In recent years, medical, industrial and military institutions have shown interest in developing small, lightweight, reliable devices to continuously monitor Heart Rate Variability (HRV) of individuals during sleep, work, exercise, or under stress. Such devices, which ideally would be no larger than a modern digital music player, would provide life-saving information to hospital staff, to milit...

The maturing distributed file sharing technology implemented by Napster has first enabled the dissemination of musical content in digital form, permitting to customers to retrieve stored music files from around the world. In the post-Napster era, the Apple iTunes online music service has hit a record share of 16.7% in the MP3 player market [J. Mc Hugh, Why Wi-Fi is a good business? Wired (2003)...

Since emotions play an important role in the daily life of human beings, the need and importance of automatic emotion recognition has grown with increasing role of human computer interface applications. Emotion recognition could be done from the text, speech, facial expression or gesture. In this paper, we concentrate on recognition of “inner” emotions from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. W...

This paper presents the results of user interaction with two explorative music environments (sound system A and B) that were inspired from the Banda Linda music tradition in two different ways. The sound systems adapted to how a team of two players improvised and made a melody together in an interleaved fashion: Systems A and B used a fuzzy logic algorithm and pattern recognition to respond wit...

The Department of Music at Rhodes University inaugurated the International Spring Music Festival in 2009. One of the central educational goals of this festival is to provide a platform for student performers to interact with local and international music professionals and to exchange knowaledge about performance practice through making music together. The shortage of informal venues for public ...

Multitasking situ ations exacerbate g ait im pairments and in crease the ri sk of fallin g among people with Parkinson disease (PD). This study compared obstacle negotiation among 10 sub jects wi th PD an d 10 non parkinsonian co ntrol (CTRL) subjects in tw o test cond itions differentiated by the presence of music played thro ugh a pers onal music player. Subjects walked the len gth o f a 10 m...

There is considerable interest in music-based games, as the popularity of Rock Band and others can attest, as well as puzzle games. However, these have rarely been combined. Most music-based games fall into the category of rhythm games, and in those games where music is incorporated into a puzzle-like challenge, music usually serves as either an accompaniment or reward. We set out to design a p...

“Music for 32 Chess Pieces” is a software system that supports composing, performing and improvising music by playing a chess game. A game server stores a representation of the state of a game, validates proposed moves by players, updates game state, and extracts a graph of piece-to-piece relationships. It also loads a plugin code module that acts as a composition. A plugin maps pieces and rela...

OBJECTIVE To examine, among adolescents and emerging adults attending inner-city lower education, associations between risky music-listening behaviors (from MP3 players and in discotheques and at pop concerts) and more traditional health-risk behaviors: substance use (cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis, and hard drugs) and unsafe sexual intercourse. METHODS A total of 944 students in Dutch inner-c...