This report describes the digital humanities project on music similarity. The project is a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and audio software company Elephantcandy. The project’s aim was to investigate timbre and rhythm similarity and to develop an application that finds similar segments of music. In this report three models are described, one for structural segmentation, one ...

Though musical performers routinely use eye movements to communicate with each other during musical performances, very few performers or composers have used eye tracking devices to direct musical compositions and performances. EyeMusic is a system that uses eye movements as an input to electronic music compositions. The eye movements can directly control the music, or the music can respond to t...

Sonic City is a wearable system in which the urban environment acts as an interface for real-time electronic music making; the user creates music dynamically by walking through a city. The system senses the user’s activities and the surrounding context, and maps this information in real time to the processing of urban sounds that are collected with a microphone. This video shows participants of...

Phonetic symbols describe movements of the vocal tract, tongue and lips, and are combined into complex movements forming the words of language. In music, vocables are words that describe musical sounds, by relating vocal movements to articulations of a musical instrument. We posit that vocable words allow the composers and listeners to engage closely with dimensions of timbre, and that vocables...

This study provides one of very few experimental investigations into the impact of a musical soundtrack on the video gaming experience. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: game-with-music, game-without-music, or music-only. After playing each of three segments of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Electronic Arts, 2002)--or, in the music-only conditi...

This paper gives an introduction into the principles of interactivity in music video games. Music video games are an old but small genre of games. The earliest direct ancestors emerged in the 1970ies. Some recent music video games were hugely successful. Until today, there are only a few different approaches to their design. The purpose of this article is to shed light on what these design prin...

While many studies have examined melodic fission of familiar and unfamiliar interleaved Western melodies, melodic fission in trance music, an electronic dance music genre, has not yet been studied. Melodic material is relatively constant throughout a trance song, while timbre, texture, and dynamics vary over time. In this study, participants listened to several clips of trance music with two or...

Project Goals • "Fuzzy" Navigation • Physically and Visually Intuitive • Large Libraries A traditional music library system controlled by a mouse and keyboard is precise, allowing users to select their desired song. Alternatively, randomized playlist or shuffles are used when users have no particular music in mind. We present a new interface and visualization system called Strike-A-Tune for fuz...

In this paper, we describe a system developed to generate visual meaning for live performed music. Specifically, this system is calibrated to respond to North Indian classical and folk drumming tradition, using custom designed digital musical interfaces, such as the Electronic Tabla and Electronic Dholak.

Computers are often used in performance of popular music, but most often in very restricted ways, such as keyboard synthesizers where musicians are in complete control, or pre-recorded or sequenced music where musicians follow the computer’s drums or click track. An interesting and yet little-explored possibility is the computer as highly autonomous performer of popular music, capable of joinin...