Intelligent Music Interfaces

Intelligent Music Interfaces: When Interactive Assistance and Augmentation Meet Musical Instruments

You like musical instruments? Are you interested in using interactive technologies to assist and augment musicians? Join our workshop at Augmented Humans (AHs) International Conference 2023!
The program is online and can be viewed here. A detailed call for papers can be found here.
Important Dates
02 February 2023: Submissions Opens
~~19 February 2023:~~ We accept rolling submissions until March 1st
Submit your Paper via Email
21 February 2023: Review Notification
12 March 2023: Workshop

Some pictures from the previous workshop at CHI 2022.

Playing a musical instrument goes hand-in-hand with many benefits, such as positively impacting mental health or dexterity. Electronic elements have been integrated into traditional musical instruments in the early 1930s to create instruments, such as E-guitars, that offer new ways of music expression. Electric instruments evolved by combining networking and computational capabilities. These new capabilities can be leveraged to further broaden artists' expressiveness, enhance learning scenarios, allow remote collaboration of musicians, and even create entirely new musical instruments.

In this workshop, we will discuss and interact with intelligent music interfaces of any form. Novel music interfaces could be a new adaption of a traditional musical instrument, an interface for learning, or even supporting software. The workshop is planned to be held in person in conjunction with the Augmented Humans International Conference on March 12th in Glasgow, UK.

Call for Papers

Integrating interactive technologies into musical instruments has become an emerging field. Initial work in the domain of intelligent music interfaces focused on improving the play performance of students through learning-by-demonstration or by reflecting the performance directly to the student for real-time improvements. Further, musical instruments were augmented by technologies to extend the musical sound space. For example, gestures and musical instruments can be combined to, for example, change the pitch of a sound. We expect future musical instruments to integrate interactive features, effectively facilitating the learning of musical instruments, promoting self-expression, and changing stage performances. We seek high quality contributions concerning different perspective of intelligent music interfaces and instruments including, but not limited to:

Position Papers
Research Statements
Interactive Demonstrations
Art Pieces

Workshop Program

Time	Program Item
9:00am - 9:15am	Welcome and Workshop Introduction
9:15am - 9:45am	Moderated Speed Dating
9:45am - 11:00am	Interactive Rhythm Workshop by Andreas Weiß from the Music School Schallkultur
11:00am - 11:30am	Coffee Break
11:30am - 1:00pm	Paper/Demo Session and Discussions
1:00pm - 2:15pm	Lunch Break
2:15pm - 3:30pm	Keynote by Prof. Max Mühlhäuser
3:30pm - 4:00pm	Moderated Discussion and Closing

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should follow the ACM two-column format using the sigconf command at the top of the Latex document: \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}. You can download the templates from ACM or use the corresponding Overleaf tempate.

Papers can be submitted via an Email.

Position Papers (2-4 pages, excluding references)
Research Statements (2-4 pages, excluding references)
Interactive Demonstrations (2-4 pages, excluding references, demonstrating an intelligent musical interface that workshop participants can try out during the workshop)
Art Pieces (1-4 pages, excluding references, any kind of art that involves music max. 10 minutes)

The authors of interactive demonstrations and art pieces are invited to present a prototype in the interactive workshop session.

Participants will be selected based on the merit of their contribution to the workshop. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop. All participants must register for the workshop. (Workshop registration is included in the full conference registration of Augmented Humans '23).

Post-Workshop Plans

After the workshop, we encourage researchers to rework their research statements and position papers based on the discussions and feedback from the workshop. We support and encourage authors to make their research available on arXiv after the workshop. Recorded pitches and the keynote will be uploaded on YouTube after seeking the presenter's permission. Based on the group work and moderated discussion, the organizers plan to distill critical aspects and the workshop's outcomes into a position paper published open access. The anticipated results are available to research questions concerning prototyping, the study design, and the evaluation of intelligent music interfaces. The feedback of the workshop attendees accompanies these research questions to inspire researchers who are interested in tackling the research questions. Based on the interest of the workshop attendees, we plan to organize regular meetups. We plan to establish a long-term format with a potential future invitation for the authors to contribute to a journal.

Organizers

Jordan Aiko Deja

is a Ph.D. student working on augmented reality, music learning, and adaptive visualizations in the HICUP research group at the University of Primorska, Slovenia. He is researching augmented reality techniques to teach improvisation in the piano. His main goal is to design interfaces and tools that give their users better ways to understand themselves and how they work

Bettina Eska

is a Ph.D. student at LMU Munich, where she researches sensor-based feedback systems for HCI for sports. But she is also interested in designing and generating appropriate feedback for other scenarios that require fine motor skills, such as playing musical instruments. Additionally, she has played the flute for over 15 years and gained experience playing in various amateur orchestras and groups several times.

Snehesh Shrestha

is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland (UMD) College Park. His research focuses on AI-assisted music education. He develops technology, tools, and applications to provide real-time feedback during practice for music players. He is interested in empowering music teachers by creating super-tools that augment their capabilities in understanding their students' strengths and weaknesses.

Jakob Karolus

is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research focuses on the design of proficiency-aware systems leveraging ubiquitous sensing technologies. In addition, he is interested in the design qualities of sensor-augmented musician-instrument interaction. His expertise in rapid design, prototyping, and evaluation of novel musical instruments will benefit the workshop.

Matthias Hoppe

is a PhD student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he focuses on mixed reality as a new medium and investigates the importance of haptic feedback in virtual reality. Therefore, he is also interested in how such novel interactions can enhance experiences with novel music interfaces. Matthias has experience in evaluating supportive tools while practicing musical instruments.

Andreas Weiß

has over twenty years of experience as a musician and music teacher. He is part of several band projects and co-owns the music school Schallkultur in Kaiserslautern, Germany. In addition, he collaborates with several research institutions by contributing his expertise as a musician to develop and evaluate new smart music interfaces, such as Let's Frets.

Andrii Matviienko

is an assistant professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. His research focuses on the assisting technology in urban environments, in particular on designing, constructing, and evaluating multimodal and mixed reality interfaces for vulnerable road users. Additionally, he has over 20 years of experience playing trombone in amateur and semi-professional orchestras in Ukraine and Germany, and a bass guitar in jazz/funk/rock bands.

Karola Marky

is a professor at the Ruhr-University Bochum. Her research focuses on the self-determination and self-expression of individuals in digital spaces, explicitly considering ubiquitous technology and novel (security and privacy) interfaces based on tangible interaction. She further leverages novel interfaces and interaction techniques to improve musical instruments dedicated to beginners and students. In her free time, she plays the piano and sings. She will coordinate the workshop organisation and contribute with her expertise in evaluating novel intelligent music interfaces.

Thomas Kosch

is a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on physiological interaction, including designing, prototyping, and evaluating physiological user interfaces. In addition, he is an expert in integrating physiological sensing into musical instruments to implicitly and explicitly augment musicians. Thomas is deeply interested in new ways to create music, augment existing instruments, and create tools and feedback mechanisms supporting musical students.