Intelligent Music Interfaces: When Interactive Assistance and Augmentation Meet Musical Instruments

The interactive augmentation of musical instruments to foster self-expressiveness and learning has a rich history. Over the past decades, the incorporation of interactive technologies into musical instruments emerged into a new research field requiring strong collaboration between different disciplines. The workshop "Intelligent Music Interfaces"consequently covers a wide range of musical research subjects and directions, including (a) current challenges in musical learning, (b) prototyping for improvements, (c) new means of musical expression, and (d) evaluation of the solutions

Investigating Tangible and Hybrid Interactions to Augment the Reading Experience

For thousands of years, we as humans have been passing knowledge and telling stories through tangibly rich methods, beginning with writing on walls and even-tually evolving to printed books of today. However, the introduction of digital documents has recently created a world that has traded tangible richness for digital convenience. This thesis demonstrates innovative, tangible interfaces to help de-velop a possible future where digital documents can incorporate tangible elements. Furthermore, during our research, we discovered a pattern amongst people, where a hybrid approach to documents is becoming adopted. This discovery led to the investigation of hybrid experiences and the development of a system in which users can seamlessly switch between the physical and digital worlds.Each chapter of this thesis investigates a function of reading and its method both physically and digitally. Firstly we investigate the act of turning a page, a simple yet integral task of reading a modern book. This chapter explores materials and methods of bringing a tangible page-turning experience to digital books, followed by a user study and evaluation. Following this, we explore the use of tangible materials for side of device interactions. For example, printed books have many, frequently hundreds of pages, often have their edges felt, ruffled and flicked. Sev-eral interactions can be invoked through page edges, which are entirely removed from digital books. We design, develop and evaluate a guitar string-based system as a metaphor for page edges on a digital device.Many of us in this modern age carry on our person a smartphone, pretty much at all times. Smartphones have given us the ability to retrieve and read books wherever and whenever we please. However, the majority of people still prefer to read using physical methods. Having multiple formats to choose from has introduced a hybrid reading experience, where one might read physically at home and digitally whilst commuting, for example. We explore this experience, and the chapter follows a human-centred design approach to investigate, design, develop, and evaluate a digital bookmark system to switch between digital and physical books seamlessly

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Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Musical Learning and Teaching Conceptions as Sociocultural Productions in Classical, Flamenco, and Jazz Cultures

This study analyzes the discourse of musicians from three different cultures of musical learning, ranging from the more formal classical European culture, through the jazz culture, to the less formal flamenco culture in Roma communities. It is based on cultural studies of learning and education and the implicit conceptions theory. Thirty-one semi-professional guitarists were interviewed about learning and teaching music. We applied the lexicometrical method using correspondence analysis. We found significant lexical differences among the three cultures for all the three educational dimensions analyzed (teaching, learning, and evaluation). We describe literal answers from the most representative participants from each culture (using the automatic selection of modal response procedure according to χ2 distance) and a qualitative analysis of their full answers. Finally, we project a distribution of the three cultures of learning onto a factorial plane, which summarizes distribution of the three cultures of learning according to two axes that we have interpreted in terms of (a) locus of control (self-others) and (b) phenomenology (analytical–emotional distance–conceptual–explicit knowledge/sensory– involvement–embodied–implicit knowledge), respectively. The discourse of classical and flamenco participants expressed other-regulated learning, although classical participants were closer to an explicit, conceptual pole, whereas flamenco participants were closer to an implicit, embodied pole. The discourse of jazz participants lay in between the other two, closer to the explicit pole, but including characteristic language about self-regulation