Hugues Vinet

The Representation Levels of Music Information

The purpose of this article is to characterize the various kinds and specificities of music representations in technical systems. It shows that an appropriate division derived from existing applications relies in four main types, which are defined as the physical, signal, symbolic and knowledge levels. This fair simple and straightforward division provides a powerful grid for analyzing all kinds of musical applications, up to the ones resulting from the most recent research advances. Moreover, it is particularly adapted to exhibiting most current scientific issues in music technology as problems of conversion between various representation levels. The effectiveness of these concepts is then illustrated through an overview of existing applications functionalities, in particular from examples of recent research performed at IRCAM.

User-centric context-aware mobile applications for embodied music listening

This paper surveys a collection of sample applications for networked user-centric context-aware embodied music listening. The applications have been designed and developed in the framework of the EU-ICT Project SAME (www.sameproject.eu) and have been presented at Agora Festival (IRCAM, Paris, France) in June 2009. All of them address in different ways the concept of embodied, active listening to music, i.e., enabling listeners to interactively operate in real-time on the music content by means of their movements and gestures as captured by mobile devices. In the occasion of the Agora Festival the applications have also been evaluated by both expert and non-expert users.

Recent Research and Development at IRCAM

Almost thirty years have elapsed since President Georges Pompidou proposed to Pierre Boulez the idea of creating a musical research institute that would be associated with the future Center for Contemporary Art in Paris, which later became the Centre Georges Pompidou. Since then, IRCAM developed its activities, while always remaining true to the goals defined at the outset: to be a place where composers, scientists, and engineers participate together in the renewal of contemporary music, while developing new knowledge and technologies related to musical composition, performance and listening. In 1991, Laurent Bayle succeeded Pierre Boulez as the head of IRCAM. One of his main concerns has been, together with setting up an efficient organization, to counter-balance a trend towards isolationism (which could have easily resulted from the specificity of its artistic and scientific content) by affirming IRCAMs role in society and by developing links to various types of public communities and fields of activity. This has been accomplished through greater interaction between IRCAMs two main poles of activity: musical production and Research and Development. The Education Department was set up under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Barriere and later MarieHelene Serra; it currently proposes various types of courses, including a one-year

Digital arts: did you feel that?

This panel considers the relationships between the interactive arts, audience engagement and experience design. What might each offer the other? Engagement and experience are central to current HCI thinking. We will present and argue about the research issues of defining and understanding audience/user engagement and experience in the context of art.