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

Being There & Being With: The Philosophical and Cognitive Notions of Presence and Embodiment in Virtual Instruments

International audienceIn this paper, we will discuss two main concepts, associated with the development of Virtual Worlds, which are "Presence" and "Embodiment". Presence is stamped as the sense of "Being there", that has to be reconstructed in Local world to render Distant Worlds accessible by net-worked or mediated communications. "Embodiment" could be the property of a Virtual entity to be incorporated by human as a second nature. We will show then, how (1) the first situation can be seen as a definition of "immateriality" and its correlative concept of infinity, (2) the second situation can be seen as a definition of "tangibility" with its correlative concept of instrumental embodiment. After exploring the complementary properties of these situations in detail, we will focus on the second one, identified as "the instrumental situation". We will propose some of its relevant properties, those that are able to trigger the sense of embodiment, as the main property supported in the real physical world by the feature of "tangibility". Consequently, we estimate that "embodiment" is more important than the tangibility in itself and we examine some criteria able to help us to recreate them in digital representations

A multimodal smartphone interface for active perception by visually impaired

The diffuse availability of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has the potential to bring substantial benefits to the people with sensory impairments. The solution proposed in this paper is part of an ongoing effort to create an accurate obstacle and hazard detector for the visually impaired, which is embedded in a hand-held device. In particular, it presents a proof of concept for a multimodal interface to control the orientation of a smartphone's camera, while being held by a person, using a combination of vocal messages, 3D sounds and vibrations. The solution, which is to be evaluated experimentally by users, will enable further research in the area of active vision with human-in-the-loop, with potential application to mobile assistive devices for indoor navigation of visually impaired people

Between Air and Electricity

After the sound reproduction industry had claimed “perfect high fidelity” for sound recordings already at the beginning of the twentieth century, composers and sound artists challenged this perfection by tweaking microphones and loudspeakers to make them act as a musical instrument instead of a mere sound reproduction device. This book explores the instrumental use of microphones and loudspeakers in music beginning in the 1950s. The popular noise musician Merzbow, over-minimalist classic Alvin Lucier, cult instrument inventor Hugh Davies, and contemporary visual artist Lynn Pook made audible what was supposed to remain silent