Interfacing Sounds: Hierarchical Audio-Content Morphologies for Creative Re-purposing in earGram

Audio content-based processing has become a pervasive methodology for techno-fluent musicians. System architectures typically create thumbnail audio descriptions, based on signal processing methods, to visualize, retrieve and transform musical audio efficiently. Towards enhanced us-ability of these descriptor-based frameworks for the music community, the paper advances a minimal content-based audio description scheme, rooted on primary musical notation attributes at the threefold sound object, meso and macro hierarchies. Multiple perceptually-guided viewpoints from rhythmic, harmonic, timbral and dynamic attributes define a discrete and finite alphabet with minimal formal and subjective assumptions using unsupervised and user-guided methods. The Factor Oracle automaton is then adopted to model and visualize temporal morphology. The generative musical applications enabled by the descriptor-based framework at multiple structural hierarchies are discussed

Retinal biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease: insights from transgenic mouse models

In this paper, we use the retina as a window into the central nervous system and in particular to assess changes in the retinal tissue associated with the Alzheimer’s disease. We imaged the retina of wild-type (WT) and transgenic mouse model (TMM) of Alzheimer’s disease with optical coherence tomography and classify retinas into the WT and TMM groups using support vector machines with the radial basis function kernel. Predictions reached an accuracy over 80% at the age of 4 months and over 90% at the age of 8 months. Texture analysis of computed fundus reference images suggests a more heterogeneous organization of the retina in transgenic mice at the age of 8 months in comparison to controls.This study was supported by the Neuroscience Mantero Belard Prize 2015 (Santa Casa da Misericórdia)(MB-1049-2015), by The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (PEst-UID/NEU/04539/2013), by FEDER-COMPETE (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007440) and Centro 2020 Regional Operational Programme (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000008: BrainHealth 2020).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Beatings: A Web Application to Foster the Renaissance of the Art of Musical Temperaments

(Abstract to follow

earGram Actors: an interactive audiovisual system based on social behavior

In multi-agent systems, local interactions among system components following relatively simple rules often result in complex overall systemic behavior. Complex behavioral and morphological patterns have been used to generate and organize audiovisual systems with artistic purposes. In this work, we propose to use the Actor model of social interactions to drive a concatenative synthesis engine called earGram in real time. The Actor model was originally developed to explore the emergence of complex visual patterns. On the other hand, earGram was originally developed to facilitate the creative exploration of concatenative sound synthesis. The integrated audiovisual system allows a human performer to interact with the system dynamics while receiving visual and auditory feedback. The interaction happens indirectly by disturbing the rules governing the social relationships amongst the actors, which results in a wide range of dynamic spatiotemporal patterns. A performer thus improvises within the behavioural scope of the system while evaluating the apparent connections between parameter values and actual complexity of the system output

Spaces sing, are you listening?

We present ​Soniferous Resonances​, an ongoing collection of electroacoustic composition pieces that intersect music, digital technologies and architecture. The creative impetus supporting this research is grounded in the interchange of the following two concepts: 1) the phenomenological exploration of the aural architecture [1], particularly the reverberation as a sonic effect [2] through music performance and 2) the real time sound analysis of both the performance and the reverberation (i.e. impulse responses) intervallic content — which ultimately leads to a generic control over consonance/dissonance (C/D). Their conceptual and morphological nature can be understood as sonic improvisations where the interaction of sound producing bodies (e.g. saxophone) with the real (e.g. performance space) and the imaginary (i.e. computer) acoustic response of a space results in formal elements mirroring their physical surroundings. Particular emphasis is given to spectromorphological manipulations by a large array of “contrasting” digital reverberations with extended control over the sound mass [3] and its musical interval content across a continuum between pitched and consonant to unpitched and dissonant sounds. Two digital applications developed by the authors are seminal in Soniferous Resonances​: Wallace [4] and MusikVerb [5]. The first is a navigable user-control surface that offers a fluid manipulation of audio signals to be convolved with several “contrasting” digital reverberations. The second offers refined (compositional) control over the interval content and/or C/D levels computed from the perceptually-inspired Tonal Interval Space [6] resulting in an automatically adaptation of harmonic content in real time. Soniferous Resonances​ aims at pushing the boundaries of musical performances that are formally tied to its surrounding space, as well as triggering new concepts and greater awareness about the sublime qualities of experiencing aural architecture.N/

Harmonic Change Detection from Musical Audio

In this dissertation, we advance an enhanced method for computing Harte et al.’s [31] Harmonic Change Detection Function (HCDF). HCDF aims to detect harmonic transitions in musical audio signals. HCDF is crucial both for the chord recognition in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and a wide range of creative applications. In light of recent advances in harmonic description and transformation, we depart from the original architecture of Harte et al.’s HCDF, to revisit each one of its component blocks, which are evaluated using an exhaustive grid search aimed to identify optimal parameters across four large style-specific musical datasets. Our results show that the newly proposed methods and parameter optimization improve the detection of harmonic changes, by 5.57% (f-score) with respect to previous methods. Furthermore, while guaranteeing recall values at > 99%, our method improves precision by 6.28%. Aiming to leverage novel strategies for real-time harmonic-content audio processing, the optimized HCDF is made available for Javascript and the MAX and Pure Data multimedia programming environments. Moreover, all the data as well as the Python code used to generate them, are made available.<br /

Never the less: a performance on networked art

Never The Less is a live audio-visual (A/V) networked performance, where participants are able to interact remotely and collaboratively. It adopts the newly-proposed web-based A/V Akson system, designed for an internet infrastructure, which allows both musical and visual content generation and interaction across multiple devices in remote locations. The system was built with great emphasis on live-performance and human collaboration, where experts and non-experts (i.e., artists and public) exist at the same level.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Examining Temporal Trends and Design Goals of Digital Music Instruments for Education in NIME: A Proposed Taxonomy

This paper presents an overview of the design principles behind Digital Music Instruments (DMIs) for education across all editions of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Music Expression (NIME). We compiled a comprehensive catalogue of over hundred DMIs with varying degrees of applicability in the educational practice. Each catalogue entry is annotated according to a proposed taxonomy for DMIs for education, rooted in the mechanics of control, mapping and feedback of an interactive music system, along with the required expertise of target user groups and the instrument learning curve. Global statistics unpack underlying trends and design goals across the chronological period of the NIME conference. In recent years, we note a growing number of DMIs targeting non-experts and with reduced requirements in terms of expertise. Stemming from the identified trends, we discuss future challenges in the design of DMIs for education towards enhanced degrees of variation and unpredictability