An Intelligent audio workstation in the browser

Music production is a complex process requiring skill and time to undertake. The industry has undergone a digital revolution, but unlike other industries the process has not changed. However, intelligent systems, using the semantic web and signal processing, can reduce this complexity by making certain decisions for the user with minimal interaction, saving both time and investment on the engineers’ part. This paper will outline an intelligent Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) designed for use in the browser. It outlines the architecture of the DAW with its audio engine (built on the Web Audio API), using AngularJS for the user interface and a relational database

Haptics for the development of fundamental rhythm skills, including multi-limb coordination

This chapter considers the use of haptics for learning fundamental rhythm skills, including skills that depend on multi-limb coordination. Different sensory modalities have different strengths and weaknesses for the development of skills related to rhythm. For example, vision has low temporal resolution and performs poorly for tracking rhythms in real-time, whereas hearing is highly accurate. However, in the case of multi-limbed rhythms, neither hearing nor sight are particularly well suited to communicating exactly which limb does what and when, or how the limbs coordinate. By contrast, haptics can work especially well in this area, by applying haptic signals independently to each limb. We review relevant theories, including embodied interaction and biological entrainment. We present a range of applications of the Haptic Bracelets, which are computer-controlled wireless vibrotactile devices, one attached to each wrist and ankle. Haptic pulses are used to guide users in playing rhythmic patterns that require multi-limb coordination. One immediate aim of the system is to support the development of practical rhythm skills and multi-limb coordination. A longer-term goal is to aid the development of a wider range of fundamental rhythm skills including recognising, identifying, memorising, retaining, analysing, reproducing, coordinating, modifying and creating rhythms – particularly multi-stream (i.e. polyphonic) rhythmic sequences. Empirical results are presented. We reflect on related work, and discuss design issues for using haptics to support rhythm skills. Skills of this kind are essential not just to drummers and percussionists but also to keyboards players, and more generally to all musicians who need a firm grasp of rhythm

Multimodal Content Analysis for Effective Advertisements on YouTube

The rapid advances in e-commerce and Web 2.0 technologies have greatly increased the impact of commercial advertisements on the general public. As a key enabling technology, a multitude of recommender systems exists which analyzes user features and browsing patterns to recommend appealing advertisements to users. In this work, we seek to study the characteristics or attributes that characterize an effective advertisement and recommend a useful set of features to aid the designing and production processes of commercial advertisements. We analyze the temporal patterns from multimedia content of advertisement videos including auditory, visual and textual components, and study their individual roles and synergies in the success of an advertisement. The objective of this work is then to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement, and to recommend a useful set of features to advertisement designers to make it more successful and approachable to users. Our proposed framework employs the signal processing technique of cross modality feature learning where data streams from different components are employed to train separate neural network models and are then fused together to learn a shared representation. Subsequently, a neural network model trained on this joint feature embedding representation is utilized as a classifier to predict advertisement effectiveness. We validate our approach using subjective ratings from a dedicated user study, the sentiment strength of online viewer comments, and a viewer opinion metric of the ratio of the Likes and Views received by each advertisement from an online platform.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, ICDM 201

An Architecture for distributed multimedia database systems

In the past few years considerable demand for user oriented multimedia information systems has developed. These systems must provide a rich set of functionality so that new, complex, and interesting applications can be addressed. This places considerable importance on the management of diverse data types including text, images, audio and video. These requirements generate the need for a new generation of distributed heterogeneous multimedia database systems. In this paper we identify a set of functional requirements for a multimedia server considering database management, object synchronization and integration, and multimedia query processing. A generalization of the requirements to a distributed system is presented, and some of our current research and developing activities are discussed

Turning it all upside down . . . Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive

What could and should be the relationship between research archives of endangered cultural heritage materials and the originating community? This paper argues that recent developments in distributed computing in a networked environment have allowed us to re-imagine this relationship in a way that profoundly changes the role of the archive and reinforces the desirability of establishing ongoing reciprocal relationships with cultural heritage communities. Some possibilities are suggested drawing from experience with PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, established in 2003 as a collaborative venture between the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University) and with local community-based digital archives in the remote Australian communities of Belyuen and Wadeye. Repatriation and rights, planning principles for establishment and sustainability of local digital archives in community cultural centres, and models for a staged approach in setting up ongoing relationships with rights holders are discussed. The paper argues that digital archives, as distributed virtual institutions, need to engage with a number of different communities of interest: not only the individuals, communities, and institutions that own the cultural heritage objects we preserve, but also the wider academic community and international standards-setting bodies. Planning for our archives’ digital future means imagining ourselves as actors and creators within that virtual society.Australian Research Counci

ABC with a UNIX Flavor

abc is a simple, yet powerful, textual musical notation. This paper presents abc::dt, a rule-based domain-specific language (Perl embedded), designed to simplify the creation of abc processing tools. Inspired by the Unix philosophy, those tools intend to be simple and compositional in a Unix filters\u27 way. From abc::dt\u27s rules we obtain an abc processing tool whose main algorithm follows a traditional compiler architecture, thus consisting of three stages: 1) abc parser (based on abcmtops\u27 parser), 2) abc semantic transformation (associated with abc attributes), 3) output generation (either a user defined or system provided abc generator)

ABC with a UNIX flavor

ABC is a simple, yet powerful, textual musical notation. This paper presents ABC::DT, a rule-based domain-specific language (Perl embedded), designed to simplify the creation of ABC processing tools. Inspired by the Unix philosophy, those tools intend to be simple and compositional in a Unix filters' way. From ABC::DT's rules we obtain an ABC processing tool whose main algorithm follows a traditional compiler architecture, thus consisting of three stages: 1) ABC parser (based on abcm2ps' parser), 2) ABC semantic transformation (associated with ABC attributes), 3) output generation (either a user defined or system provided ABC generator).(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

MHEG: An Interchange Format for Interactive Multimedia Presentations

This paper surveys the upcoming MHEG standard, as under development by the Multimedia Hypermedia Experts Group of ISO. It's scope is to define a system-independent encoding of the structure information which can be used for storing, exchanging, and executing of multimedia presentations in final form. We use a running example to describe the building blocks of an MHEG encoded presentation. To contribute our experience using MHEG in a networked multimedia kiosk environment, we present a complete MHEG run-time environment