Blending the physical and the virtual in music technology
George Tzanetakis, Sidney Fels, Michael J. Lyons · 2013
Recent years have seen a significant increase of interest in rich multi-modal user interfaces going beyond conventional mouse/keyboard/screen interaction. The new interface technologies are broadly impacting music technology and culture. New musical interfaces use a variety of sensing (and actuating) modalities to receive and present information to users, and often require techniques from signal processing and machine learning in order to extract and fuse high level information from noisy, high dimensional signals over time. Hence they pose many interesting signal processing challenges while offering fascinating possibilities for new research. At the same time the richness of possibilities for new forms of musical interaction requires a new approach to the design of musical technologies and has implications for performance aesthetics and music pedagogy. This tutorial begins with a general and gentle introduction to the theory and practice of the design of new technologies for musical creation and performance. It continues with an overview of signal processing and machine learning methods which are needed for more advanced work in new musical interface design.