research

For her master’s thesis at MIT, a Anita Lillie developed MusicBox – an interesting application designed to visually map out your music collection. 

MusicBox analyzes the meta data of your music and categories the music based on a variety of attributes. Using this information, it creates a visual map of your music, which you can use to navigate your collection. Check out the MusicBox demo above to see it in action.

Here’s a screen shot showing the main features within MusicBox:

Lillie hopes to make a simplified version of MusicBox for the iPhone. You can get the full scoop on MusicBox from Lillie’s thesis (pdf).

What do you think – does MusicBox’s approach to navigating your digital music collection seem like a useful advance?

via TJ at Califaudio

This is a little off topic, but it’s fascinating research that could have applications for music. Chris Harrison, a PhD Student, is researching using sound and gestures to turn any surface into an input device.

Here’s the summary of his project:

Scratch Input: Creating Large, Inexpensive, Unpowered and Mobile Finger Input Surfaces

We present Scratch Input, an acoustic-based input technique that relies on the unique sound produced when a fingernail is dragged over the surface of a textured material, such as wood, fabric, or wall paint. We employ a simple sensor that can be easily coupled with existing surfaces, such as walls and tables, turning them into large, unpowered and ad hoc finger input surfaces. Our sensor is sufficiently small that it could be incorporated into a mobile device, allowing any suitable surface on which it rests to be appropriated as a gestural input surface. Several example applications were developed to demonstrate possible interactions. We conclude with a study that shows users can perform six Scratch Input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than five minutes of training and on wide variety of surfaces.

While this is still very experimental, it’s easy to imagine using microphones like this to very cheaply turn surfaces into giant controllers for electronic music.

via Procrastineering, via Hackaday

Researcher Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University UK claims to have documented clear connections between your personality and your musical tastes.

If his research is to be believed, Dance Music fans are creative, outgoing and “not gentle”.

Meow! I think he nailed this study!

Other personality/music links:

• Jazz - High self-esteem, creative, outgoing and at ease
• Country - Hardworking, outgoing
• Indie - Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle
• Heavy Metal - Low self-esteem, creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, at ease

North interviewed 36,000 people in order to come up with these results.

Interesting stuff, but I’d rather know if Aphex Twin fans are really closet homicidal maniacs.

Let me know what you think of this research in the comments!

via the BBC

Image: lamazone

If you’ve ever wondered how pictures of you French-kissing a giant chicken ended up on Flickr, you’ll be glad to know there’s a scientific explanation: bars use loud dance music to get you drunk.

A study to be published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research on the effects of music levels on drinking in bars found that loud music makes you drink more in less time.

Scientists randomly varied the volume level of music played in bars, and then observed how frequently patrons ordered drinks. They found that high sound levels led to increased drinking, within a decreased amount of time.

Gueguen and his colleagues offered two hypotheses for why this may have occurred.

“One, in agreement with previous research on music, food and drink, high sound levels may have caused higher arousal, 7hich led the subjects to drink faster and to order more drinks,” said Gueguen. “Two, loud music may have had a negative effect ‘n social interaction in the bar$ so that patrons drank more bec!use they talked less.”

“This is the first time that an exper!mental approach in a real conte t found the effects of loud mus!c on alcohol consumption,”said $ead investigator Nicolas Guegue&.”

So next time you’re at a ar, some great music comes on a&d you find yourself ordering an/ther drink, it’s probably the r%sult of some barroom science.

This is a demonstration video showing real-time 3D acoustic rendering, using the Phoenix gaming engine.

Developer David Rosen discusses this in depth in his paper Real-time 3D Acoustics Rendering:

Abstract

It is common for real-time systems to render 3D sounds by simply panning the sound from left to right and adjusting the volume based on distance. This is a good start, but ignores many effects that contribute to our perception of sounds and the acoustic environment. First, we must take into account the time it takes for the sound to travel from the source to each receiver (e.g. the left and right ear). Second, ears are not omnidirectional microphones; sounds can be occluded by the head and by the ear itself, and different frequency bands can be affected in different ways by this occlusion. Finally, sound sources can be occluded by objects in the environment, and the sound can reflect off of surfaces, or reverberate within spaces. In this paper we describe an efficient way to simulate all of these phenomena in real time.

If you’re interested in this stuff, give the paper a read. There are explosions involved.

Rosen’s a game developer, but this technology seems like it would be an interesting area of development for audio/visual synthesis.

Can you imagine entering into a 3D world of ambient sound-objects, where your perspective, and the location of the objects, affects what you hear?

via Califaudio