Corrado Canepa

HARP: a system for intelligent composer's assistance

HARP (Hybrid Action Representation and Planning), a prototype high-level system for computer-aided composition, is introduced. HARP represents and manipulates music knowledge using a twofold formalism. An object-oriented concurrent environment, the analogical subsystem, provides procedures to manage the sound itself (samples, codes, and algorithms) and particular analysis processes. The symbolic subsystem, a declarative symbolic environment, stores higher level scores, composition rules, definitions in general, and descriptions of pieces of music. The symbolic subsystem is based on a multiple-inheritance semantic network formalism derived from KL-One. The HARP knowledge base, system interface, and reasoning mechanisms are discussed. An important set of analogical descriptions in HARP, based on the metaphor of force fields, is examined.<<ETX>>

Social active listening and making of expressive music: the interactive piece the bow is bent and drawn

This paper discusses the concepts, the interaction paradigms, the system design and implementation that have been developed for the interactive dance and music performance The Bow is bent and drawn (composer Nicola Ferrari), presented at Casa Paganini, Genova, Italy, in occasion of the opening concert of the 8th Intl. Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME08), June 4, 2008. The Bow is bent and drawn grounds its bases on current research at Casa Paganini -- InfoMus Lab on social active listening of sound and music content and on analysis and processing of expressiveness in human full-body movement and gesture. In particular, The Bow is bent and drawn exploits our recent system Mappe per Affetti Erranti (literally Maps for Wandering Affects), which enables a novel paradigm for social active experience and dynamic molding of expressive content of a music piece. In Mappe per Affetti Erranti multiple users can physically navigate a polyphonic music piece and can intervene in real-time on the expressive content music performance conveys through their full-body movement and gesture. The research topics addressed in this paper are currently investigated in the EUICT Project SAME (Sound and Music for Everyone, Everyday, Everywhere, Every Way, www.sameproject.eu).

A system to support the learning of movement qualities in dance: a case study on dynamic symmetry

In this paper, we present (i) a computational model of Dynamic Symmetry of human movement, and (ii) a system to teach this movement quality (symmetry or asymmetry) by means of an interactive sonification exergame based on IMU sensors and the EyesWeb XMI software platform. The implemented system is available as a demo at the workshop.

Automatic Classification of Expressive Hand Gestures on Tangible Acoustic Interfaces According to Laban's Theory of Effort

Tangible Acoustic Interfaces (TAIs) exploit the propagation of sound in physical objects in order to localize touching positions and to analyse users gesture on the object. Designing and developing TAIs consists of exploring how physical objects, augmented surfaces, and spaces can be transformed into tangible-acoustic embodiments of natural seamless unrestricted interfaces. Our research focuses on Expressive TAIs , i.e., TAIs able at processing expressive users gesture and providing users with natural multimodal interfaces that fully exploit expressive, emotional content. This paper presents a concrete example of analysis of expressive gesture in TAIs: hand gestures on a TAI surface are classified according to the Space and Time dimensions of Rudolf Labans Theory of Effort. Research started in the EU-IST Project TAI-CHI (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction) and is currently going on in the EU-ICT Project SAME (Sound and Music for Everyone, Everyday, Everywhere, Every way, www.sameproject.eu). Expressive gesture analysis and multimodal and cross-modal processing are achieved in the new EyesWeb XMI open platform (available at www.eyesweb.org) by means of a new version of the EyesWeb Expressive Gesture Processing Library.

Teaching by Means of a Technologically Augmented Environment: The Stanza Logo-Motoria

The Stanza Logo-Motoria is an interactive multimodal environment, designed to support and aid learning in Primary Schools, with particular attention to children with Learning Disabilities. The system is permanently installed in a classroom of the “Elisa Frinta” Primary School in Gorizia where for over a year now, it has been used as an alternative and/or additional tool to traditional teaching strategies; the on-going experimentation is confirming the already excellent results previously assessed, in particular for ESL (English as a Second Language). The Stanza Logo-Motoria, also installed for scientific research purposes at the Engineering Information Department (DEI) of University of Padova, has sparked the interest of teachers, students and educationalists and makes us believe that this is but the beginning of a path, which could lead to the introduction of technologically augmented learning in schools.

A multimodal corpus for technology-enhanced learning of violin playing

Learning to play a musical instrument is a difficult task, mostly based on the master-apprentice model. Technologies are rarely employed and are usually restricted to audio and video recording and playback. Nevertheless, multimodal interactive systems can complement actual learning and teaching practice, by offering students guidance during self-study and by helping teachers and students to focus on details that would be otherwise difficult to appreciate from usual audiovisual recordings. This paper introduces a multimodal corpus consisting of the recordings of expert models of success, provided by four professional violin performers. The corpus is publicly available on the repoVizz platform, and includes synchronized audio, video, motion capture, and physiological (EMG) data. It represents the reference archive for the EU-H2020-ICT Project TELMI, an international research project investigating how we learn musical instruments from a pedagogical and scientific perspective and how to develop new interactive, assistive, self-learning, augmented-feedback, and social-aware systems to support musical instrument learning and teaching.

Enhancing Music Learning with Smart Technologies

Learning to play a musical instrument is a difficult task, requiring the development of sophisticated skills. Nowadays, such a learning process is mostly based on the master-apprentice model. Technologies are rarely employed and are usually restricted to audio and video recording and playback. The TELMI (Technology Enhanced Learning of Musical Instrument Performance) Project seeks to design and implement new interaction paradigms for music learning and training based on state-of-the-art multimodal (audio, image, video, and motion) technologies. The project focuses on the violin as a case study. This practice work is intended as demo, showing to MOCO attendants the results the project obtained along two years of work. The demo simulates a setup at a higher education music institution, where attendants with any level of previous violin experience (and even with no experience at all) are invited to try the technologies themselves, performing basic tests of violin skill and pre-defined exercises under the guidance of the researchers involved in the project.

As Wave Impels a Wave Active Experience of Cultural Heritage and Artistic Content

This paper presents the interactive installation “Come un’Onda premuta da un’Onda” (“As Wave impels a Wave”, a citation from Ovidio’s “Metamorphoses” as a metaphor of time). The installation, presented in its early version at the Festival della Scienza 2009, introduces visitors to the rich history and artistic content of a monumental building: a virtual walk through the time. The core idea is to support an active experience based on novel paradigms of interaction and narration. The active experience is grounded on an informational environment characterized by an invisible “sound scent” map. The research is partially supported by the EU FP7 ICT I-SEARCH project.

An Invisible Line: Remote Communication Using Expressive Behavior

An Invisible Line is an installation focusing on the remote communication between 2 human users, based on the analysis of full-body expressivity. It aims at creating shared, networked, social experiences. It is the result of a scientific and artistic collaboration between Casa Paganini - InfoMus Lab (Genova, Italy), IRCAM (Paris, Italy) and The Hochschule fur Musik und Theater (Hamburg, Germany).

Modelling and Analysing Creative Communication within Groups of People: the Artistic Event at FET11

Abstract Theatre stage and artistic performances aim at joining participants to act together, to share, shape, and co-create cultural content by means of active experiences. Future networked and social media technologies promote new ways of experiencing cultural events and artefacts. Nonverbal social signals are major components of future social media characterised by embodiment and physical engagement of users. This contribution introduces research results from the EU-ICT-FET SIEMPRE Project, presenting how these results were shown in the final performance at FET11.