Leandro Lesqueves Costalonga

Relational Properties in Interaction Aesthetics: The Ubiquitous Music Turn

Taking as a point of departure recent theoretical advances in Interaction Design and Human-Computer Interaction (Lowgren 2009), we discuss a body of knowledge gathered in Ubiquitous Music practices (Keller et al. 2011a) during the last six years. New concepts and methods have been proposed to describe aspects of the ideation and materialisation of experiences with technology. Pliability (Lowgren 2007) and anchoring (Keller et al. 2010) are two of the multiple design qualities that surfaced in interaction design that impact information technology creative practices. We present results of experiments addressing creativity support for ubiquitous music making through the time tagging metaphor (Radanovitsck et al. 2011). The studies serve to exemplify how relational properties can be integrated within creativity-centred design. Our research indicates that sonic relational properties may provide affordances for proto-musical phenomena. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of this proposal highlighting its impact on everyday musical creativity.

Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus

In this paper we propose aesthetic heuristics as an area of study within ubiquitous music research. Initially we discuss the motivations for narrowing the focus of the experimental variables involved in creativity-centred design studies. Then we place aesthetic heuristics within the current efforts toward designs for creativity support, highlighting recent studies that target everyday musical creativity. The reviewed experimental results point to a gap between the current theoretical proposals in musical creativity and the factors that impact everyday musical activities. Self-referentiality of the experimental-theoretical construct and early domain restriction are two of the limitations pointed out by previous theoretical work. We provide a working definition of aesthetic heuristics, indicating its object of study and its rationale. We also lay out initial experimental strategies. Potential contributions from interaction aesthetics and ubimus research are discussed, introducing the concept of creative bias and a set of experimental hypotheses. The last section of the paper furnishes examples of creative biases within the context of musical interaction design.

Interaction Aesthetics and Ubiquitous Music

Two recent approaches to interaction design have good potential to address creative practice in everyday settings: interaction aesthetics and ubiquitous music. We discuss the theoretical and methodological issues raised by both perspectives and highlight the similarities and differences among the two approaches. Through the analysis of a series of experiments, a common theme emerges: relational properties may provide a useful target for creativity-oriented experimental work.

Capture and Stylization of Human Models

Capturing and creating models of human subjects is an ongoing effort in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a framework to capture, model, simplify, and stylize an human subject. We use a consumer 3D depth camera that captures the appearance, shape, and pose of the recorded person. We then fit this data with a parametric human model that is based on 3D scans available from the CAESAR database. Once we have a personalized 3D human model, we can apply stylization techniques to create a variety of outputs. We present several results obtained with our framework and verify that these models remain recognizable as their human sources.

Local Synchronization of Web Applications with Audio Markings

Synchronization is about providing coherent orchestration of events or resources involved in a multimedia application. In a synchronized application, the user has the notion that his devices content is directly connected with others. In this paper we discuss the existing synchronization techniques, their advantages and disadvantages, and the current implementations and usage. We also present our open source solution for local synchronization of Web applications, the Audio Markings API, detailing its usage, components and functionalities. The focus of this paper is on smart devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops since they often have built-in microphones and speakers - resources that we intend to explore. In addition to that, those devices are perfectly capable of running full-featured web browsers, something that we also need to take advantage of. Our goal is to give developers an alternative for synchronization of Web applications, using the Web browser as a platform and the sound as a bridge.

Ubiquitous Music: A Computer Science Approach

Ubimus is a research field that merges Ubicomp and music and studies the influence of ubiquitous devices and applications in Music. This field has been explored by musicians and social scientists around the world helped by a countless number of computer scientists. Nevertheless, it is not easy to a novice computer scientist understand Ubimus concepts and specially how to take part of this research field. Based on this, the authors present in this paper a point of view of Ubimus associating fields in computer science and hardware and software definitions and suggestions to be explored with Ubimus.