Search

Human movement is rich and complex and has been studied from two seemingly opposing design approaches: technology-driven design which seeks to continuously improve movement and gesture creation and recognition for both the user and the system; and experiential design which explores nuances of aesthetic human movement, cultivates body awareness, and develops methods for movement in embodied design. We compare and contrast these approaches with respect to their intended users and contexts, focus of the movement, and respective stages of the technology design process. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for future research that takes both perspectives into account.

We report on a system that enables the synchronization of electroacoustic sounds with conductor gestures. This system was specifically used in the context of the music composition 'IDEA', for instrumental ensemble and live electronics. After a series of experiments and testing, the system was used in two public performances with two different conductors. We describe in this paper the development and the implementation of the gesture following system and the data recording. In particular, the system requires the full-length recording of the conductor's right hand movements with an inertial measurement unit. The patches and the dataset are made publicly available, along with the recording of other pieces collected during the preliminary experiments. We believe this material can be used to test other following systems, to study and learn conducting gestures, as well as for more general computational analysis of movements.

International audience; Entrain is an adaptive agent designed to stimulate social interaction among users in collective music making. It registers individual user behavior and provides sonic feedback to encourage users to look up from their mobiles and interact with each other. We demonstrate a use case of Entrain in Coloop, a distributed and collective musical instrument.

International audience; This PhD project is multidisciplinary, at the intersection of Early Childhood Education, Design, and Human-Computer Interaction. The PhD goal aim at developing new approaches for early childhood education focusing on the role of body in the learning process. We leverage digital tangible and interactive technologies to develop specific scenarios that are evaluated in preschools. Our work proposes novel paradigms and uses of digital technologies currently not found in typical preschool environments.

People, through their bodily actions, engage in sensorimotor loops that connect them to the world and to their own bodies. People's brains integrate the incoming sensory information to form mental representations of their body appearance and capabilities. Technology provides exceptional opportunities to tweak sensorimotor loops and provide people with different experiences of their bodies. We recently showed that real-time sound feedback on one's movement (sonic avatar) can be used for sensory alteration of people's body perception, and in turn provoke enhanced motor behaviour, confidence and motivation for physical activity (PA) in people while increasing their positive emotions towards their own bodies. Here we describe the design process of a wearable prototype that aims to investigate how we can overcome known body-perception-related psychological barriers to PA by employing action-sound loops. The prototype consists of sensors that capture people's bodily actions and a gesture-sound palette that allows different action-sound mappings. Grounded in neuroscientific, clinical and sports psychology studies on body perception and PA, the ultimate design aim is to enhance PA in inactive populations by provoking changes on their bodily experience.

International audience; Designers are used to produce a variety of physical and digital representations at different stages of the design process. These intermediary objects (IOs) do support the externalization of ideas and the mediation with the different stakeholders. In the same manner, sound designers deliver several intermediate sounds to their clients, through iteration and refinement. In fact, these preliminary sounds are sound sketches representing the intermediate steps of an evolving creation. In this paper we reflect on the method of sketching sounds through vocalizations and gestures, and how a technological support, grounded in the understanding of the design practice, can foster transparency and mediation in sound design-thinking. Three tools, under development in the scope of the EU project SkAT-VG (Sketching Audio Technologies using Vocalizations and Gestures) are introduced and discussed, based on the preliminary observations collected during a workshop involving professional sound designers.

Current development in multimodal interfaces allows us to interact with digitally represented objects. Sadly, these representations are often poor due to technical limitations in representing some of the sensorial properties. Here we explore the possibility of overcoming these limitations by exploiting multisensory integration processes and propose a sound-based interaction technique to alter the perceived materiality of a surface being touched and to shape users' touch behavior. The latter can be seen both as a cue of, and as a means to reinforce, the altered perception. We designed a prototype that dynamically alters the texture-related sound feedback based on touch behavior, as in natural surface touch interactions. A user study showed that the frequency of the sound feedback alters texture perception (coldness and material type) and touch behavior (velocity and pressure). We conclude by discussing lessons learnt from this work in terms of HCI applications and questions opened by this research.

Gesture has become ubiquitous as an input modality in computer system, using multi-touch interfaces, cameras, or inertial measurement units. Whereas gesture control often necessitates the visual modality as a feedback mechanism, sound feedback has been significantly less explored. Nevertheless, sound can provide both discrete and continuous feedback on the gestures and the results of their action. We present here a system that significantly simplify and speedup the design of continuous sonification. Our approach is based on the concept of mapping by demonstration. This methodology enables designers to create motion-sound relationships intuitively, avoiding complex programming that is usually required in common approaches. Our system relies on multimodal machine learning techniques combined with hybrid sound synthesis. We believe that the system we describe opens new directions in the design of continuous motion-sound interactions. We developed prototypes related to different fields: performing arts, gaming, and sound-guided rehabilitation.

International audience; We investigate the use of interactive sound feedback for dance pedagogy based on the practice of vocalizing while moving. Our goal is to allow dancers to access a greater range of expressive movement qualities through vocalization. We propose a methodology for the sonification of Effort Factors, as defined in Laban Movement Analysis, based on vocalizations performed by movement experts. Based on the experiential outcomes of an exploratory workshop, we propose a set of design guidelines that can be applied to interactive sonification systems for learning to perform Laban Effort Factors in a dance pedagogy context.

This SIG intends to investigate the ongoing dialogue between music technology and the field of human-computer interaction. Our specific aims are to consider major findings of musical interface research over recent years and discuss how these might best be conveyed to CHI researchers interested but not yet active in this area, as well as to consider how to stimulate future collaborations between music technology and CHI research communities. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI EA '13 Extended Abstracts in Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Chiseling Bodies is an interactive augmented dance performance, where a dancer interacts with abstract visuals. They are massive mass-spring systems whose dynamical behaviors are echoing the dancer's movement qualities.

cote interne IRCAM: FdiliAlaoui12b; None / None; National audience; In this paper, we explore the use of movement qualities as interaction modality. The notion of movement qualities is widely used in dance practice and can be understood as how the movement is performed, independently of its specific trajectory in space. We implemented our approach in the context of an artistic installation called A light touch. This installation invites the participant to interact with a moving light spot reacting to the hand movement qualities. We conducted a user experiment that showed that such an interaction based on movement qualities tends to enhance the user experience favouring explorative and expressive usage.

We present Urban Musical Game, an installation using augmented sports balls to manipulate and transform an interactive music environment. The interaction is based on playing techniques, a concept borrowed from traditional music instruments and applied here to non musical objects.

We present an ensemble of tangible objects and software modules designed for musical interaction and performance. The tangible interfaces form an ensemble of connected objects communicating wirelessly. A central concept is to let users determine the final musical function of the objects, favoring customization, assembling, repurposing. This might imply assembling the wireless interfaces with existing everyday objects or musical instruments. Moreover, gesture analysis and recognition modules allow the users to define their own action/motion for the control of sound parameters. Various sound engines and interaction scenarios were built and experimented. Some examples that were developed in a music pedagogy context are described.