Only in the last decade has the musician become interested in expanding his arsenal of practice and performance tools. Previously, the prime modus operandi of the musician had been: "if you can't play the piece -practice. If you still can't play it -then practice some more!" For some this might work, but usually it is not the most prudent use of time. This philosophy can also harm the musician ...

Cochlear implants (CIs) are auditory prostheses that restore hearing via electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Compared to normal acoustic hearing, sounds transmitted through the CI are spectro-temporally degraded, causing difficulties in challenging listening tasks such as speech intelligibility in noise and perception of music. In normal hearing (NH), musicians have been shown to bett...

Automatic musical accompaniment is where a human musician is accompanied by a computer musician. The computer musician is able to produce musical accompaniment that relates musically to the human performance. The accompaniment should follow the performance using observations of the notes they are playing. This paper describes a complete and detailed construction of a score following and accompa...

Several reports have indicated a higher incidence of absolute pitch in blind than in sighted musicians. Employing a pitch memory task, we examined whether a blind absolute pitch musician would rely on different neural correlates than a group of sighted absolute pitch musicians. The blind musician showed significantly more activation of bihemispheric visual association areas, lingual gyrus, pari...

This study investigated whether musical training and bilingualism are associated with enhancements in specific components of executive function, namely, task switching and dual-task performance. Participants (n = 153) belonging to one of four groups (monolingual musician, bilingual musician, bilingual non-musician, or monolingual non-musician) were matched on age and socioeconomic status and ad...

This paper introduces jamTable, a system that enables the collaboration between users playing a standard musical instrument and users interacting with a tangible musical sequencer. In an introductory study both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from eight participants in two setup conditions: Musician-Musician and Novice-Musician pairs. By comparing the performance of participant...

This research is an initial effort in showing how a multimodal approach can improve systems for gaining insight into a musician’s practice and technique. Embedding a variety of sensors inside musical instruments and synchronously recording the sensors’ data along with audio, we gather a database of gestural information from multiple performers, then use machine-learning techniques to recognize ...