Annotations for Real Time Music Spatialization

We are interested in developing multimedia technology for enriching the listening experience of average listeners. One main issue we focus on is the design and construction of software systems in which users interact with music in various ways while maintaining as much as possible the semantics of the original music. In this context, we develop a research activity concerning music spatialization. We propose a system called MidiSpace, in which users may listen to music while controlling in real time the localization and spatialization of sound sources, through a simple interface. In this paper we show how to represent various information about the musical content as annotations, and how to exploit these annotations to enrich the interaction with the user. We propose a format for these annotations, and an implementation of an interactive real time player. We further introduce a constraint propagation mechanism that ensure the spatialization always satisfies some mixing properties. We finally show that these constraints can themselves be represented as annotations in our framework.