projects

The project will provide tools for dance groups in choreography and improvisation and facilitate new audience experience, both on-site and remotely. For example, in addition to seeing the dancer, the audience can hear and possibly feel the dancer’s movements. Effects include percussive sounds and vibrations produced while performer for example hits a virtual drum. Sonification based on dancers’ arm motion was piloted at Kuopio Dance Festival in June 2022 with live audience.

The stiffness and physical deformability of the instrument create openings in its folded shape, generating audio samples when handheld physical actions are applied. This physical manipulation changes control parameters in sample-based granular synthesis, while new audio samples are distributed across the surface as the performer directly interacts with the instrument. Navigating timbral variations in the sonic latent space enables the musician to develop an idiomatic digital relationship with sound-making and control actions using the Al-terity instrument.

The Co-Creative Artificial Intelligence of Music is a joint research project in collaboration with Koray Tahiroğlu (Aalto University Department of Art & Media), Nitin Sawhney (Aalto University Department of Computer Science) and Douglas Eck, Anna Huang (Magenta, Google Brain Team). The project is supported by Aalto University’s internal funding from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture’s (MEC) Global Program Pilots for India & USA.

What makes our relationship with music particularly interesting is that it is inherently a socio-cultural activity, supporting a diverse range of interactions and social or individual goals. In our relationship with music, socio-cultural factors (shared ideas, expectations, believes, interpretations, etc.) and technological aspects set conditions for us, for the interactions we develop and for the musical experience we create with musical instruments. Opening up a new field of inquiry around socio-cultural and techno-scientific conditions of digital musical instruments in our research, we question, what has changed in our relationships with musical instruments, compositions, performances and musical experiences, what do today’s instruments inspire us to do differently?

Network of Intelligent Sonic Agents (NOISA) aims to create a reactive system that uses ambient intelligence to adapt the current system state. The ambient intelligence includes techniques to measure in real-time the internal states of a user. These states include motivation, affective states and reactiveness. The task is to maintain these states – if the user loses his motivation or interest, the system will react by changing its behaviour in order to make the system interesting again.

KET is Thomas Bjelkeborn Sweden and Koray Tahiroğlu Finland and our research and artistic work is part of activities at EMS in Stockholm and at SOPI, Department of Media, Aalto University School of ARTS, Finland.The music is the carrier of the project idea where the visual will illustrate the project’s origins and its musical development. The visual follows the music as a subordinate companion that clarifies and densified the atmosphere around with very abstract sound creation.

InSpace with the Otherness explores what’s possible when the visitor follows the music as a subordinate companion that clarifies and densifies the atmosphere around it with very abstract sound creation at the ever-shifting border between new sounds and a constantly reinvented composition with the “otherness”, artificial intelligence.

The research aims to increase the potential affordances of digital technologies to create interactions in music performances with digital musical instruments. PESI is an Academy of Finland (pr. 137646).We have been also developing a repertoire to be performed with the PESI system.

continuous and dynamical audio and tactile feedback in deformation-based interactions, and deformation-based input and output in non-verbal communication and in other implicit interaction applications. – joint research project with Nokia Research Center. Audio and tactile feedback plays an important role in human computer interaction. They help user to interact with the system in eyes-free manner and can increase the feeling of control.

In most Virtual Reality (VR) systems or Virtual Environments (VE), interaction is highly dependent on visual feedback, immersive display systems, virtual helmets or specialized and complicated studio setups. With this in mind, we set out to design a prototype for a low-cost, non-visual, audio-haptic interface for manipulating virtual objects in a real environment. AHNE is the result of this experimentation. It allows for any real space to be augmented with virtual objects that can be moved and manipulated by the user with the help of motion tracking and custom-made glove controllers.

Motion-based interactive systems have long been utilised in contemporary dance performances. These performances bring new insight to sound-action experiences in multidisciplinary art forms. The performance set up of Raja gives a possibility to use two complementary tracking systems and two alternative choices for motion sensors in real-time audio-visual synthesis.

Its massive sculpture-body enables multi-user interaction to happen with the laser beams that provide an optical control through sound producing gestures using both hands. Its relation to traditional Kantele is with the sound synthesis module; each laser beam can be controlled individually to playback particular notes in real time that are synthesised using physical models of Kantele strings.