Interactive Spaces. Models and Algorithms for Reality-based Music Applications

Reality-based interfaces have the property of linking the user's physical space with the computer digital content, bringing in intuition, plasticity and expressiveness. Moreover, applications designed upon motion and gesture tracking technologies involve a lot of psychological features, like space cognition and implicit knowledge. All these elements are the background of three presented music applications, employing the characteristics of three different interactive spaces: a user centered three dimensional space, a floor bi-dimensional camera space, and a small sensor centered three dimensional space. The basic idea is to deploy the application's spatial properties in order to convey some musical knowledge, allowing the users to act inside the designed space and to learn through it in an enactive way

A SMARC Effect for Loudness

Various reports suggest that the pitch height of musical tones may be represented along a mental space, with lower pitch heights represented on the left or lower sectors and higher pitch heights represented on the right or upper sectors of the mental space. Given that in Western languages the loudness of tones is often addressed spatially, with loud sounds referred to as \u201chigh\u201d and quiet sounds referred to as \u201clow,\u201d here we investigated whether loudness might also have a spatial representation. Participants judged whether a tone was louder or quieter than a reference tone, by pressing two keys: one at the top and the other at the bottom of a response box. Participants were faster in a situation where they pressed the key at the top to report louder sounds, and the key at the bottom to report quieter sounds, than vice versa. This result supports the view that loudness, like other types of magnitudes, might be represented spatially

The \u201cHarmonic Walk\u201d and Enactive Knowledge: an Assessment Report

The Harmonic Walk is an interactive, physical environment based on user\u2019s motion detection and devoted to the study and practice of tonal harmony. When entering the rectangular floor surface within the application\u2019s camera view, a user can actually walk inside the musical structure, causing a sound feedback depending on the occupied zone. We arranged a two masks projection set up to allow users to experience melodic segmentation and tonality harmonic space, and we planned two phase assessment sessions, submitting a 22 high school student group to various test conditions. Our findings demonstrate the high learning effectiveness of the Harmonic Walk application. Its ability to transfer abstract concepts in an enactive way, produces important improvement rates both for subjects who received explicit information and for subjects who didn\u2019t

Digital competencies and capabilities. Pre-adolescents inside and outside school

The investment on key-competences in last years was one crucial European strategy to face the new challenges of the knowledge society and of the digital convergence and to guarantee the active citizenship and social inclusion. The first answer has been given in Lisbon 2000’s, when eight main objectives have been presented; they were focused on the improvement of basic and "soft" skills in educational paths of the main agencies (i.e. school and family). Hence, the digital competence, included in Lisbon strategies, can be interpreted in a double meaning: as basic skill (focused on the digital literacy) as soft skill (focused on the digital learning). Starting from here, this proposal will construct a theoretical description of the digital competence and its impact to cognitive processes of the children, considering the influence and the strategies applied by agencies of the social capital, especially the family. This issue will be analysed through the re-reading the capabilities approach by Sen and Nussbaum (2011), according two perspectives: 1. the first is psyco-cognitive connected to the development of digital competences during the learning process of children; 2. the second is focused on the relational and communicative styles of their socializing agencies. In the digital skills, the generation gap is more evident: the youngsters acquire the digital literacy through their experiences; however their digital knowledge is often technical and linguistic, while it isn’t a lot oriented to the metacognition of the digital media, such as the critical thinking or the creativity; on the other side, the educators don’t have the same familiarity with media and for this reason they not always understand needs, values and references of youngsters. The consumption styles of parents, their prejudices and their competences influence the relationship of children with media starting from their first digital experience, with social and cognitive consequences

Signal-Theoretic Characterization of Waveguide Mesh Geometries for Models of Two--Dimensional Wave Propagation in Elastic Media

Waveguide Meshes are efficient and versatile models of wave propagation along a multidimensional ideal medium. The choice of the mesh geometry affects both the computational cost and the accuracy of simulations. In this paper, we focus on 2D geometries and use multidimensional sampling theory to compare the square, triangular, and hexagonal meshes in terms of sampling efficiency and dispersion error under conditions of critical sampling. The analysis shows that the triangular geometry exhibits the most desirable tradeoff between accuracy and computational cost.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, to appear on IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 9, no. 2, february 200

A Conceptual Framework for Motion Based Music Applications

Imaginary projections are the core of the framework for motion based music applications presented in this paper. Their design depends on the space covered by the motion tracking device, but also on the musical feature involved in the application. They can be considered a very powerful tool because they allow not only to project in the virtual environment the image of a traditional acoustic instrument, but also to express any spatially defined abstract concept. The system pipeline starts from the musical content and, through a geometrical interpretation, arrives to its projection in the physical space. Three case studies involving different motion tracking devices and different musical concepts will be analyzed. The three examined applications have been programmed and already tested by the authors. They aim respectively at musical expressive interaction (Disembodied Voices), tonal music knowledge (Harmonic Walk) and XX century music composition (Hand Composer)

Vibrotactile sensitivity in active touch: effect of pressing force

An experiment was conducted to study the effects of force produced by active touch on vibrotactile perceptual thresholds. The task consisted in pressing the fingertip against a flat rigid surface that provided either sinusoidal or broadband vibration. Three force levels were considered, ranging from light touch to hard press. Finger contact areas were measured during the experiment, showing positive correlation with the respective applied forces. Significant effects on thresholds were found for vibration type and force level. Moreover, possibly due to the concurrent effect of large (unconstrained) finger contact areas, active pressing forces, and long duration stimuli, the measured perceptual thresholds are considerably lower than what previously reported in the literature

Fractionally-addressed delay lines

While traditional implementations of variable-length digital delay lines are based on a circular buffer accessed by two pointers, we propose an implementation where a single fractional pointer is used both for read and write operations. On modern general-purpose architectures, the proposed method is nearly as efficient as the popularinterpolated circular buffer, and it behaves well for delay-length modulations commonly found in digital audio effects. The physical interpretation of the new implementation shows that it is suitable for simulating tension or density modulations in wave-propagating media.Comment: 11 pages, 19 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing Corrected ACM-clas

Film and Tourism. An Information System for Disclosing the Cinematographic Attractiveness of Destinations (Giulia Lavarone pp.289-291)

The Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padova investigated the topic of film-induced tourism in a year-long project, concluded in April 2015, titled Strumenti innovativi per la promozione turistica: film-induced tourism (Novel Tools to Promote Tourism: Film-induced Tourism). The project was financed by the Veneto Region through ESF funds. It brought together the expertise of film scholars, computer scientists and destination management experts, in partnership with public bodies (Provincia di Padova) and ICT companies. The goal of the project was to develop an information system that fosters film-induced tourism combining data about a geographical area and the movies produced in it. The system is designed as a platform to store and convey rich contents, able to address the needs of the tourist but also of stakeholders as DMOs and film commissions. The system was planned as a model for the destinations which could take advantage of a significant cinematographic background, yet are unlikely to spontaneously produce considerable film-induced tourism phenomena. The province of Padova has been used as a case study