A flexible system for creating music while interacting with the computer

ABSTRACT

Music is a very important part of our lives. People enjoy listening to the music, and many of us find a special pleasure in creating the music. Computers further extended many aspects of our musical experience. Listening to, recording, and creating music is now easier and more accessible to various users. On the other hand, various computing applications exploit the music in order to better support the interaction with users. However, listening to music is generally a passive experience. Although we may change many parameters, the music we listen to generally does not reflect our response, or does so very roughly.In this paper we present a flexible framework that enables active creation of instrumental music based of the implicit dynamics and content of human-computer interaction. Our approach is application independent, and it provides a mapping of musical features to the abstraction of user interaction. This mapping is based on analysis of the dynamic and content of the human-computer interaction. In contrast to the most existing interactive music composition tools, which require explicit interaction with the system, we have provided a more flexible solution that implicitly maps user interaction parameters to the various musical features.

REFERENCES

• 1: Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning", Computer Music Journal, Fall 1981, Vol. 5, Number 3
• 2: Buxton, W. (1995). Speech, Language & Audition. Chapter 8 in R.M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. Buxton and S. Greenberg, S. (Eds.) (1995). Readings in Human Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000, San Francisco, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
• 3: Desney S. Tan , Jeanine K. Stefanucci , Dennis R. Proffitt , Randy Pausch, The Infocockpit: providing location and place to aid human memory, Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Perceptive user interfaces, November 15-16, 2001, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/971478.971526]
• 4: Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Prentice Hall, 1996
• 5: Curtis Roads, The Computer Music Tutorial, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996
• 6: Chong (John) Yu, "Computer Generated Music Composition", MSc Thesis, M.I.T., 1996.
• 7: Morwaread M. Farbood , Egon Pasztor , Kevin Jennings, Hyperscore: A Graphical Sketchpad for Novice Composers, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.24 n.1, p.50-54, January 2004 [doi>10.1109/MCG.2004.1255809]
• 8: Allison Druin , Juan Pablo Hourcade, Introduction, Communications of the ACM, v.48 n.1, January 2005 [doi>10.1145/1039539.1039565]
• 9: Alexander Rigopulos. "Growing Music from Seeds: Parametric Generation and Control of Seed-Based Music for Interactive Composition and Performance." Master's thesis, MIT Media Lab, 1994.
• 10: Jennifer Healey, Rosalind Picard, Frank Dabek "A New Affect-Perceiving Interface and Its Application to Personalized MUSIC Selection", PUI 98 Workshop.
• 11: Lalya Gaye , Ramia Mazé , Lars Erik Holmquist, Sonic City: the urban environment as a musical interface, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on New interfaces for musical expression, May 22-24, 2003, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 12: Sharle Source Code Web Page, http://home.comcast.net/~chtongyu/sharle/, Last Visited May 22, 2005.
• 13: Paw (pro-active webfilter) Web Site, http://paw-project. sourceforge.net/, Last Visited May 22, 2005.
• 14: Muffin WWW Filtering System Web Site, http://muffin.doit.org/, Last Visited May 22, 2005.
• 15: Judith Donath, A semantic approach to visualizing online conversations, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.4, April 2002 [doi>10.1145/505248.505271]
• 16: The Alexa Web Information Service, http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/ WebInfoService.html/, Last Visited May 22, 2005.
• 17: Kevin Larson , Mary Czerwinski, Web page design: implications of memory, structure and scent for information retrieval, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.25-32, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/274644.274649]
• 18: Emil Jovanov , Dušan Starčević , Aleksandar Samardžić , Andy Marsh , Željko Obrenović, EEG analysis in a telemedical virtual world, Future Generation Computer Systems, v.15 n.2, p.255-263, March 1999 [doi>10.1016/S0167-739X(98)00068-5 ]
• 19: Z. Obrenovic, D. Starcevic, E. Jovanov, V. Radivojevic, "An Implementation of Real-time Monitoring and Analysis in Telemedicine", Third IEEE EMBS Information Technology Applications in Biomedicine - Workshop of the International Telemedical Information Society ITAB-ITIS 2000, Arlington, Virginia, Nov 2000, pp. 74--1004

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Audio input/output

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Synchronous interaction
      H.5.5 Sound and Music Computing
          Subjects: Signal analysis, synthesis, and processing

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement

Keywords:
interactive music composition tools