Embodiment, sound and visualization : a multimodal perspective in music education

Recently, many studies have emphasized the role of body movements in processing, sharing and giving meaning to music. At the same time, neuroscience studies, suggest that different parts of the brain are integrated and activated by the same stimuli: sounds, for example, can be perceived by touch and can evoke imagery, energy, fluency and periodicity. This interaction of auditory, visual and motor senses can be found in the verbal descriptions of music and among children during their spontaneous games. The question to be asked is, if a more multisensory and embodied approach could redefine some of our assumptions regarding musical education. Recent research on embodiment and multimodal perception in instrumental teaching could suggest new directions in musical education. Can we consider the integration between the activities of body movement, listening, metaphor visualization, and singing, as more effective than a disembodied and fragmented approach for the process of musical understanding

Analyzing Visual Mappings of Traditional and Alternative Music Notation

In this paper, we postulate that combining the domains of information visualization and music studies paves the ground for a more structured analysis of the design space of music notation, enabling the creation of alternative music notations that are tailored to different users and their tasks. Hence, we discuss the instantiation of a design and visualization pipeline for music notation that follows a structured approach, based on the fundamental concepts of information and data visualization. This enables practitioners and researchers of digital humanities and information visualization, alike, to conceptualize, create, and analyze novel music notation methods. Based on the analysis of relevant stakeholders and their usage of music notation as a mean of communication, we identify a set of relevant features typically encoded in different annotations and encodings, as used by interpreters, performers, and readers of music. We analyze the visual mappings of musical dimensions for varying notation methods to highlight gaps and frequent usages of encodings, visual channels, and Gestalt laws. This detailed analysis leads us to the conclusion that such an under-researched area in information visualization holds the potential for fundamental research. This paper discusses possible research opportunities, open challenges, and arguments that can be pursued in the process of analyzing, improving, or rethinking existing music notation systems and techniques.Comment: 5 pages including references, 3rd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, Vis4DH, IEEE Vis 201

Dance-the-music : an educational platform for the modeling, recognition and audiovisual monitoring of dance steps using spatiotemporal motion templates

In this article, a computational platform is presented, entitled “Dance-the-Music”, that can be used in a dance educational context to explore and learn the basics of dance steps. By introducing a method based on spatiotemporal motion templates, the platform facilitates to train basic step models from sequentially repeated dance figures performed by a dance teacher. Movements are captured with an optical motion capture system. The teachers’ models can be visualized from a first-person perspective to instruct students how to perform the specific dance steps in the correct manner. Moreover, recognition algorithms-based on a template matching method can determine the quality of a student’s performance in real time by means of multimodal monitoring techniques. The results of an evaluation study suggest that the Dance-the-Music is effective in helping dance students to master the basics of dance figures

From Dynamic to Expressionism: An Arts Integration Study

The classroom based study “From Dynamic to Expressionism: An Arts Integration Study” was designed to answer the question; Will implementing an interdisciplinary art and music unit affect the level of student confidence in understanding expressionism in art? The researcher implemented an interdisciplinary art unit in two inner-city second grade classes. Throughout the study a survey was used for students to assess their confidence level and a checklist was used to observe student confidence during class time

Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1