Collaborative Research: Pilot: Personalized Tools to Enhance Musical Creativity

信息技术日益增长的能力和灵活性使开发人员能够开发越来越有创造性的工具；然而，同样的能力往往导致工具的使用超出了最专业的超级用户的使用范围。音乐是具有重大文化和经济意义的创造性努力的一个领域。近几十年来，引入了各种各样的音频制作工具来增强和促进音乐创作。不幸的是，由于这些工具来自更熟悉Java而不是音乐创造力的软件开发人员，因此这些工具中的许多都非常复杂，使用的概念和控制器与音乐家习惯和熟悉的概念和控制器非常不同。由于这些工具很复杂，而且软件套件的界面每隔几年就会改变一次，音乐家可能无法接受它们，或者只学了一半？它们抑制了创造力，限制了可能产生的作品的范围，以及强大的技术所具有的提高音乐创作的终极能力。许多音乐家用个人主义的术语来思考声音，可能没有已知的映射到现有音频制作工具的控制上。例如，小提琴家可能想让她的小提琴录音听起来闪闪发光。虽然她对微微的声音有一个明确的概念，但她可能不知道如何用让制作人将其映射到可用的音频工具(如混响和均衡)上的术语来表达它。这个项目开发了一个计算工具，与音乐家一起工作，以快速了解声学特征如何映射到音频概念上，并创建一个简单的控制器来根据该概念操作音频。对于小提琴演奏者来说，这个工具会学习闪闪发光对她意味着什么，然后创造一个旋钮，让她发出或多或少闪闪发光的声音。本项目采用以用户为中心的设计方法来开发自动适应用户的音频制作工具--S的工作风格，而不是强迫用户适应工具。其结果将是音频工具如何增强创造力的范例，以及更广泛地说，如何将情感概念自动映射到与数字媒体生产相关的更离散的参数。

The growing power and flexibility of information technology has allowed developers to build increasingly creative tools; however that same capacity has often led to tools whose use is beyond any but the most expert power-user. One area of creative endeavor of great cultural and economic importance is music. In recent decades, a vast variety of audio production tools have been introduced to enhance and facilitate music creation. Unfortunately, since the tools come from software developers more familiar with Java than musical creativity, many of these tools are extremely complex and use concepts and controllers very different from those that musicians are accustomed to and comfortable with. Since the tools are complex, and interfaces to software suites change every few years, musicians may fail to embrace them or only ?half- learn? them, inhibiting creativity and limiting the range of possible works produced, and the ultimate capacity that powerful technology has to enhance musical creation. Many musicians think about sound in individualistic terms that may not have known mappings onto the controls of existing audio production tools. For example, a violinist may want to make the recording of her violin sound shimmery. While she has a clear concept of what a shimmery sound is, she may not know how to articulate it in terms that let a producer map shimmery onto the available audio tools (such as reverberation and equalization). This project develops a computational tool that works alongside the musician to quickly learn how acoustic features map onto an audio concept, and creates a simple controller to manipulate audio in terms of that concept. In the case of the violin player, the tool would learn what shimmery means to her, and then create a knob that would let her make a sound more or less shimmery. This project uses a user-centered design approach to the development of audio production tools that automatically adapts to the user?s work style, rather than forcing the user to adapt to the tools. The result will be and example of how audio tools can enhance creativity, and more broadly, how affective concepts can be automatically mapped to more discrete parameters associated with digital media production.