Music-Related Media-Contents Synchronization over theWeb: the IEEE 1599 Initiative

IEEE 1599 is an international standard originally conceived for music, which aims at providing a comprehensive description of the media contents related to a music piece within a multi-layer and synchronized environment. A number of o_- line and stand-alone software prototypes has been realized after its standardization, occurred in 2008. Recently, thanks to some technological advances (e.g. the release of HTML5), the engine of the IEEE 1599 parser has been ported on the Web. Some non-trivial problems have been solved, e.g. the management of multiple simultaneous media streams in a client-server architecture. After providing an overview of the IEEE 1599 standard, this article presents a survey of the recent initiatives regarding audio-driven synchronization over the Web

Meta-instrument and Natural User Interface: a New Paradigm in Music Education

Music is gaining a growing role in children and teenager education, but playing music is not as natural as listening, requiring a large amount of time to spend in learning how to play a music instrument. Since a number of technical skills should be acquired through practice, this is a strong limitation for educational contexts where student\u2019s time is a limited resource. The meta-instrument is a new paradigm for music instruments that overcomes these limitations and enables the student to instantly execute a music score without a specific training. Thanks to the natural ability of the human beings to tap the music, the meta-instrument moves the interaction level to the timing, the interpretation, and the natural interaction, embedding the pitch control in its smart logic implementation. The typical interaction of a natural user interface is applicable to a meta-instrument because it can emulate both a traditional music instrument and a virtual one. The student can play a music instrument regardless to the interaction mode, thus focusing on interpretation rather than on playing. The proposed meta-instrument framework refers to multiple and heterogeneous contents applying the specification of IEEE 1599, an XML-based standard for full representation of music

Development of serious games for music education

Serious games have proved to be an effective educational tool in many fields. The first goal of this paper is to illustrate some possible applications to music and their advantages. Moreover, music can be characterized by heterogeneous multimedia contents. Among the different facets music information is made of it is worth citing music symbols, their graphical representations as scores, their audio renderings as tracks, etc. The international standard known as IEEE 1599 is an XML multilayer format for heterogeneous music contents, and describes such different aspects in an integrated and synchronized context. Making relationships among music contents explicit provides a potentially rich educational environment. Consequently, this paper discusses the concept of multilayer learning object, introduces the IEEE 1599 standard, and finally shows some applications and case studies

Fruizione evoluta via Web di contenuti musicali e multimediali: il portale EMIPIU

Il presente lavoro descrive il portale EMIPIU, un\u2019interfaccia Web per la fruizione evoluta di contenuti musicali. Esso si basa sulle caratteristiche del formato IEEE 1599, che consente di codificare l\u2019informazione musicale eterogenea relativa ad un singolo brano all\u2019interno di un unico documento XML. Il portale fornisce accesso a una libreria di pezzi in formato IEEE 1599, rappresentativi di diversi periodi storici, stili e organici strumentali. Per la loro fruizione e stato realizzato un lettore multimediale IEEE 1599 in HTML5, le cui peculiarita permettono di scaricare in streaming e visualizzare flussi multimediali multipli. L\u2019articolo descrive nel dettaglio il progetto, soffermandosi sulle caratteristiche principali del formato IEEE 1599, del portale EMIPIU, della teca digitale e del player

Analysis of Different Classification Techniques for Two-Class Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy-Based Brain-Computer Interface

We analyse and compare the classification accuracies of six different classifiers for a two-class mental task (mental arithmetic and rest) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals. The signals of the mental arithmetic and rest tasks from the prefrontal cortex region of the brain for seven healthy subjects were acquired using a multichannel continuous-wave imaging system. After removal of the physiological noises, six features were extracted from the oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) signals. Two- and three-dimensional combinations of those features were used for classification of mental tasks. In the classification, six different modalities, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), k-nearest neighbour (kNN), the Naïve Bayes approach, support vector machine (SVM), and artificial neural networks (ANN), were utilized. With these classifiers, the average classification accuracies among the seven subjects for the 2- and 3-dimensional combinations of features were 71.6, 90.0, 69.7, 89.8, 89.5, and 91.4% and 79.6, 95.2, 64.5, 94.8, 95.2, and 96.3%, respectively. ANN showed the maximum classification accuracies: 91.4 and 96.3%. In order to validate the results, a statistical significance test was performed, which confirmed that the p values were statistically significant relative to all of the other classifiers (p < 0.005) using HbO signals

Music 2025 : The Music Data Dilemma: issues facing the music industry in improving data management

© Crown Copyright 2019Music 2025ʼ investigates the infrastructure issues around the management of digital data in an increasingly stream driven industry. The findings are the culmination of over 50 interviews with high profile music industry representatives across the sector and reflects key issues as well as areas of consensus and contrasting views. The findings reveal whilst there are great examples of data initiatives across the value chain, there are opportunities to improve efficiency and interoperability

Harnessing the Benefits of Open Electronics in Science

Freely and openly shared low-cost electronic applications, known as open electronics, have sparked a new open-source movement, with much un-tapped potential to advance scientific research. Initially designed to appeal to electronic hobbyists, open electronics have formed a global community of "makers" and inventors and are increasingly used in science and industry. Here, we review the current benefits of open electronics for scientific research and guide academics to enter this emerging field. We discuss how electronic applications, from the experimental to the theoretical sciences, can help (I) individual researchers by increasing the customization, efficiency, and scalability of experiments, while improving data quantity and quality; (II) scientific institutions by improving access and maintenance of high-end technologies, visibility and interdisciplinary collaboration potential; and (III) the scientific community by improving transparency and reproducibility, helping decouple research capacity from funding, increasing innovation, and improving collaboration potential among researchers and the public. Open electronics are powerful tools to increase creativity, democratization, and reproducibility of research and thus offer practical solutions to overcome significant barriers in science.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure, 2 table

Virtual Reality and Learning: A Case Study of Experiential Pedagogy in Art History

While images are central to the discipline of art history, surprisingly little research has been conducted on the uses of digital environments for teaching in the discipline. Over the past decade, more studies have emerged considering the egalitarian space that can be used by students and teachers in web-based applications and social media. A body of literature has begun to emerge out of a small network of scholars and educators interested in digital humanities and art history, providing examples of how new tools can be integrated into the standard slideshow and lecture format of the field. At the same time, the latest technology that proves revolutionary for the field has had very little study-virtual reality (VR). Additionally, sensory evidence for digital art history and the creation of immersive interactive and multimodal environments for knowledge production is still underexplored. As multiple educational metaverses are currently under development, understanding best practices and pedagogical use of VR has never been timelier. This study seeks to review the pedagogical use of VR in art history current in the field and introduces results from a study of the most effective ways to use these immersive experiences using Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Results confirm that the most effective method to structure VR assignments is to provide training on the technology, provide students with the necessary instructional material to introduce the concept, skill or technique to be learned, create or select an immersive experience that reinforces that topic, and conclude with a debrief or discussion about major takeaways from the experience

Music Synchronization, Audio Matching, Pattern Detection, and User Interfaces for a Digital Music Library System

Over the last two decades, growing efforts to digitize our cultural heritage could be observed. Most of these digitization initiatives pursuit either one or both of the following goals: to conserve the documents - especially those threatened by decay - and to provide remote access on a grand scale. For music documents these trends are observable as well, and by now several digital music libraries are in existence. An important characteristic of these music libraries is an inherent multimodality resulting from the large variety of available digital music representations, such as scanned score, symbolic score, audio recordings, and videos. In addition, for each piece of music there exists not only one document of each type, but many. Considering and exploiting this multimodality and multiplicity, the DFG-funded digital library initiative PROBADO MUSIC aimed at developing a novel user-friendly interface for content-based retrieval, document access, navigation, and browsing in large music collections. The implementation of such a front end requires the multimodal linking and indexing of the music documents during preprocessing. As the considered music collections can be very large, the automated or at least semi-automated calculation of these structures would be recommendable. The field of music information retrieval (MIR) is particularly concerned with the development of suitable procedures, and it was the goal of PROBADO MUSIC to include existing and newly developed MIR techniques to realize the envisioned digital music library system. In this context, the present thesis discusses the following three MIR tasks: music synchronization, audio matching, and pattern detection. We are going to identify particular issues in these fields and provide algorithmic solutions as well as prototypical implementations. In Music synchronization, for each position in one representation of a piece of music the corresponding position in another representation is calculated. This thesis focuses on the task of aligning scanned score pages of orchestral music with audio recordings. Here, a previously unconsidered piece of information is the textual specification of transposing instruments provided in the score. Our evaluations show that the neglect of such information can result in a measurable loss of synchronization accuracy. Therefore, we propose an OCR-based approach for detecting and interpreting the transposition information in orchestral scores. For a given audio snippet, audio matching methods automatically calculate all musically similar excerpts within a collection of audio recordings. In this context, subsequence dynamic time warping (SSDTW) is a well-established approach as it allows for local and global tempo variations between the query and the retrieved matches. Moving to real-life digital music libraries with larger audio collections, however, the quadratic runtime of SSDTW results in untenable response times. To improve on the response time, this thesis introduces a novel index-based approach to SSDTW-based audio matching. We combine the idea of inverted file lists introduced by Kurth and Müller (Efficient index-based audio matching, 2008) with the shingling techniques often used in the audio identification scenario. In pattern detection, all repeating patterns within one piece of music are determined. Usually, pattern detection operates on symbolic score documents and is often used in the context of computer-aided motivic analysis. Envisioned as a new feature of the PROBADO MUSIC system, this thesis proposes a string-based approach to pattern detection and a novel interactive front end for result visualization and analysis