Designing Musical Interactions: Cognitive Music Systems, New Instruments and New Sound

Professor Tiago Tavares

601 Computer Studies Building

Music is an enjoyment when you casually listen to it. But music can be much more exhilarating: musical experience becomes an excitement when you fully immerse into the sound, when you join its beats, create a tune, when you touch its voice and dance with its rhythms.

My research on music signal processing leads me to the human-music interaction mechanisms and systems in various musical processes of music composition, performance, content production, and consumption. These processes can be facilitated or augmented using computational cognitive systems, intelligent signal processing and pattern recognition systems

that learn regular patterns in existing human-music interaction mechanisms and smartly generalize these mechanisms to new ways of interacting with music. To make “artificial” music interactions musical, the design of these interactions will take us to a journey of how musicians create and play, how music instruments make sound, and eventually, the very question and the definition of music itself. Based on this, I will compare various successful and unsuccessful attempts to interact with music, exploring their technical, poetic, aesthetic, and cultural roots, and illustrate the theoretical and systematic frameworks of human-music interaction systems and their applications.

 Biography

Tiago Tavares is an assistant professor at the University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil. He received his MsC and PhD degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Campinas. His PhD research was on using computational models of musical rhythm recognition for enhancing the automatic music transcription systems. His current research is on music signal processing and new interfaces for musical expression, focusing on symbolic representations, systematic analyses, music instrument mechanisms, audience participation, and musical system personalization.

Refreshments will be provided.