I2M
Interfaces to Music

Music (especially Western Classical Music) is a highly complex artifact that happens in real time; it is not easy for laypersons, music students, and even experts to always fully appreciate and understand the full structure and beauty of musical pieces and performances.

The guiding vision of this project is to develop novel types of computer interfaces that provide new ways of presenting, teaching, understanding, experiencing, and also shaping music in creative ways. These "interfaces" will provide intuitive access to music through novel visualisation paradigms and new methods for interactive manipulation and control of music performances and recordings – for instance, by visualising aspects of the expressive performances of great artists via computer animations, or by permitting a user to interactively play with and modify a given recording according to his/her taste. The project will focus on classical music (in the widest sense), though we will keep an eye on other application possibilities.

The technical goals of the project are to perform the basic research needed to develop the methodological basis. That includes research on intelligent musical structure recognition algorithms, new visualisation paradigms, and methods for (real-time) computer-based interaction with music. This will be achieved by inter-disciplinary research that combines knowledge from fields like computer science, Artificial Intelligence, pattern recognition, visualisation, and musicology.

Research staff

• Gerhard Widmer
• Arthur Flexer

Sponsor