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 CHI 2022!
Important Dates (Submission Deadline Extended)
~~24 February 2022~~
04 March 2022: Submissions due
Submission site: EasyChair
10 March 2022: Notifications of acceptance
15 April 2022: Proceedings published
Proceedings published at <TBA>
1 May 2022: Workshop

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 while offering to participate virtually.

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:

Prototyping of novel music interfaces
Improving self-expression
Supporting existing or novel playstyles
Designing new interfaces and prototypes
Augmenting collaborative music sessions

Workshop Program

15 min Opening
15 min Speed Dating and Ice Breaking
10 min Introduction of Interactive Session
60 min Interactive Music Session
5 min Break
30 min Keynote
30 min Presentation Art Pieces
5 min Break
70 min Pitch Presentations
10 min Coffee Break
60 min Moderated Discussion and Closing

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should follow the ACM two-column format with a maximum page length of three pages excluding references 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 using EasyChair. The talks and presentations will be streamed for virtually attending participants. 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 both the workshop and at least one day of the conference. We solicit the following types of submissions: position papers, research statements, art pieces, and interactive demonstrations. The duration of an art piece is limited to 10 minutes. As interactive demonstrations, we consider demonstrating an intelligent musical interface that workshop participants can try out during the workshop. The authors of interactive demonstrations and art pieces are invited to present a prototype in the interactive workshop session.

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 will support researchers in submitting their final statements and papers to either arXiv or preprints on our website. 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

Karola Marky

is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the intersection of cybersecurity and human factors, explicitly considering privacy aspects of ubiquitous technology and novel security 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. She will coordinate the workshop organization and contribute with her expertise in evaluating novel intelligent music interfaces.

Annika Kilian

is a master student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is interested in new, seamlessly integrable input modalities for musical instruments that aim to enhance a performer's expressiveness and elevate creativity. Annika will provide perspectives to the workshop from a practitioners' point of view.

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. The practical didactic experience of Andreas will allow workshop attendees to quickly identify challenges and opportunities when using interactive technologies in learning scenarios.

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.

Paweł Woźniak,

is a full professor at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He is interested in how supportive, interactive technologies integrated into music instruments influence the musician's playstyle and motivation. His knowledge in evaluating the musician's motivation, experience, and playstyle is necessary to supervise workshop attendees in choosing their evaluation paradigm.

Max Mühlhäuser

is a professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt. In the past, he investigated several music interfaces, also contributing a long-term interactive music exhibit called "virtual conductor" to the House of Music in Vienna.

Thomas Kosch

is an assistant professor at the Utrecht University. 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. He will provide his experience in prototyping and evaluating novel music interfaces.