Spatially augmented audio delivery: applications of spatial sound awareness in sensor-equipped indoor environments

Current mainstream audio playback paradigms do not take any account of a user's physical location or orientation in the delivery of audio through headphones or speakers. Thus audio is usually presented as a static perception whereby it is naturally a dynamic 3D phenomenon audio environment. It fails to take advantage of our innate psycho-acoustical perception that we have of sound source locations around us. Described in this paper is an operational platform which we have built to augment the sound from a generic set of wireless headphones. We do this in a way that overcomes the spatial awareness limitation of audio playback in indoor 3D environments which are both location-aware and sensor-equipped. This platform provides access to an audio-spatial presentation modality which by its nature lends itself to numerous cross-dissiplinary applications. In the paper we present the platform and two demonstration applications

Space Time Exploration of Musical Instruments

Musical instruments are tools used to generate sounds for musical expression. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) musical instruments create sounds that may be spatially disjointed from the instrument controls. Spatial audio processing can be used to position the Extended Reality (XR) musical instruments and their corresponding sounds in the same space. This dissertation investigates novel ways of combining spatial reverb models to improve the naturalness of XR musical instruments. Seven spatial reverb systems, combinations of a shoebox spatial reverb model, a raytracing spatial reverb model, and measured directional room impulse response convolution reverb, were compared in a pilot study. A novel hybrid system of synthetic early reflections and directional room impulse responses was preferred for naturalness when tested over headphones with three instruments created by the author: AR electric guitar, AR drumset, and VR Singing Kite. This research culminated in a concert, Spherical Sound Search, which showcased the preferred hybrid system, the three XR musical instruments, and four re-contextualized spatial audio effects (spatial looping, spatial delay, spatial feedback, and spatial compression). The three pieces in the concert explored different aspects of XR modalities and presented the novel system with spatial audio effects to a larger audience by rendering to an octophonic loudspeaker layout

The sound motion controller: a distributed system for interactive music performance

We developed an interactive system for music performance, able to control sound parameters in a responsive way with respect to the user’s movements. This system is conceived as a mobile application, provided with beat tracking and an expressive parameter modulation, interacting with motion sensors and effector units, which are connected to a music output, such as synthesizers or sound effects. We describe the various types of usage of our system and our achievements, aimed to increase the expression of music performance and provide an aid to music interaction. The results obtained outline a first level of integration and foresee future cognitive and technological research related to it

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Game design in an Internet of Things

Whilst no consensus yet exists on how the Internet of Things will be realised, a global infrastructure of networked physical objects that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable and controllable is undoubtedly a compelling vision. Although many implementations of the Internet of Things have presented these objects in a largely ambient sensing role, or providing some form of remote access/control, in this paper we consider the emerging convergence between games and the Internet of Things. This can be seen in a growing number of games that use objects as physical game pieces to enhance the players’ interaction with virtual games. These hybrid physical/digital objects present game designers with number of interesting challenges as they i) blur the boundaries between toys and games; ii) provide opportunities for freeform physical play outside the virtual game; and iii) create new requirements for interaction design, in that they utilise design techniques from both product design and computer interface design. Whilst in the past the manufacturing costs of such game objects would preclude their use within games from small independent games developers, the advent of low cost 3D printing and open software and hardware platforms, which are the enablers of the Internet of Things, means this is no longer the case. However, in order to maximise this opportunity game designers will need to develop new approaches to the design of their games and in this paper we highlight the design sensibilities required if they are to combine the digital and physical affordances within the design of such objects to produce good player experiences

Towards a Semantic Architecture for the Internet of Musical Things

The Internet of Musical Things is an emerging research area that relates to the network of Musical Things, which are computing devices embedded in physical objects dedicated to the production and/or reception of musical content. In this paper we propose a semantically-enriched Internet of Musical Things architecture which relies on a semantic audio server and edge computing techniques. Specifically, a SPARQL Event Processing Architecture is employed as an interoperability enabler allowing multiple heterogeneous Musical Things to cooperate, relying on a music-related ontology. We technically validate our architecture by implementing an ecosystem around it, where five Musical Thing prototypes communicate between each other

Audio in place: media, mobility & HCI: creating meaning in space

Audio-based content, location and mobile technologies can offer a multitude of interactional possibilities when combined in innovative and creative ways. It is important not to underestimate impact of the interplay between location, place and sound. Even if intangible and ephemeral, sounds impact upon the way in which we experience the built as well as the natural world. As technology offer us the opportunity to augment and access the world, mobile technologies offer us the opportunity to interact while moving though the world. They are technologies that can mediate, provide and locate experience in the world. Vision, and to some extent the tactile senses have been dominant modalities discussed in experiential terms within HCI. This workshop suggests that there is a need to better understand how sound can be used for shaping and augmenting the experiential qualities of places through mobile computing

The Hyper-Hurdy-Gurdy

(Abstract to follow

Dirichlet belief networks for topic structure learning

Recently, considerable research effort has been devoted to developing deep architectures for topic models to learn topic structures. Although several deep models have been proposed to learn better topic proportions of documents, how to leverage the benefits of deep structures for learning word distributions of topics has not yet been rigorously studied. Here we propose a new multi-layer generative process on word distributions of topics, where each layer consists of a set of topics and each topic is drawn from a mixture of the topics of the layer above. As the topics in all layers can be directly interpreted by words, the proposed model is able to discover interpretable topic hierarchies. As a self-contained module, our model can be flexibly adapted to different kinds of topic models to improve their modelling accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on text corpora demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model.Comment: accepted in NIPS 201