A novel continuous pitch electronic wind instrument controller

We present a design for an electronic continuous pitch wind controller for musical performance. It uses a combination of linear position, magnetic reed, and air pressure sensors to generate three fully continuous control dimensions. Each control dimension is encoded and transmitted using the industry standard MIDI protocol to allow the instrument to interface with a large variety of synthesizers to control different parameters of the synthesis algorithm in real time, allowing for a high degree of expressiveness not possible with existing electronic wind instrument controllers. The first part of the thesis will provide a justification for the design of a novel instrument, and present some of the theory behind pitch representation, encoding, and transmission with respect to digital systems. The remainder of the thesis will present the particular design and explain the workings of its various subsystems.

Automatic musical instrument recognition for multimedia indexing

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Disparador MIDI para batería

La batería acústica es un instrumento de percusión muy complejo que requiere altas dosis de coordinación, interdependencia y musicalidad. Los músicos necesitan nuevas formas de desarrollarse y expresarse. Buscando caminos que mejoren su comprensión. Así también los aprendices requieren herramientas para poder disfrutar del instrumento musical. Construir un disparador MIDI mejora esas prestaciones. Aumenta la cantidad de soni-dos, es adaptable a la forma de tocar y simplifica los conceptos evitando problemas a los principiantes. Actualmente existen escasos disparadores MIDI en el mercado. En su lugar se presen-tan módulos electrónicos con altas características, complejos de utilizar y con alto coste. El proyecto a implementar consiste en un disparador MIDI, un equipo cuyo fin es cap-tar los impactos que efectúa un músico; un percusionista. En el proyecto se estudian y analizan las problemáticas a las que se enfrenta este tipo de dispositivo, se propondrá distintas soluciones de concepto y, finalmente se construirá dicho sistema que será probado en un ordenador personal. Con un ideal en mente, emular una batería acústica y ser un proyecto abierto en el sentido de ser modulable y ampliable. ABSTRACT. Drum set is a very complex percussion instrument that requires a lot of coordination, interdependence and musicality. Musicians need new ways to develop and express themselves, as well as learners re-quire tools to enjoy the musical instrument. Build a MIDI drum trigger improves these benefits. It increases the amount of sounds, is customizable and simplifies problems for drummer beginners. There are currently a few MIDI triggers on the market. Instead, electronic modules with high features, complex to use and they are sold at high cost. The aim of the project is to implement a MIDI drum trigger, a kit to capture the impact that percussionist makes. The project studies and analyzes the problems which this type of device. Different solutions concept will be proposed and finally the system will be built. With an ideal in mind, emulate an acoustic drum.

Human-Computer interaction methodologies applied in the evaluation of haptic digital musical instruments

Recent developments in interactive technologies have seen major changes in the manner in which artists, performers, and creative individuals interact with digital music technology; this is due to the increasing variety of interactive technologies that are readily available today. Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) present musicians with performance challenges that are unique to this form of computer music. One of the most significant deviations from conventional acoustic musical instruments is the level of physical feedback conveyed by the instrument to the user. Currently, new interfaces for musical expression are not designed to be as physically communicative as acoustic instruments. Specifically, DMIs are often void of haptic feedback and therefore lack the ability to impart important performance information to the user. Moreover, there currently is no standardised way to measure the effect of this lack of physical feedback. Best practice would expect that there should be a set of methods to effectively, repeatedly, and quantifiably evaluate the functionality, usability, and user experience of DMIs. Earlier theoretical and technological applications of haptics have tried to address device performance issues associated with the lack of feedback in DMI designs and it has been argued that the level of haptic feedback presented to a user can significantly affect the user’s overall emotive feeling towards a musical device. The outcome of the investigations contained within this thesis are intended to inform new haptic interface.

Behavioral and neural correlates of perceived and imagined musical timbre

The generality of findings implicating secondary auditory areas in auditory imagery was tested by using a timbre imagery task with fMRI. Another aim was to test whether activity in supplementary motor area (SMA) seen in prior studies might have been related to subvocalization. Participants with moderate musical background were scanned while making similarity judgments about the timbre of heard or imagined musical instrument sounds. The critical control condition was a visual imagery task. The pattern of judgments in perceived and imagined conditions was similar, suggesting that perception and imagery access similar cognitive representations of timbre. As expected, judgments of heard timbres, relative to the visual imagery control, activated primary and secondary auditory areas with some right-sided asymmetry. Timbre imagery also activated secondary auditory areas relative to the visual imagery control, although less strongly, in accord with previous data. Significant overlap was observed in these regions between perceptual and imagery conditions. Because the visual control task resulted in deactivation of auditory areas relative to a silent baseline, we interpret the timbre imagery effect as a reversal of that deactivation. Despite the lack of an obvious subvocalization component to timbre imagery, some activity in SMA was observed, suggesting that SMA may have a more general role in imagery beyond any motor component.

Cibercultura e Sub-culturas: Estética Digital

Introdução: informação, conteúdos, saberes: Os conteúdos digitais; Projeto 1: A vida quotidiana dos infonautas; Netiquette; Produção e consumo cultural na sociedade da informação; Cibercultura e vida académica; Media studies e new media studies; Diversas áreas de pesquisa; Proliferação de questões; Reflexividade dos especialistas do saber prático; A falência das antigas certezas. Estética digital: Sean Cubbit: Digital Aesthetics; Computação estética; Natureza da arte digital; Interfaces; o iPhone e iPad; o Windows 8; Design da interação digital; Luvas de realidade virtual; Inputs diretos da eletricidade cerebral; o Sistema de interação com múltiplas interfaces.

Finalidades do estudo de um instrumento musical: intervenção pedagógica com recurso a estratégias no ensino do violino para desenvolver a atenção seletiva

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Ensino de Música

Estudi de casos pel control de síntesi d’instruments musicals virtuals mitjançant la veu cantada

Report for the scientific sojourn carried out at the Music Technology Area (Sound Processing and Control Lab), Faculty of Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, from October to December 2005.The aim of this research is to study the singing voice for controlling virtual musical instrument synthesis. It includes analysis and synthesis algorithms based on spectral audio processing. After digitalising the acoustic voice signal in the computer, a number of expressive descriptors of the singer are extracted. This process is achieved synchronously, thus all the nuance of the singer performance have been tracked. In a second stage, the extracted parameters are mapped to a sound synthesizer, the so-called digital musical instruments. In order achieve it, several tests with music students of the Faculty of Music, McGill University have been developed. These experiments have contributed to evaluate the system and to derive new control strategies to integrate: clarinet synthesis, bass guitar, visual representation of voice signals.

Microcontroller-based interface circuit for inductive sensors

This work proposes a fully-digital interface circuit for the measurement of inductive sensors using a low-cost microcontroller (µC) and without any intermediate active circuit. Apart from the µC and the sensor, the circuit just requires an external resistor and a reference inductance so that two RL circuits with a high-pass filter (HPF) topology are formed. The µC appropriately excites such RL circuits in order to measure the discharging time of the voltage across each inductance (i.e. sensing and reference) and then it uses such discharging times to estimate the sensor inductance. Experimental tests using a commercial µC show a non-linearity error (NLE) lower than 0.5%FSS (Full-Scale Span) when measuring inductances from 1 mH to 10 mH, and from 10 mH to 100 mH.

The Influence of Pre-stimulus EEG Activity on Reaction Time During a Verbal Sternberg Task is Related to Musical Expertise

Abstract Previous work highlighted the possibility that musical training has an influence on cognitive functioning. The suggested reason for this influence is the strong recruitment of attention, planning, and working memory functions during playing a musical instrument. The purpose of the present work was twofold, namely to evaluate the general relationship between pre-stimulus electrophysiological activity and cognition, and more specifically the influence of musical expertise on working memory functions. With this purpose in mind, we used covariance mapping analyses to evaluate whether pre-stimulus electroencephalographic activity is predictive for reaction time during a visual working memory task (Sternberg paradigm) in musicians and non-musicians. In line with our hypothesis, we replicated previous findings pointing to a general predictive value of pre-stimulus activity for working memory performance. Most importantly, we also provide first evidence for an influence of musical expertise on working memory performance that could distinctively be predicted by pre-stimulus spectral power. Our results open novel perspectives for better comprehending the vast influences of musical expertise on cognition.

Organs and tuning, a practical handbook for organists; being a treatise on the construction, mechanism, tuning, and care of the instrument,

Mode of access: Internet.

Pathfinder: a performance-game for the augmented drum-kit

Pathfinder is a performance-game for solo drummer, exploring the synergies between multiple contemporary creative practices. The work navigates between music composition, improvisation, projection/light art and game art. At its heart lies a bespoke electro-acoustic instrument, the augmented drum-kit, used not only to provide the sonic content of the work in real-time, but also as a highly expressive game controller that interacts with an instrument-specific game. The musical instrument offers a much wider range of expressive possibilities, control and tactile feedback in comparison to a traditional general-purpose game controller, and as a result it affords a more diverse and nuanced game play performance. Live electronics, lights, projections and the drum-kit all make up the performance-game’s universe, within which the performer has to explore, adapt, navigate and complete a journey.

A flexible bio-inspired hierarchical model for analyzing musical timbre

A flexible and multipurpose bio-inspired hierarchical model for analyzing musical timbre is presented in this paper. Inspired by findings in the fields of neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and psychoacoustics, not only does the model extract spectral and temporal characteristics of a signal, but it also analyzes amplitude modulations on different timescales. It uses a cochlear filter bank to resolve the spectral components of a sound, lateral inhibition to enhance spectral resolution, and a modulation filter bank to extract the global temporal envelope and roughness of the sound from amplitude modulations. The model was evaluated in three applications. First, it was used to simulate subjective data from two roughness experiments. Second, it was used for musical instrument classification using the k-NN algorithm and a Bayesian network. Third, it was applied to find the features that characterize sounds whose timbres were labeled in an audiovisual experiment. The successful application of the proposed model in these diverse tasks revealed its potential in capturing timbral information.

iGrooving: A Generative Music Mobile Application for Runners

iGrooving is a generative music mobile application specifically designed for runners. The application’s foundation is a step-counter that is programmed using the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer. The runner’s steps generate the tempo of the performance by mapping each step to trigger a kick-drum sound file. Additionally, different sound files are triggered at specific step counts to generate the musical performance, allowing the runner a level of compositional autonomy. The sonic elements are chosen to promote a meditative aspect of running. iGrooving is conceived as a biofeedback-stimulated musical instrument and an environment for creating generative music processes with everyday technologies, inspiring us to rethink our everyday notions of musical performance as a shared experience. Isolation, dynamic changes, and music generation are detailed to show how iGrooving facilitates novel methods for music composition, performance and audience participation.