5409418
You're The Conductor: A Realistic Interactive Conducting System for Children
This paper describes the first system designed to allow children to conduct an audio and video recording of an orchestra. No prior music experience is required to control the orchestra, and the system uses an advanced algorithm to time stretch the audio in real-time at high quality and without altering the pitch. We will discuss the requirements and challenges of designing an interface to target our particular user group (children), followed by some system implementation details. An overview of the algorithm used for audio time stretching will also be presented. We are currently using this technology to study and compare professional and non-professional conducting behavior, and its implications when designing new interfaces for multimedia. You're the Conductor is currently a successful exhibit at the Children's Museum in Boston, USA.
1549095
Education, entertainment and authenticity: lessons learned from designing an interactive exhibit about medieval music
In this paper we describe the design experience gathered from creating an interactive exhibit about medieval music. This system was designed as an educational exhibit that relies on audio as its only feedback channel. We focused our work on three major goals: educational value, entertainment aspects, and historic authenticity. We present insight into the challenges in designing a system with these goals, and how they could be solved.
2078708
Improving orchestral conducting systems in public spaces: examining the temporal characteristics and conceptual models of conducting gestures
Designing interactive conducting exhibits for public spaces poses unique challenges, primarily because the conceptual model of conducting music varies amongst users. In a user study, we compared how conductors and non-conductors place their beats when conducting to a fixed orchestral recording of Radetzky March, and found significant differences between these two groups. Conductors lead the actual music beat with their gestures by an average of 150 ms, compared to 50 ms for non-conductors; non-conductors also vary their placement of the beat 50% more than conductors. Furthermore, we found differences in how users conceptually mapped their gestures to the music, such as conducting to the musical rhythm rather than to the beat. We are incorporating these results into an upcoming conducting system for public spaces to increase its usability; we believe they also apply to a more general class of musical gestures such as dance.
1540671
Bangarama: Creating Music with Headbanging
Bangarama is a music controller using headbanging as the primary interaction metaphor. It consists of a head-mounted tilt sensor and a guitar-shaped controller that does not require complex finger positions. We discuss the specific challenges of designing and building this controller to create a simple, yet responsive and playable instrument, and show how ordinary materials such as plywood, tin foil, and copper wire can be turned into a device that enables a fun, collaborative music-making experience.
7621577
Towards a quantitative analysis of audio scrolling interfaces
We present the results of a user study inspired by previous work in document navigation comparing rate and position control for navigating an audio timeline. Although interfaces for controlling playback speed (rate) are favored over playback position, we found that position control is, on average, 15-19% faster than rate control when searching for targets 90 to 100 seconds away in the audio timeline. Additional studies are being planned to further characterize audio scrolling performance with position and rate controls.
7551391
The Role of Time in Engineering Computer Music Systems
Discussion of time in interactive computer music systems engineering has been largely limited to data acquisition rates and latency. Since music is an inherently time-based medium, we believe that time plays a more important role in both the usability and implementation of these systems. In this paper, we present a time design space, which we use to expose some of the challenges of developing computer music systems with time-based interaction. We describe and analyze the time-related issues we encountered whilst designing and building a series of interactive music exhibits that fall into this design space. These issues often occur because of the varying and sometimes conflicting conceptual models of time in the three domains of user, application (music), and engineering. We present some of our latest work in conducting gesture interpretation and frameworks for digital audio, which attempt to analyze and address these conflicts in temporal conceptual models.
821388
Subvarieties of the Variety Generated by the Five-element Brandt Semigroup
All subvarieties of the variety B2 generated by the five-element Brandt semigroup are characterized. Based on this characterization, an algorithm is provided that decides if a finite set of identities defines, within B2, a finitely generated subvariety.
36039309
Consistency in Dataflow Graphs
Analytical properties of programming languages with dataflow graph semantics are discussed. It is shown that one of the most serious problems with these languages is that subtle inconsistencies between parts of the dataflow graph can be inadvertently created. These inconsistencies can lead to deadlock, or in the case of nonterminating programs, to unbounded memory requirements. Consistency is defined to mean that the same number of tokens is consumed as produced on any arc, in the long run. A token-flow model is developed for testing for inconsistency. The method is a generalization of consistency checks for synchronous dataflow (SDF) graphs. The token-flow model is compared to similar tests applied to hybrid dynamical systems. It is argued that dataflow semantics make steady-state analysis possible, leading to a simpler method in most cases. >
40109015
Busy Periods of Poisson Arrival Queues with Loss
We consider two queues with loss, one is the finite dam with Poisson arrivals and the other is the M/G/1 queue with impatient customers. We use the method of Kolmogorov's backward differential equation and construct a type of renewal equation to obtain the Laplace transform of busy(or wet) period in both queues. As a consequence, we provide the explicit forms of expected busy periods.
24643318
Context Adaptive Self-configuration System Based on Multi-agent
This paper proposes an adaptive resource self-management system that collects system resources, user information, and usage patterns as context information for utilization in self-configuration. This system will ease the system maintenance burden on users by automating a large portion of the configuration tasks such as; install, reconfiguration and update, while also decreasing cost and errors. Working from the gathered context information, this system allows users to select and install appropriate components for their system context. This also offers a more personalized configuration setting by using user's existing application setting and usage pattern. To avoid a center server overload when transferring and managing related files, we employ Peerto- Peer method. A prototype was developed to evaluate the system with a comparison study using the conventional methods of manual configuration and MS-IBM systems was conducted to validate the proposed system in terms of functional capacity, install time, etc...
19038002
Computational Experience of an Interior-Point Algorithm in a Parallel Branch-and-Cut Framework
An interior-point algorithm within a branch-and-bound framework for solving nonlinear mixed integer programs is described. In contrast to solving the relaxation to optimality at each tree node, the relaxation is only solved to near-optimality. Analogous to using advanced bases for warmstart solutions in the case of linear MIP, a \dynamic" collection of warmstart vectors is kept. Computational results on various classes of nonlinear mixed integer programs are presented.