the equalization according to what room the speaker resides in and how sounds bounces off the speaker’s surroundings.

In accordance to the client’s needs, the application designed was developed cross-platform on both Android and iOS, the application was developed using the Xamarin Forms framework using the C# language. This allowed for development on both platforms while only needing to write a majority of the code once. As this was the entire team’s first time developing a mobile application, everyone was able to learn a substantial amount about mobile application development.