Abstract:The XX th century is full of technological inventions that made the very idea of a listening device possible, from the early gramophones to the latest portable mini disk players. What evolutions can w...The XX th century is full of technological inventions that made the very idea of a listening device possible, from the early gramophones to the latest portable mini disk players. What evolutions can we predict for the listening devices of the future, and how these evolutions will change the way we access and listen to music ? In this chapter, we suggest that listening devices can be greatly enhanced by providing new forms of user controls which provide users with semantically preserving variations. These controls are intended to allow listeners different musical perceptions on a piece of music, by opposition to traditional listening, in which the musical media is played passively by some neutral device. The objective is both to increase the musical comfort of listeners, and, when possible, to provide listeners with smoother paths to new music (music they do not know, or do not like). This chapter illustrates this idea on a few examples of active listening projects conducted at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, based on the notion of constrained exploratory space. These constrained spaces suggest that the classical boundaries between composing, listening and mixing may be redefined, thereby assigning new roles to composers, sound engineers and listeners. 1. From Buttons to Exploration We propose the idea of exploratory listening environments, as a natural evolution in the history of musical controls. We first sketch a brief history of musical controls, and then introduce the notion of semantic-preserving musical exploratory environment.Read More
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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