Social music in cars

This paper builds an understanding of how music is currently experienced by a social group travelling together in a car - how songs are chosen for playing, how music both reflects and influences the group’s mood and social interaction, who supplies the music, the hardware/software that supports song selection and presentation. This fine-grained context emerges from a qualitative analysis of a rich set of ethnographic data (participant observations and interviews) focusing primarily on the experience of in-car music on moderate length and long trips. We suggest features and functionality for music software to enhance the social experience when travelling in cars, and prototype and test a user interface based on design suggestions drawn from the data

Challenges in cross-cultural/multilingual music information seeking

Understanding and meeting the needs of a broad range of music users across different cultures and languages are central in designing a global music digital library. This exploratory study examines cross-cultural/multilingual music information seeking behaviors and reveals some important characteristics of these behaviors by analyzing 107 authentic music information queries from a Korean knowledge search portal Naver (knowledge) iN and 150 queries from Google Answers website. We conclude that new sets of access points must be developed to accommodate music queries that cross cultural or language boundaries

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Song walker harmony space: embodied interaction design for complex musical skills

Tonal harmony is widely considered to be the most technical and complex part of music theory. Consequently harmonic skills can be hard to acquire. Furthermore, experience of the flexible manipulation of harmony in real time generally requires the ability to play an instrument. Even for those with instrumental skills, it can be difficult to gain clear insight into harmonic abstractions. The above state of affairs gives rise to substantial barriers not only for beginners but also for many experienced musicians. To address these problems, Harmony Space (Holland et al. 2009) is an interactive digital music system designed to give insight into a wide range of musical tasks in tonal harmony, ranging from performance and composition to analysis. Harmony Space employs a principled set of spatial mappings to offer fluid, precise, intuitive control of harmony. These mappings give rise to sensory-motor and music-theoretic affordances that are hard to obtain in any other way. As a result, harmonic abstractions are rendered amenable to concrete, visible control by simple spatial manipulation. In the language of conceptual metaphor theory, many relationships in tonal harmony become accessible to rapid, universal, low-level, robust human inference mechanisms using image schemata such as containment, contact, centre-periphery, and source-path-goal. This process is more rapid, and imposes far less cognitive load, than slow, abstract symbolic reasoning. Using the above principles, several versions of Harmony Space have been de-signed to exploit specific interaction styles for different purposes. We note some key variants, such as the desktop version (Holland 1994), the camera tracked version (Holland et al. 2009), while focusing principally on the most recent version, Song Walker (Holland et al. 2011), which employs whole body interaction. Preliminary results from a study of the Song Walker system are outlined, in which both beginners and expert musicians undertook a range of musical tasks involving the performance, composition and analysis of music. Finally, we offer a discussion of the limitations of the current system, and outline directions for future wor

Lessons in Architectural Improvisation

Looking at the majority of constructed environment in our cities (i.e. Tirana and Athens), questions arise concerning on one hand customary relations between architects and their end-product recipients, and on the other hand usual means that define these relations. Is architectural design advanced enough to provide handling of contingency due to users‟ unforeseen dispositions and actions? Are users adequately prompted and properly activated to contribute and participate in the formation of their own space? A traditional perception in theorising the profession of architect, and consequently in teaching architec tural design, recognises architects as absolute masters in the formal process of space determining and building planning. Exclusive authority and responsibility, based on their expertise, are imposed and affect how composition principles and practices correspond to actual functions and, hence, how initial definitions relate to future developments. In general, end-product users either unconditionally accept architects‟ ingenuity or they ignore it, managing and completing space formation in further ways. To face this binary misconception and subsequent problems it may cause, architectural composition should facilitate improvisatory actions as a way to render collaborative space formation an available and beneficial option. It is believed that the concept of architectural improvisation should come into composition processes, not as the architect‟s privilege to spontaneously create, but as the user‟s right to immediately participate. In order to become viable, such an attempt entails a thorough study of the associations between roles and means in space formation processes, as well as a multi-layered examination with regard to interactions between composition and improvisation. A concise analysis of these associations and interactions, as appear in music, offers an additional tool to comprehensively define architectural improvisation

DeWitt Wallace Library Annual Report 2014-2015

Summary of library and media services activities for 2014-201