Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc

Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc

Musical Haptics

This Open Access book offers an original interdisciplinary overview of the role of haptic feedback in musical interaction. Divided into two parts, part I examines the tactile aspects of music performance and perception, discussing how they affect user experience and performance in terms of usability, functionality and perceived quality of musical instruments. Part II presents engineering, computational, and design approaches and guidelines that have been applied to render and exploit haptic feedback in digital musical interfaces. Musical Haptics introduces an emerging field that brings together engineering, human-computer interaction, applied psychology, musical aesthetics, and music performance. The latter, defined as the complex system of sensory-motor interactions between musicians and their instruments, presents a well-defined framework in which to study basic psychophysical, perceptual, and biomechanical aspects of touch, all of which will inform the design of haptic musical interfaces. Tactile and proprioceptive cues enable embodied interaction and inform sophisticated control strategies that allow skilled musicians to achieve high performance and expressivity. The use of haptic feedback in digital musical interfaces is expected to enhance user experience and performance, improve accessibility for disabled persons, and provide an effective means for musical tuition and guidance

Composing for the Performance Space: A practice-based investigation on the design of interfaces for spatial sound and lighting

This thesis presents a compositional portfolio that incorporates design methods for creating interactivity between music, spatialised multichannel audio and lighting. This is presented in the form of musical scores, commentary, and a summary of interfaces for sound spatialisation and lighting, including technical studies that present new design concepts and industrial prototypes. Furthermore, it reveals a new mixed-media format, Sound Canvas, that can be used for the display of interactive music and sound art within galleries. Spatial music has, for some years, been extensively explored in experimental music through different analogue and digital systems. Examples can be found in the electroacoustic works of Schaeffer (e.g., Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul, 1951—performed through the ‘space potentiometer’ device), Stockhausen (e.g., Gesang Der Jünglinge, 1955-56; Oktophonie, 1991), Xenakis (e.g., Bohor, 1962; Hibiki Hana Ma, 1969-70), and in the sound installations of Bernhard Leitner (e.g., Double Arching, 1999; Sonambiente, 2006). The technology available today allows composers to use not only what is commercially available, but also to implement their own systems for spatialisation and performance interaction. The expansion of new audio codecs and microcontroller technology offers new possibilities to be musically explored. Similarly, current stage lighting technology can also be explored further through experimentation. Whereas stage lighting in popular music has been commonly explored by lighting designers, this has not been widely investigated in contemporary music. By using software such as Cycling '74’s Max and open-source hardware platforms such as the Arduino, composers can design their own interfaces for sound-light control. These two forms of expression—space and light—allow composers to move beyond traditional notation and create sound interactions within the performance space, which can become multisensory and yield new forms of artistic expression. Taking practice-based and applied research strategies, this thesis suggests new ideas for the two mediums and narrates the process of development through design. Keywords: sound spatialisation, sound-light interaction, interactive composition, music interface design, performance space, multichannel audio, multisensory music, sound canvas, mixed-media art, kinetic music, kinetic sound art, virtual concerts

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference - June 5-12, 2022 - Saint-Étienne (France). https://smc22.grame.f