A change of music appreciation style from “listening to high fidelity (Hi-Fi) sounds” to “listening to preferred sounds” has emerged due to evolution of digital audio processing technology for the past years. Previously, many people enjoyed passive music appreciation: e.g., they buy CD and phonograph recordings or download mp3 audio files, set the disks or files to various media players, and hi...

In this paper we present first results on musical instrument classification using an HMM based recognizer. The final goal of our work is to automatically evaluate instruments and to classify them according to their characteristics. The first step in this direction was to train a system that is able to recognize a particular instrument among others of the same kind (e.g. guitars). The recognitio...

An experiment has been conducted, measuring pianists’ sensitivity to piano key vibrations at the fingers while playing an upright or a grand Yamaha Disklavier piano. At each trial, which consisted in playing loud and long A notes across the whole keyboard, vibrations were either present or absent through setting the Disklavier pianos to normal or quiet mode. Sound feedback was always provided b...

MM-RT (material and magnet rhythm and timbre) is a tabletop musical instrument equipped with electromagnetic actuators to offer a new paradigm of musical expression and exploration. After expanding on prior work with electromagnetic instrument actuation and tabletop musical interfaces, the paper explains why and how MM-RT, through its physicality and ergonomics, has been designed specifically f...

An interactive museum exhibit of a digitally augmented medieval musical instrument, the tromba marina, is presented. The tromba marina is a curious single stringed instrument with a rattling bridge, from which a trumpet-like timbre is produced. The physical instrument was constructed as a replica of one found in Musikmuseet, a musical instrument museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. The replica instru...

PURPOSE To evaluate the temporal processing of popular singers who do or do not play a musical instrument. METHODS The study population comprised 30 popular band singers. Of them, 15 play a musical instrument (G1) and 15 do them do not play a musical instrument (G2). All of them were submitted to basic audiological evaluation and temporal processing tests: test of frequency standard (TFS) and...

Musical robots provide artists and musicians with the ability to realise complex new musical ideas in real acoustic space. However, most musical robots are created with openloop control systems, many of which require time consuming calibration and do not reach the level of reliability of other electronic musical instruments such as synthesizers. This paper outlines the construction of a new rob...

First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to Mr Anssi Klapuri, who was the initiator of this research and provided guidance, advice and support of all kinds for this work. I wish to thank Professor Jaakko Astola for his advice and comments. I am grateful for the staff at the Audio Research Group and Insitute of Signal Processing for providing a stimulating working atmosphere. During th...