Augmenting Sonic Experiences Through Haptic Feedback

Sonic experiences are usually considered as the result of auditory feedback alone. From a psychological standpoint, however, this is true only when a listener is kept isolated from concurrent stimuli targeting the other senses. Such stimuli, in fact, may either interfere with the sonic experience if they distract the listener, or conversely enhance it if they convey sensations coherent with what is being heard. This chapter is concerned with haptic augmentations having effects on auditory perception, for example how different vibrotactile cues provided by an electronic musical instrument may affect its perceived sound quality or the playing experience. Results from different experiments are reviewed showing that the auditory and somatosensory channels together can produce constructive effects resulting in measurable perceptual enhancement. That may affect sonic dimensions ranging from basic auditory parameters, such as the perceived intensity of frequency components, up to more complex perceptions which contribute to forming our ecology of everyday or musical sounds

Motion Capturing Emotions

The paper explores the activities conducted as part of WhoLoDancE: Whole Body Interaction Learning for Dance Education which is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project. In particular, we discuss the motion capture sessions that took place at Motek, Amsterdam as well as the dancers’ experience of being captured and watching themselves or others as varying visual representations through the HoloLens. HoloLens is Microsoft’s first holographic computer that you wear as you would a pair of glasses. The study embraced four dance genres: Ballet, Contemporary, Flamenco and Greek Folk dance. We are specifically interested in the kinesthetic and emotional engagement with the moving body and what new corporeal awareness may be experienced. Positioning the moving, dancing body as fundamental to technological advancements, we discuss the importance of considering the dancer’s experience in the real and virtual space. Some of the artists involved in the project have offered their experiences, which are included, and they form the basis of the discussion. In addition, we discuss the affect of immersive environments, how these environments expand reality and what effect (emotionally and otherwise) that has on the body. The research reveals insights into relationships between emotion, movement and technology and what new sensorial knowledge this evokes for the dancer

Automatic accompaniment of vocal melodies in the context of popular music

A piece of popular music is usually defined as a combination of vocal melody and instrumental accompaniment. People often start with the melody part when they are trying to compose or reproduce a piece of popular music. However, creating appropriate instrumental accompaniment part for a melody line can be a difficult task for non-musicians. Automation of accompaniment generation for vocal melodies thus can be very useful for those who are interested in singing for fun. Therefore, a computer software system which is capable of generating harmonic accompaniment for a given vocal melody input has been presented in this thesis. This automatic accompaniment system uses a Hidden Markov Model to assign chord to a given part of melody based on the knowledge learnt from a bank of vocal tracks of popular music. Comparing with other similar systems, our system features a high resolution key estimation algorithm which is helpful to adjust the generated accompaniment to the input vocal. Moreover, we designed a structure analysis subsystem to extract the repetition and structure boundaries from the melody. These boundaries are passed to the chord assignment and style player subsystems in order to generate more dynamic and organized accompaniment. Finally, prototype applications are discussed and the entire system is evaluated.M.S.Committee Chair: Chordia, Parag; Committee Member: Freeman, Jason; Committee Member: Weinberg, Gi

Computational modeling of improvisation in Turkish folk music using Variable-Length Markov Models

The thesis describes a new database of uzun havas, a non-metered structured improvisation form in Turkish folk music, and a system, which uses Variable-Length Markov Models (VLMMs) to predict the melody in the uzun hava form. The database consists of 77 songs, encompassing 10849 notes, and it is used to train multiple viewpoints, where each event in a musical sequence are represented by parallel descriptors such as Durations and Notes. The thesis also introduces pitch-related viewpoints that are specifically aimed to model the unique melodic properties of makam music. The predictability of the system is quantitatively evaluated by an entropy based scheme. In the experiments, the results from the pitch-related viewpoints mapping 12-tone-scale of Western classical theory and 17 tone-scale of Turkish folk music are compared. It is shown that VLMMs are highly predictive in the note progressions of the transcriptions of uzun havas. This suggests that VLMMs may be applied to makam-based and non-metered musical forms, in addition to Western musical styles. To the best of knowledge, the work presents the first symbolic, machine-readable database and the first application of computational modeling in Turkish folk music.MSCommittee Chair: Parag Chordia; Committee Member: Gil Weinberg; Committee Member: Jason Freema

The Modern Fairy Tale

This book provides a unique and intriguing insight into current debates concerning the relationship between nation and state as well as the political management of international image in today’s Europe through an examination of debates on nation branding and the Eurovision Song Contest. Europe is a contested construct and its boundaries are subject to redefinition. This work aims to advance critical thinking about contemporary nation branding and its relationship to, and influence on, nation building. In particular it focusses on key identity debates that the Eurovision Song Contest engendered in Estonia in the run-up to EU accession. The Eurovision Song Contest is an event which is often dismissed as musically and culturally inferior. However, this work demonstrates that it has the capacity to shed light on key identity debates and illuminate wider socio-political issues. Using a series of in-depth interviews with political elites, media professionals and opinion leaders, this book is a valuable contribution to the growing field of research on nation branding and the Eurovision Song Contest

Cultural Context-Aware Models and IT Applications for the Exploitation of Musical Heritage

Information engineering has always expanded its scope by inspiring innovation in different scientific disciplines. In particular, in the last sixty years, music and engineering have forged a strong connection in the discipline known as “Sound and Music Computing”. Musical heritage is a paradigmatic case that includes several multi-faceted cultural artefacts and traditions. Several issues arise from the analog-digital transfer of cultural objects, concerning their creation, preservation, access, analysis and experiencing. The keystone is the relationship of these digitized cultural objects with their carrier and cultural context. The terms “cultural context” and “cultural context awareness” are delineated, alongside the concepts of contextual information and metadata. Since they maintain the integrity of the object, its meaning and cultural context, their role is critical. This thesis explores three main case studies concerning historical audio recordings and ancient musical instruments, aiming to delineate models to preserve, analyze, access and experience the digital versions of these three prominent examples of musical heritage. The first case study concerns analog magnetic tapes, and, in particular, tape music, a particular experimental music born in the second half of the XX century. This case study has relevant implications from the musicology, philology and archivists’ points of view, since the carrier has a paramount role and the tight connection with its content can easily break during the digitization process or the access phase. With the aim to help musicologists and audio technicians in their work, several tools based on Artificial Intelligence are evaluated in tasks such as the discontinuity detection and equalization recognition. By considering the peculiarities of tape music, the philological problem of stemmatics in digitized audio documents is tackled: an algorithm based on phylogenetic techniques is proposed and assessed, confirming the suitability of these techniques for this task. Then, a methodology for a historically faithful access to digitized tape music recordings is introduced, by considering contextual information and its relationship with the carrier and the replay device. Based on this methodology, an Android app which virtualizes a tape recorder is presented, together with its assessment. Furthermore, two web applications are proposed to faithfully experience digitized 78 rpm discs and magnetic tape recordings, respectively. Finally, a prototype of web application for musicological analysis is presented. This aims to concentrate relevant part of the knowledge acquired in this work into a single interface. The second case study is a corpus of Arab-Andalusian music, suitable for computational research, which opens new opportunities to musicological studies by applying data-driven analysis. The description of the corpus is based on the five criteria formalized in the CompMusic project of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona: purpose, coverage, completeness, quality and re-usability. Four Jupyter notebooks were developed with the aim to provide a useful tool for computational musicologists for analyzing and using data and metadata of such corpus. The third case study concerns an exceptional historical musical instrument: an ancient Pan flute exhibited at the Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art of the University of Padova. The final objective was the creation of a multimedia installation to valorize this precious artifact and to allow visitors to interact with the archaeological find and to learn its history. The case study provided the opportunity to study a methodology suitable for the valorization of this ancient musical instrument, but also extendible to other artifacts or museum collections. Both the methodology and the resulting multimedia installation are presented, followed by the assessment carried out by a multidisciplinary group of experts

Reconstructing the Sufi Shrine as a Living Heritage: Case of the Shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, Sindh, Pakistan

Living heritage sites are strongly connected to their historical, geographical, socio-political and cultural context. A descriptive narrative of the evolutionary process of the living heritage site of a Sufi shrine is undertaken in this research. It focuses on the changing relationship between the spatial and socio-cultural aspects over time. The larger or macro regional context is interrelated to the micro architectural context. The tangible heritage is defined by and intimately tied to the intangible aspects of the heritage. It is these constituting macro and micro elements and their interrelationships particularly through space and architecture that the research thesis explores in its documentation and analysis. The Sufi shrine in the South Asian Pakistani context is representative of a larger culture in the precolonial era. It is an expression of an indigenous modernity, belonging to a certain time period, place and community. The Sufi shrine as a building type has evolved from the precolonial time period, particularly starting at the golden ages of the Muslim Empire in the world (9th – 12th century), through the colonial age when western modernity arrived until the current neoliberal paradigm within the post independence period. Continued and evolved use of space, ritualistic performances, multiple social groups using the site are various elements whose documentation and analysis can establish the essential co-relations that contribute to continuity of its historical living. Physical and social relation of the historic site to its immediate settlement context is also a significant element that preserves the socio-cultural context. The chosen case of the Shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, situated in the small town of Bhitshah in the province of Sindh, Pakistan forms a unique example where the particular physical and socio-cultural environment forms the context within which the Sufi heritage lives and survives. It is well integrated within its context at multiple levels. What are these levels and how do the constituting elements integrate is a major subject of research? These form the background to defining some of the basic issues and questions addressed in this doctoral thesis. Given that living heritage sites are unique due to their particular association to the context, the case study method was used to gain deeper insight and understanding on the topic

Full Issue: An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause Part 2_June 2019

Full PDF of the issue An Arts-Based Contemplative Pause: Part 2. Co-edited by Susan Walsh (guest editor) & Barbara Bicke