Paulo Maria Rodrigues

Instruments for Everyone: Designing New Means of Musical Expression for Disabled Creators

The purpose of this project was the development of tools that facilitate the musical expression of a well-defined group of physically and mentally challenged people. Knowing those people and becoming familiar with their capabilities, tastes and ambitions was the departing point for the design of solutions. Once developed, they remained in their institutions, to become a part of their lives, contributing to the range of occupational activities they can be involved with. The composition of a piece of music that uses those resources and its performance by these people in the main concert hall of Casa da Musica in April 2010 was more than a proof of concept, it was a truly engaging, motivating experience and, indeed, a proper artistic challenge.

Sound=Space Opera: choreographing life within an interactive musical environment

Abstract This paper aims to describe the different stages of the artistic project SOUND=SPACE Opera, held at Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal and presented during the festival Ao Alcance de Todos (Accessible to All) during 15–19 April, 2008. A series of creative workshops using an interactive musical environment, created by Rolf Gehlhaar in 1984, were run for several weeks with a group of six adolescents with special needs, mainly suffering from Down Syndrome. The translation of their day-by-day experiences into sounds and movements resulted in two final performances which were the public surface of a very empowering and rewarding process that intended to improve the quality of life of those who participated.

CaDaReMi. An educational interactive music game

Abstract This new multi-user interactive sound installation (for up to eight persons simultaneously) implements proprietary glob-recognition and tracking software to allow visitors to a large empty space (ca. 5×7 m) to move an avatar – projected on a screen at the end of the space – simply by moving about the space, with the objective of taking it to specific, recognisable locations. Success in this endeavour causes musical sounds to be triggered.

Evaluating the Timeliness of Bluetooth ACL Connections for the Wireless Transmission of MIDI

This paper describes a preliminary work carried on to assess the use of Bluetooth technology to transport MIDI data streams. The proposed approach is based on Bluetooth ACL links. Although the music field motivated the work, the results are significant for the use of Bluetooth ACL links in time critical applications such as industrial automation. In the paper, a test-bed is described and several timing measures are presented and discussed. The conclusion is that the ACL links are suited for transmitting single note MIDI commands.