Adriano Baratè

Advanced interfaces for music enjoyment

Music enjoyment in a digital format is more than listening to a binary file. An overall music description is made of many interdependent aspects, that should be taken into account in an integrated and synchronized way. In this article, a proposal for an advanced interface to enjoy music in all its aspects will be described. The encoding language that allows the design and implementation of such interface is the IEEE P1599 standard, an XML-based format known as MX.

MXDemo: a case study about audio, video, and score synchronization

Information technology provides many ways to describe music contents. An integrated and comprehensive representation is possible, as MX format demonstrates. This paper illustrates the basic principles of synchronization in a multi-layered XML-based environment aimed at music description, and provides an example of software implementation.

Development of Serious Games for Music Education

Serious games have proved to be an effective educational tool in many fields. The first goal of this paper is to illustrate some possible applications to music and their advantages. Moreover, music can be characterized by heterogeneous multimedia contents. Among the different facets music information is made of it is worth citing music symbols, their graphical representations as scores, their audio renderings as tracks, etc. The international standard known as IEEE 1599 is an XML multilayer format for heterogeneous music contents, and describes such different aspects in an integrated and synchronized context. Making relationships among music contents explicit provides a potentially rich educational environment. Consequently, this paper discusses the concept of multilayer learning object, introduces the IEEE 1599 standard, and finally shows some applications and case studies.

Music analysis and modeling through petri nets

Petri Nets are a formal tool for studying systems that are concurrent, asynchronous, distributed, parallel, nondeterministic, and/or stochastic. They were used in a number of real-world simulations and scientific problems, but seldom considered an effective means to describe and/or generate music. The purpose of this paper is demonstrating that Petri Nets (enriched with some peculiar extensions) can well represent the results of a musicological analysis process.

Fostering Computational Thinking in Secondary School through Music : An Educational Experience based on Google Blockly

We propose a methodology especially conceived to exploit the musical media in order to vehiculate some aspects in the realm of computational thinking to pupils of the lower secondary school (6th to 8th grades). The related activities are based on a visual programming language whose execution generates a melody shown using both its traditionally-notated musical score and its audio reproduction. This language provides the basic programming tools, such as simple and structured variables, iterations and so on. The learning activities are based on challenging small groups of students to solve programming exercises of increasing difficulty.

A Web-Oriented Multi-layer Model to Interact with Theatrical Performances

This paper presents an innovative approach to online fruition of theater performances. Web applications like traditional viewers are already available for the wide audience of Internet users. Our proposal aims at adding both interactivity and multi-layer fruition, and a way to manipulate and create new media. The premise to reach these goals is digitizing a number of heterogeneous materials in order to describe a single performance comprehensively, e.g. different video and audio-takes from different perspectives, and a number of related materials such as scripts, fashion plates, playbills, etc. The format we adopt to encode such information is based on the XML international standard known as IEEE 1599. Finally, an advanced Web player supporting search and play functions for synchronized materials must be designed. This work describes the whole process, from the acquisition of materials directly on the stage to their publishing on a Web portal.

NINA - Navigating and Interacting with Notation and Audio

This article deals with an XML-based format that allows an integrated representation of music, as well as with a working software demo that demonstrates the power of the format. The format itself is the basis of an IEEE international standard for a comprehensive description of music contents and their synchronisation. After a theoretical introduction, a music browser based on such concepts will be reviewed. The application, called NINA (for Navigating and Interacting with Notation and Audio), has been recently presented at an exhibition about Neapolitan music.

Towards a Topological Fingerprint of Music

Can music be represented as a meaningful geometric and topological object? In this paper, we propose a strategy to describe some music features as a polyhedral surface obtained by a simplicial interpretation of the \textit{Tonnetz}. The \textit{Tonnetz} is a graph largely used in computational musicology to describe the harmonic relationships of notes in equal tuning. In particular, we use persistent homology in order to describe the \textit{persistent} properties of music encoded in the aforementioned model. Both the relevance and the characteristics of this approach are discussed by analyzing some paradigmatic compositional styles. Eventually, the task of automatic music style classification is addressed by computing the hierarchical clustering of the topological fingerprints associated with some collections of compositions.

Integration of Audio Resources into a Digital Library: The BEIC Case Study

The focus of this paper is on the integration of audio resources with other content types in digital libraries. As a case study, we will present the most recent initiative of the Biblioteca Europea di Informazione e Cultura (BEIC), an Italian institution that pursues educational and instructional goals through the realization and management of a multimedia, free access, open shelf library. A new audio section will be added to the already-existing digital archive, allowing users to listen to about 1000 classical recordings in a multi-platform and cross-browser manner. This experience involves a number of heterogeneous fields, ranging from musicology to computer programming, from cataloging to digitization and archiving. In this paper, we will apply a bottom-up technique in order to provide a generalization of the specific case study, thus suggesting a methodological approach for similar initiatives.

An IEEE 1599-Based Interface for Score Analysis

This paper deals with a software application to visualize score analysis. Such a tool allows both the enjoyment of music in general, thanks to the synchronized execution of heterogeneous multimedia objects, and the highlighting of the results of score analyses. As a consequence, the user can investigate the compositional process and the relationships among the music objects of a given piece while listening to an audio track and viewing the corresponding score. This is made possible by a new XML-based standard for music representation --- namely IEEE 1599 --- which will be shortly described.