CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Portfolio of compositions using causality as a musical parameter

The main body of this thesis consists of three drone pieces, all with a special concern with causality as a crucial musical parameter, within semi-improvised mixed music settings. This accompanying commentary gives a theoretical background to the pieces, as well as documenting the pragmatic considerations of their technical implementation, with a special emphasis on real-time audio mosaicking. This accompanying commentary anchors the pieces within an aesthetic and theoretical background. The coding and implementation of digital and hybrid instruments, as well as their practical implementation was at the core of the compositional work, as well as mixed-music concerns of integrating the loudspeaker sound with that of the acoustic instrument. The text will then position mixed-music more generally within current technological trends, and how this position extends the music presented here

A Multidimensional Sketching Interface for Visual Interaction with Corpus-Based Concatenative Sound Synthesis

The present research sought to investigate the correspondence between auditory and visual feature dimensions and to utilise this knowledge in order to inform the design of audio-visual mappings for visual control of sound synthesis. The first stage of the research involved the design and implementation of Morpheme, a novel interface for interaction with corpus-based concatenative synthesis. Morpheme uses sketching as a model for interaction between the user and the computer. The purpose of the system is to facilitate the expression of sound design ideas by describing the qualities of the sound to be synthesised in visual terms, using a set of perceptually meaningful audio-visual feature associations. The second stage of the research involved the preparation of two multidimensional mappings for the association between auditory and visual dimensions.The third stage of this research involved the evaluation of the Audio-Visual (A/V) mappings and of Morpheme’s user interface. The evaluation comprised two controlled experiments, an online study and a user study. Our findings suggest that the strength of the perceived correspondence between the A/V associations prevails over the timbre characteristics of the sounds used to render the complementary polar features. Hence, the empirical evidence gathered by previous research is generalizable/ applicable to different contexts and the overall dimensionality of the sound used to render should not have a very significant effect on the comprehensibility and usability of an A/V mapping. However, the findings of the present research also show that there is a non-linear interaction between the harmonicity of the corpus and the perceived correspondence of the audio-visual associations. For example, strongly correlated cross-modal cues such as size-loudness or vertical position-pitch are affected less by the harmonicity of the audio corpus in comparison to weaker correlated dimensions (e.g. texture granularity-sound dissonance). No significant differences were revealed as a result of musical/audio training. The third study consisted of an evaluation of Morpheme’s user interface were participants were asked to use the system to design a sound for a given video footage. The usability of the system was found to be satisfactory.An interface for drawing visual queries was developed for high level control of the retrieval and signal processing algorithms of concatenative sound synthesis. This thesis elaborates on previous research findings and proposes two methods for empirically driven validation of audio-visual mappings for sound synthesis. These methods could be applied to a wide range of contexts in order to inform the design of cognitively useful multi-modal interfaces and representation and rendering of multimodal data. Moreover this research contributes to the broader understanding of multimodal perception by gathering empirical evidence about the correspondence between auditory and visual feature dimensions and by investigating which factors affect the perceived congruency between aural and visual structures

A Multidimensional Sketching Interface for Visual Interaction with Corpus-Based Concatenative Sound Synthesis

The present research sought to investigate the correspondence between auditory and visual feature dimensions and to utilise this knowledge in order to inform the design of audio-visual mappings for visual control of sound synthesis. The first stage of the research involved the design and implementation of Morpheme, a novel interface for interaction with corpus-based concatenative synthesis. Morpheme uses sketching as a model for interaction between the user and the computer. The purpose of the system is to facilitate the expression of sound design ideas by describing the qualities of the sound to be synthesised in visual terms, using a set of perceptually meaningful audio-visual feature associations. The second stage of the research involved the preparation of two multidimensional mappings for the association between auditory and visual dimensions.The third stage of this research involved the evaluation of the Audio-Visual (A/V) mappings and of Morpheme’s user interface. The evaluation comprised two controlled experiments, an online study and a user study. Our findings suggest that the strength of the perceived correspondence between the A/V associations prevails over the timbre characteristics of the sounds used to render the complementary polar features. Hence, the empirical evidence gathered by previous research is generalizable/ applicable to different contexts and the overall dimensionality of the sound used to render should not have a very significant effect on the comprehensibility and usability of an A/V mapping. However, the findings of the present research also show that there is a non-linear interaction between the harmonicity of the corpus and the perceived correspondence of the audio-visual associations. For example, strongly correlated cross-modal cues such as size-loudness or vertical position-pitch are affected less by the harmonicity of the audio corpus in comparison to weaker correlated dimensions (e.g. texture granularity-sound dissonance). No significant differences were revealed as a result of musical/audio training. The third study consisted of an evaluation of Morpheme’s user interface were participants were asked to use the system to design a sound for a given video footage. The usability of the system was found to be satisfactory.An interface for drawing visual queries was developed for high level control of the retrieval and signal processing algorithms of concatenative sound synthesis. This thesis elaborates on previous research findings and proposes two methods for empirically driven validation of audio-visual mappings for sound synthesis. These methods could be applied to a wide range of contexts in order to inform the design of cognitively useful multi-modal interfaces and representation and rendering of multimodal data. Moreover this research contributes to the broader understanding of multimodal perception by gathering empirical evidence about the correspondence between auditory and visual feature dimensions and by investigating which factors affect the perceived congruency between aural and visual structures

DMRN+16: Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2021

DMRN+16: Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2021 Queen Mary University of London Tuesday 21st December 2021 Keynote speakers Keynote 1. Prof. Sophie Scott -Director, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. Title: "Sound on the brain - insights from functional neuroimaging and neuroanatomy" Abstract In this talk I will use functional imaging and models of primate neuroanatomy to explore how sound is processed in the human brain. I will demonstrate that sound is represented cortically in different parallel streams. I will expand this to show how this can impact on the concept of auditory perception, which arguably incorporates multiple kinds of distinct perceptual processes. I will address the roles that subcortical processes play in this, and also the contributions from hemispheric asymmetries. Keynote 2: Prof. Gus Xia - Assistant Professor at NYU Shanghai Title: "Learning interpretable music representations: from human stupidity to artificial intelligence" Abstract Gus has been leading the Music X Lab in developing intelligent systems that help people better compose and learn music. In this talk, he will show us the importance of music representation for both humans and machines, and how to learn better music representations via the design of inductive bias. Once we got interpretable music representations, the potential applications are limitless

Modelling affect for horror soundscapes

The feeling of horror within movies or games relies on the audience’s perception of a tense atmosphere — often achieved through sound accompanied by the on-screen drama — guiding its emotional experience throughout the scene or game-play sequence. These progressions are often crafted through an a priori knowledge of how a scene or game-play sequence will playout, and the intended emotional patterns a game director wants to transmit. The appropriate design of sound becomes even more challenging once the scenery and the general context is autonomously generated by an algorithm. Towards realizing sound-based affective interaction in games this paper explores the creation of computational models capable of ranking short audio pieces based on crowdsourced annotations of tension, arousal and valence. Affect models are trained via preference learning on over a thousand annotations with the use of support vector machines, whose inputs are low-level features extracted from the audio assets of a comprehensive sound library. The models constructed in this work are able to predict the tension, arousal and valence elicited by sound, respectively, with an accuracy of approximately 65%, 66% and 72%.peer-reviewe

Third International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation TENOR 2017

The third International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation seeks to focus on a set of specific research issues associated with Music Notation that were elaborated at the first two editions of TENOR in Paris and Cambridge. The theme of the conference is vocal music, whereas the pre-conference workshops focus on innovative technological approaches to music notation