AbstractsComputer Science

Music Interaction Techniques in a Touchless Environment

by S.L. Geertsema




Institution: Universiteit Utrecht
Department:
Year: 2015
Record ID: 1259375
Full text PDF: http://dspace.library.uu.nl:8080/handle/1874/312451


Abstract

Music is often used for setting a mood or relaxing. But it could also be used as a method for expressing an emotion for people who have trouble to do so. Since about twenty percent of modern teenagers (in the Netherlands) experience this problem, a solution is needed. One such solution is an environment where teenagers can use several sense-based methods to express their emotions. The Moodroom is such an environment. It uses colours to express emotions. This project is a first attempt to come to an expressive user interface to interact with music. The goal of this project is to implement and verify various techniques for music interaction. Possible interaction techniques are gesture-based menus, predefined gestures and undefined gestures. With interaction techniques the user is able to control the certain parameters, such as tempo and attack. These are used to provide corresponding music. Possible techniques for providing fitting music are either with recorded music or music that is algorithmically composed. Recorded music can be found with the use of a database containing pre-calculated parameters, or by adjusting a certain song to the parameters. Generated music is generated in real-time, based on the parameters. A qualitative evaluation has been performed to verify which techniques (gesture-based menus and predefined gestures for interaction and database-based recorded music and generated music for music) are the most suitable for this purpose. With the current implementation, 77% of the participants prefers a gesture-based menu over a predefined gesture interface, and 80% prefers the recorded music selected with the use of a database over the generated music.