The progressive appearance of affordable tabletop technology and devices urges human-computer interaction researchers to provide the necessary methods to make this kind of devices the most useful to their users. Studies show that tabletops have distinctive characteristics that can be specially useful to solve some types of problems, but this potential is arguably not yet translated into real-world applications. We theorize that the important components that can transform those systems into useful tools are application frameworks that take into account the devices affordances, a third party application ecosystem, and multi-application systems supporting concurrent multitasking. In this dissertation we approach these key components: First, we explore the distinctive affordances of tabletops, with two cases: TurTan, a tangible programming language in the education context, and SongExplorer, a music collection browser for large databases. Next, in order to address the difficulty of building such applications in a way that they can exploit these affordances, we focus on software frameworks to support the tabletop application making process, with two different approaches: ofxTableGestures, targeting programmers, and MTCF, designed for music and sound artists. Finally, recognizing that making useful applications is just one part of the problem, we focus on a fundamental issue of multi-application tabletop systems: the difficulty to support multi-user concurrent multitasking with third-party applications. After analyzing the possible approaches, we present GestureAgents, a content-based distributed application-centric disambiguation mechanism and its implementation, which solves this problem in a generic fashion, being also useful to other shareable interfaces, including uncoupled ones.
PB - Universitat Pompeu Fabra CY - Barcelona ER - TY - CONF T1 - Audio-to-score alignment at the note level for orchestral recordings T2 - 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference Y1 - 2014 A1 - Marius Miron A1 - Julio José Carabias A1 - Janer, J. KW - audio-to-score alignment KW - offset detection JF - 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference CY - Taipei, Taiwan ER - TY - CONF T1 - GestureAgents: An Agent-Based Framework for Concurrent Multi-Task Multi-User Interaction T2 - TEI 2013 Y1 - 2013 A1 - Carles F. Julià A1 - Jordà, S. A1 - Nicolas Earnshaw KW - agent- exclusivity KW - Concurrent interaction KW - gesture framework KW - multi-user AB -While the HCI community has been putting a lot of effort on creating physical interfaces for collaboration, studying multi-user interaction dynamics and creating specific applications to support (and test) this kind of phenomena, it has not addressed the problem of having multiple applications sharing the same interactive space. Having an ecology of rich interactive programs sharing the same interfaces poses questions on how to deal with interaction ambiguity in a cross-application way and still allow different programmers the freedom to program rich unconstrained interaction experiences. This paper describes GestureAgents, a framework demonstrating several techniques that can be used to coordinate different applications in order to have concurrent multi-user multi-tasking interaction and still dealing with gesture ambiguity across multiple applications.
JF - TEI 2013 PB - ACM UR - http://www.mtg.upf.edu/system/files/publications/2013%20TEI13%20GestureAgents.pdf ER - TY - THES T1 - Informed Source Separation for Multiple Instruments of Similar Timbre T2 - Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Y1 - 2013 A1 - López, Jakue KW - source Separation KW - Timbre modelling AB -This Master’s thesis focuses on the challenging task of separating the musical audio sources with instruments of similar timbre. We address the case in which external pitch information to assist the separation process is available. This information is provided to the source / filter model, which is embedded in a Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) framework that processes the audio input spectrogram. Different state of the art literature methods are inspected and extended. As an extension to these, two new separation methods are proposed, the Multi-Excitation and Single Filter Instantaneous Mixture Model and the Multi-Excitation and Multi-Filter Instantaneous Mixture Model. The use of dedicated source and filter decomposition for each instrument is proposed. In addition, we introduce the use of timbre models in the separation process. Timbre models are previously trained on isolated instrument recordings. The methods are compared with the BSS Eval and PEASS evaluation toolkits over an existing dataset. Promising results obtained in the conducted experiments, which shows that this is a path to be further investigated.
JF - Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra VL - Master in Sound and Music Computing UR - http://mtg.upf.edu/system/files/publications/Jakue-Lopez-Master-Thesis-2013.pdf ER - TY - CONF T1 - Innovating the Classical Music Experience in the PHENICX Project: Use Cases and Initial User Feedback T2 - 1st International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption (WSICC) at EuroITV 2013 Y1 - 2013 A1 - Cynthia C. S. Liem A1 - Ron van der Sterren A1 - Marcel van Tilburg A1 - Álvaro Sarasúa A1 - Juan J. Bosch A1 - Jordi Janer A1 - Mark S. Melenhorst A1 - Emilia Gómez A1 - Alan Hanjalic KW - interactivity KW - multimedia information systems KW - multimodality KW - music information retrieval KW - performing arts KW - social networks KW - user studies AB -The FP7 PHENICX project focuses on creating a new digital classical concert experience, improving the accessibility of classical music concert performances by enhancing and enriching them in novel digital ways, In this paper, we present the project’s foreseen use cases. Subsequently, we summarize initial use case feedback from two different user groups. Despite the early stage of the project, the feedback already gives important insight into real-world considerations to make for interactive music content consumption solutions.
JF - 1st International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption (WSICC) at EuroITV 2013 CY - Como, Italy ER - TY - CONF T1 - Low-latency Bass Separation using Harmonic-Percussion Decomposition T2 - International Conference on Digital Audio Effects Conference (DAFx-13) Y1 - 2013 A1 - Marxer, R. A1 - Janer, J. AB -Many recent approaches to musical source separation rely on model-based inference methods that take into account the signal’s harmonic structure. To address the particular case of low-latency bass separation, we propose a method that combines harmonic decomposition using a Tikhonov regularization-based algorithm, with the peak contrast analysis of the pitch likelihood function. Our experiment compares the separation performance of this method to a naive low-pass filter, a state-of-the-art NMF-based method and a near-optimal binary mask. The proposed low-latency method achieves results similar to the NMF-based high-latency approach at a lower computational cost. Therefore the method is valid for real-time implementations.
JF - International Conference on Digital Audio Effects Conference (DAFx-13) CY - Maynooth, Ireland UR - http://dafx13.nuim.ie/papers/11.dafx2013_submission_13.pdf ER - TY - CONF T1 - PHENICX: Performances as Highly Enriched aNd Interactive Concert Experiences T2 - SMAC Stockholm Music Acoustics Conference 2013 and SMC Sound and Music Computing Conference 2013 Y1 - 2013 A1 - Gómez, E. A1 - Grachten, M. A1 - Hanjalic, A. A1 - Janer, J. A1 - Jordà, S. A1 - Julià, C. F. A1 - Cynthia C. S. Liem A1 - Martorell, A. A1 - Schedl, M. A1 - Widmer, G. AB -Modern digital multimedia and internet technology have radically changed the ways people find entertainment and discover new interests online, seemingly without any phys- ical or social barriers. Such new access paradigms are in sharp contrast with the traditional means of entertainment. An illustrative example of this is live music concert perfor- mances that are largely being attended by dedicated audi- ences only.
This papers introduces the PHENICX project, which aims at enriching traditional concert experiences by using state- of-the-art multimedia and internet technologies. The project focuses on classical music and its main goal is twofold: (a) to make live concerts appealing to potential new au- dience and (b) to maximize the quality of concert experi- ence for everyone. Concerts will then become multimodal, multi-perspective and multilayer digital artifacts that can be easily explored, customized, personalized, (re)enjoyed and shared among the users. The paper presents the main scientific objectives on the project, provides a state of the art review on related research and presents the main chal- lenges to be addressed.
Drums modelling is of special interest in musical source separation because of its widespread presence in western popular music. Current research has often focused on drums separation without specifically modelling the other sources present in the signal. This paper presents an extensive study of the use of regularizations and constraints to drive the factorization towards the separation between percussive and non-percussive music accompaniment. The proposed regularizations control the frequency smoothness of the basis components and the temporal sparseness of the gains. We also evaluated the use of temporal constraints on the gains to perform the separation, using both ground truth manual annotations (made publicly available) and automatically extracted transients. Objective evaluation of the results shows that, while optimal regularizations are highly dependent on the signal, drum event position contains enough information to achieve a high quality separation.
JF - International Conference on Digital Audio Effects Conference (DAFx-13) UR - http://dafx13.nuim.ie/papers/16.dafx2013_submission_16.pdf ER -