Playing music instruments can bring a lot of joy and satisfaction, but not all apsects of music practice are always enjoyable. In this contribution we are addressing two such sometimes unwelcome aspects: the solitude of practicing and the ”dumbness” of instruments. The process of practicing and mastering of music instruments often takes place behind closed doors. A student of piano spends most ...

Today, people listen to music on their mobile phone or other playback devices. Jukefox is a special music player running on Google’s smart phone operating system Android. It’s capable of recognizing similarities between multiple songs, albums and artists using data based on a huge music similarity map [1] which classifies songs into a high-dimensional space. Songs with small distance are simila...

Prior research in cross-cultural studies in technology adoption has mainly focused on national cultural level and conducted in western countries. This paper examines the impact of espoused national cultural values on consumer’s intention to use mobile payment devices using the UTAUT and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the basis for the research framework. The moderating effect of espoused unc...

AJapanese version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (]DES) was developed and administered to 199 late adolescents, 40 normal adults, 16 schizophrenics, and 19 subjects with dissociative disorders whose diagnoses were made with a comprehensive assessment including a semi-structured interview. As a result, theJDES yielded comparable reliability and validity with those established for the Diss...

In this paper we explore new ways of interacting to configure and personalize music selection in ambient environments. We propose a prototype for a context aware music player and a novel interaction concept to deal with it. Context information refers in this work both to the user, especially the mood situation, and the environment. The interaction concept lets the user express information about...

Considering educational games as interactive metaphors for learning material, we suggest in this paper that PlayStation-like gamepads are appropriate user interfaces that enable students to play with music concepts without being hindered by their own instrumental limitations. Our proposal builds upon current pedagogical research that shows that fun games increase learners’ motivation and foster...

This chapter discusses the application of non-centralized MPC (NCMPC) approaches to DWTNs. The aim of DMPC is to reduce the computational burden and to increase scalability and modularity with respect to the centralised counterpart, but still maintaining a convenient level of suboptimality with respect to the desired control objectives. Moreover, the advantage of NCMPC approach is the simplicit...