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Harmony has always been considered a difficult matter to
learn, also by experienced musicians. The aim of this paper
is to present a system designed to provide unskilled
users with an indication about the sound of the different
harmonic regions and to help them to build a cognitive map
of their relationships, linking musical perception to spatial
a...
Citations
... We developed a large-scale interactive environment running several mini-games and an interface to allow therapists to modify most of the game parameters, to easily adapt the games to the specific needs of the children. Other applications of this environment are listed in [16,[18][19][20]. The goal is to help children by providing them with an exciting and educational environment, but also to foster fun and interaction with the outside world. ...
Digital games aimed at improving cognitive and/or motor-sensory skills need to be carefully designed to take into account the characteristics and needs of particular categories of users. Several novel mini-games explicitly aimed at children with visual impairment (VI) were co-designed by a multidisciplinary team which involved computer engineers and a therapy team from the Robert Hollman Foundation (Padova, Italy). These games are played by children moving within a large-scale interactive environment - i.e., a floor portion placed under a motion capture system capable of tracking one or more people - with the game linking the players movements to the audio and visual output to produce meaningful interactions. We report on a pilot study of the usability of the system involving 11 children with VI. The results allowed us to improve the system and to define a set of guidelines useful for designers and developers of similar systems.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11042-022-13665-7.
... The generated music as it is now does never use notes outside the ones in the selected chords [20]. An added layer could generate more advanced melodies that are not so strongly restricted by the underlying chord. ...
Making music with other people is a social activity as well as an artistic one. Music therapists take advantage of the social aspects of music to obtain benefits for the patients, interacting with them musically, but this activity requires an high level of expertise. We propose a serious game that helps people even without musical skills interact with each other by collaboratively creating a rhythm with MIDI drum pads. The gaming system analyzes the rhythm in real time to add a musical feedback that enhances the aesthetical experience that is a crucial part of the musical interaction. The system is evaluated through a questionnaire asking subjects who tried in couples the system if they perceived it as helping their interaction. Despite the early development stage of the game, the results of the questionnaire show positive reception.
... The carpet's color has been chosen has an optimal background to enhance the camera vision and to avoid excessive light reflection that could altere the visual data and that could be visible even to blind children. The system relies upon two software modules: the Zone Tracker application for camera data processing [11,16] and a Max/MSP [12] patch for the audio production, as depicted in Figure 1b. The RGB video data coming from the ceiling mounted camera are processed by the Zone Tracker application. ...
... This is also the relevant point of the Harmonic Walk application, which has an immediate predecessor in the Stanza Logo-motoria [12], where the child has to use her/his spatial memory to match sounds with a spoken text. Some preparatory studies about orientation and wayfinding in the Harmonic Walk's environment have been presented in [13], where assessment tests, carried out with a sample of children from 7 to 11 years old, showed that the majority of them was able to find a valid path to perform a harmonic progression. The Harmonic Walk presents a very simple harmonic palette restricted to only six roots without any further option. ...
The
Harmonic Walk
is an interactive physical environment designed for learning and practicing the accompaniment of a tonal melody. Employing a highly innovative multimedia system, the application offers to the user the possibility of getting in touch with some fundamental tonal music features in a very simple and readily available way. Notwithstanding tonal music is very common in our lives, unskilled people as well as music students and even professionals are scarcely conscious of what these features actually are. The
Harmonic Walk
, through the body movement in space, can provide all these users a live experience of tonal melody structure, chords progressions, melody accompaniment, and improvisation. Enactive knowledge and embodied cognition allow the user to build an inner map of these musical features, which can be acted by moving on the active surface with a simple step. Thorough assessment tests with musicians and nonmusicians high school students could prove the high communicative power and efficiency of the
Harmonic Walk
application both in improving musical knowledge and in accomplishing complex musical tasks.
... As can be seen from Fig.6, the geometrical interpretation of the conductor's interaction space is a hemisphere with the center at the level of the breastbone of the conductor and the diameter corresponding approximately to the two stretched arms length. Following the conductor's interaction model, the The Harmonic Walk [8] is an interactive physical environment designed for experiencing a novel spatial approach to musical creation. In particular, the system allows the user to get in touch with some fundamental tonal music features in a very simple and readily available way. ...
Reality-based interfaces have the property of linking the user's physical space with the computer digital content, bringing in intuition, plasticity and expressiveness. Moreover, applications designed upon motion and gesture tracking technologies involve a lot of psychological features, like space cognition and implicit knowledge. All these elements are the background of three presented music applications, employing the characteristics of three different interactive spaces: a user centered three dimensional space, a floor bi-dimensional camera space, and a small sensor centered three dimensional space. The basic idea is to deploy the application's spatial properties in order to convey some musical knowledge, allowing the users to act inside the designed space and to learn through it in an enactive way.
... Subsection 3.2 shows the projections 3 http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ best-music-apps/ 4 on a flat surface of the Harmonic Walk, a step operated application for the accompaniment of a tonal melody [7]. At the end (Subsection 3.3) we present the Hand Composer [6], a tool for interactive, gesturally driven, XX century music composition. ...
