Jamming with a Smart Mandolin and Freesound-based Accompaniment

This paper presents an Internet of Musical Things ecosystem involving musicians and audiences interacting with a smart mandolin, smartphones, and the Audio Commons online repository Freesound. The ecosystem has been devised to sup- port performer-instrument and performer-audience interactions through the generation of musical accompaniments exploiting crowd-sourced sounds. We present two use cases investigating how audio content retrieved from Freesound can be leveraged by performers or audiences to produce accompanying soundtracks for music performance with a smart mandolin. In the performer- instrument interaction use case, the performer can select content to be retrieved prior to performing through a set of keywords and structure it in order to create the desired accompaniment. In the performer-audience interaction use case, a group of audience members participates in the music creation by selecting and arranging Freesound audio content to create an accompaniment collaboratively. We discuss the advantages and limitations of the system with regard to music making and audience participation, along with its implications and challenges

C Minor: a Semantic Publish/Subscribe Broker for the Internet of Musical Things

Semantic Web technologies are increasingly used in the Internet of Things due to their intrinsic propensity to foster interoperability among heterogenous devices and services. However, some of the IoT application domains have strict requirements in terms of timeliness of the exchanged messages, latency and support for constrained devices. An example of these domains is represented by the emerging area of the Internet of Musical Things. In this paper we propose C Minor, a CoAP-based semantic publish/subscribe broker specifically designed to meet the requirements of Internet of Musical Things applications, but relevant for any IoT scenario. We assess its validity through a practical use case

Improving User Involvement Through Live Collaborative Creation

Creating an artifact - such as writing a book, developing software, or performing a piece of music - is often limited to those with domain-specific experience or training. As a consequence, effectively involving non-expert end users in such creative processes is challenging. This work explores how computational systems can facilitate collaboration, communication, and participation in the context of involving users in the process of creating artifacts while mitigating the challenges inherent to such processes. In particular, the interactive systems presented in this work support live collaborative creation, in which artifact users collaboratively participate in the artifact creation process with creators in real time. In the systems that I have created, I explored liveness, the extent to which the process of creating artifacts and the state of the artifacts are immediately and continuously perceptible, for applications such as programming, writing, music performance, and UI design. Liveness helps preserve natural expressivity, supports real-time communication, and facilitates participation in the creative process. Live collaboration is beneficial for users and creators alike: making the process of creation visible encourages users to engage in the process and better understand the final artifact. Additionally, creators can receive immediate feedback in a continuous, closed loop with users. Through these interactive systems, non-expert participants help create such artifacts as GUI prototypes, software, and musical performances. This dissertation explores three topics: (1) the challenges inherent to collaborative creation in live settings, and computational tools that address them; (2) methods for reducing the barriers of entry to live collaboration; and (3) approaches to preserving liveness in the creative process, affording creators more expressivity in making artifacts and affording users access to information traditionally only available in real-time processes. In this work, I showed that enabling collaborative, expressive, and live interactions in computational systems allow the broader population to take part in various creative practices.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145810/1/snaglee_1.pd