Area 1: Human Aesthetic Expression

In this project, which is part of the WARA Media and Language and a collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, we build computer models of the processes by which humans communicate in music performance, and use these to 1) learn about the underlying processes, 2) build different kinds of interactive applications. We focus on the communication between a conductor and an orchestra, a process based on the non-verbal communication of cues and instructions via the conductor’s hand, arm and upper body motion, as well as facial expression and gaze pattern.

In the first part of the project, a museum installation is designed for the omni-theater Wisdome Stockholm at Tekniska Museet, in collaboration with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Publications

During ancient times, the choir (χορος, khoros) had a major function in the classical Greek theatrical plays - commenting on and interacting with the main characters in the drama. We aim to create a robotic choir, invited to take part in a full-scale operatic performance in Rijeka, Croatia, September 2020 - thereby grounding our technological research in an ancient theatrical and operatic tradition. In our re-interpretation, the choir will consist of a swarm of small flying drones that have perceptual capabilities and thereby will be able to interact with human singers, reacting to their behavior both as individual agents, and as a swarm.

Publications

• Sara Eriksson, Åsa Unander-Scharin, Vincent Trichon, Carl Unander-Scharin, Hedvig Kjellström, and Kristina Höök. Dancing with drones: Crafting novel artistic expressions through intercorporeality. In ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019.

Classical music sound production is structured by an underlying manuscript, the sheet music, that specifies into some detail what will happen in the music. However, the sheet music specifies only up to a certain degree how the music sounds when performed by an orchestra; there is room for considerable variation in terms of timbre, texture, balance between instrument groups, tempo, local accents, and dynamics. In larger ensembles, such as symphony orchestras, the interpretation of the sheet music is done by the conductor. We propose to learn a simplified generative model of the entire music production process from data; the conductor's articulated body motion in combination with the produced orchestra sound. This model can be exploited for two applications; the first is "home conducting" systems, i.e., conductor-sensitive music synthesizers, the second is tools for analyzing conductor-orchestra communication, where latent states in the conducting process are inferred from recordings of conducting motion and orchestral sound.

Publications

• Kelly Karipidou*, Josefin Ahnlund*, Anders Friberg, Simon Alexanderson, and Hedvig Kjellström. Computer analysis of sentiment interpretation in musical conducting. In IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, 2017. (*Joint first authors)
  • Dataset and videos

There are many commercial applications of synthesized music from acoustic instruments, e.g. generation of orchestral sound from sheet music. Whereas the sound generation process of some types of instruments, like piano, is fairly well known, the sound of a violin has been proven extremely difficult to synthesize. The reason is that the underlying process is highly complex: The art of violin-playing involves extremely fast and precise motion with timing in the order of milliseconds.
We believe that ideas from Machine Learning can be employed to build better violin sound synthesizers. The task of this project is to use learning methods to create a generative model of violin sound from sheet music, using an intermediate representation of the kinematic system (violin and bow) generating the sound. To train the generative model, a database with motion capture of bowing will be used, containing a large set of bowing examples, performed by 6 professional violinists.

Publications

• Akshaya Thippur, Anders Askenfelt, and Hedvig Kjellström. Probabilistic modeling of bowing gestures for gesture-based violin sound synthesis. In Stockholm Music Acoustics Conference, 2013.