Testing Two Tools for Multimodal Navigation

The latest smartphones with GPS, electronic compasses, directional audio, touch screens, and so forth, hold a potential for location-based services that are easier to use and that let users focus on their activities and the environment around them. Rather than interpreting maps, users can search for information by pointing in a direction and database queries can be created from GPS location and compass data. Users can also get guidance to locations through point and sweep gestures, spatial sound, and simple graphics. This paper describes two studies testing two applications with multimodal user interfaces for navigation and information retrieval. The applications allow users to search for information and get navigation support using combinations of point and sweep gestures, nonspeech audio, graphics, and text. Tests show that users appreciated both applications for their ease of use and for allowing users to interact directly with the surrounding environment

miMic: The microphone as a pencil

miMic, a sonic analogue of paper and pencil is proposed: An augmented microphone for vocal and gestural sonic sketching. Vocalizations are classified and interpreted as instances of sound models, which the user can play with by vocal and gestural control. The physical device is based on a modified microphone, with embedded inertial sensors and buttons. Sound models can be selected by vocal imitations that are automatically classified, and each model is mapped to vocal and gestural features for real-time control. With miMic, the sound designer can explore a vast sonic space and quickly produce expressive sonic sketches, which may be turned into sound prototypes by further adjustment of model parameters

Evaluating musical software using conceptual metaphors

An open challenge for interaction designers is to find ways of designing software to enhance the ability of novices to perform tasks that normally require specialized domain expertise. This challenge is particularly demanding in areas such as music analysis, where complex, abstract, domain-specific concepts and notations occur. One promising theoretical foundation for this work involves the identification of conceptual metaphors and image schemas, found by analyzing discourse. This kind of analysis has already been applied, with some success, both to musical concepts and, separately, to user interface design. The present work appears to be the first to combine these hitherto distinct bodies of research, with the aim of devising a general method for improving user interfaces for music. Some areas where this may require extensions to existing method are noted. This paper presents the results of an exploratory evaluation of Harmony Space, a tool for playing, analysing and learning about harmony. The evaluation uses conceptual metaphors and image schemas elicited from the dialogues of experienced musicians discussing the harmonic progressions in a piece of music. Examples of where the user interface supports the conceptual metaphors, and where support could be improved, are discussed. The potential use of audio output to support conceptual metaphors and image schemas is considered

Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

A Semantic Web Annotation Tool for a Web-Based Audio Sequencer

Music and sound have a rich semantic structure which is so clear to the composer and the listener, but that remains mostly hidden to computing machinery. Nevertheless, in recent years, the introduction of software tools for music production have enabled new opportunities for migrating this knowledge from humans to machines. A new generation of these tools may exploit sound samples and semantic information coupling for the creation not only of a musical, but also of a "semantic" composition. In this paper we describe an ontology driven content annotation framework for a web-based audio editing tool. In a supervised approach, during the editing process, the graphical web interface allows the user to annotate any part of the composition with concepts from publicly available ontologies. As a test case, we developed a collaborative web-based audio sequencer that provides users with the functionality to remix the audio samples from the Freesound website and subsequently annotate them. The annotation tool can load any ontology and thus gives users the opportunity to augment the work with annotations on the structure of the composition, the musical materials, and the creator's reasoning and intentions. We believe this approach will provide several novel ways to make not only the final audio product, but also the creative process, first class citizens of the Semantic We