Anna Xambo

El diseño gráfico y multimedia están en claro proceso de desarrollo. En el mercado se encuentra una gran variedad de aplicaciones distintas para satisfacer las necesidades de cada usuario.
El Manual Imprescindible de Herramientas de diseño digital ofrece la posibilidad de adquirir conocimientos de diseño gráfico y diseño multimedia mediante el uso del software más avanzado.
El libro se divide en dos grandes bloques. El primero, dedicado al diseño gráfico, introduce conceptos sobre el diseño vectorial con FreeHand, el retoque fotográfico con Photoshop y la optimización de gráficos estáticos para la Web de la mano de Fireworks. El segundo bloque, centrado en el diseño multimedia, introduce elementos como la edición de audio digital con el programa Sonic Foundry Sound Forge, la edición de imágenes en movimiento con Premiere y la creación de animaciones para la Web con Flash.
Dado su carácter práctico, el texto contiene numerosos ejercicios, tratados de forma técnica y creativa. El manual es recomendable no sólo porque se aprenden los conceptos básicos de seis programas líderes en el mercado del diseño gráfico y multimedia, sino además porque se exponen conceptos fundamentales del diseño, el conocimiento de los cuales permite enfrentarse con soltura a proyectos creativos.

The recent increase in the accessibility and size of personal and crowdsourced digital sound collections brought about a valuable resource for music creation. Finding and retrieving relevant sounds in performance leads to challenges that can be approached using music information retrieval (MIR). In this paper, we explore the use of MIR to retrieve and repurpose sounds in musical live coding. We present a live coding system built on SuperCollider enabling the use of audio content from online Creative Commons (CC) sound databases such as Freesound or personal sound databases. The novelty of our approach lies in exploiting high-level MIR methods (e.g., query by pitch or rhythmic cues) using live coding techniques applied to sounds. We demonstrate its potential through the reflection of an illustrative case study and the feedback from four expert users. The users tried the system with either a personal database or a crowdsourced database and reported its potential in facilitating tailorability of the tool to their own creative workflows.

In recent years, there has been an increase in awareness of the underrepresentation of women in the sound and music computing fields. The New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference is not an exception, with a number of open questions remaining around the issue. In the present paper, we study the presence and evolution over time of women authors in NIME since the beginning of the conference in 2001 until 2017. We discuss the results of such a gender imbalance and potential solutions by summarizing the actions taken by a number of worldwide initiatives that have put an effort into making women's work visible in our field, with a particular emphasis on Women in Music Tech (WiMT), a student-led organization that aims to encourage more women to join music technology, as a case study. We conclude with a hope for an improvement in the representation of women in NIME by presenting WiNIME, a public online database that details who are the women authors in NIME.

In this paper we examine methodological innovation in the social sciences through a focus on researching the body in digital environments. There are two strands to our argument as to why this is a useful site to explore methodological innovation in the social sciences. First, researching the body in digital environments places new methodological demands on social science. Second, as an area of interest at the intersection of the social sciences and the arts, it provides a focus for exploring how social science innovation can be informed by engagement with the arts, in this instance how the arts work with the body in digital environments and take up social science ideas in novel ways. We argue that social science engagement with the arts and the relatively unmapped terrain of the body in digital environments has the potential to open up spaces for innovative social science questions and methods: spaces, questions and methods that have potential for more general social science methodological innovation. We draw on the  ndings of the Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (MIDAS) project a multi-site ethnography of the research ecologies of the social sciences and the arts related to the body in digital environments. We propose a continuum of methodological innovation that attends to how methods are moved across research contexts and disciplines, in this instance the social sciences and the digital arts. We illustrate and discuss the innovative potential of expanding and re-situating methods across the social sciences and the arts, the transfer of methods and concepts across disciplinary borders and the interdisciplinary generation of new methods. We discuss the catalysts and challenges for social science methodological innovation in relation to the digital and the arts, with attention to how the social sciences might engage with the arts towards innovative research.

Collaborative music live coding (CMLC) approaches the music improvisation practice of live coding in collaboration. In network music, co-located and remote interactions are possible, and communication is typically supported by the use of a chat window. However, paying attention to simultaneous multi-user actions, such as chat texts and code, can be demanding to follow. In this paper we explore co-located and remote CMLC using the live coding environment and pedagogical tool EarSketch. In particular, we examine the mechanism of turn-taking and the use of a small set of semantic hashtags in online chatting by using an autoethnographic approach of duo and trio live coding. This approach is inspired by (1) the practice of pair programming, a team-based strategy to efficiently solving computational problems; (2) the language used in short messaging service (SMS) texting and social media. The results from an online survey with six practitioners in live coding and collaboration complements the autoethnographic findings and point to education as the most suitable domain for this approach to CMLC. We conclude discussing the challenges and opportunities of turn-taking and the use of semantic hashtags focusing on educational settings.

This performance invites the audience to participate in an immersive experience using their mobile devices. The aim is at capturing their actions on a digital painting inspired by Jackson Pollock's action painting technique. The audience is connected to a wireless network and a Web Audio application that recognizes a number of gestures through the mobile accelerometer sensor, which trigger different sounds. Gestures will be recognized and mapped to a digital canvas. A set of loudspeakers will complement the audience's actions with ambient sounds. The performance explores audio spatialization using both loudspeakers and mobile phone speakers, that combined with the digital painting provides an immersive audiovisual experience. The final digital canvas will be available online as a memory of the performance.

Co-located collaborative live coding is a potential approach to network music and to the music improvisation practice known as live coding. A common strategy to support communication between live coders and the audience is the use of a chat window. However , paying attention to simultaneous multiuser actions, such as chat texts and code, can be too demanding to follow. In this paper, we explore collaborative music live coding (CMLC) using the live coding environment and pedagogical tool EarSketch. In particular, we examine the use of turn-taking and a customized chat window inspired by the practice of pair programming, a team-based strategy to efficiently solving computational problems. Our approach to CMLC also aims at facilitating the understanding of this practice to the audience. We conclude discussing the benefits of this approach in both performance and educational settings.

Co-creation between a human agent (HA) and a virtual agent (VA) is an approach to collaboration that has been explored in different creative domains, particulary in computer music. With a few exceptions, there is little research on the use of virtual agents in collaborative music live coding (CMLC), a network music improvi-sational practice. This paper considers the benefits of CMLC both in education and in performance involving human agents, with or without virtual agents. We reflect on our previous work on, and lessons learned from, two studies of collaboration and live coding using EarS-ketch, an educational online platform for learning music via code based on audio clips. We speculate future scenarios , in particular, we envision a virtual agent that can help students to improve their programming and musical skills, and can help musicians to exploit computational creativity applied to music.

This article presents a video-based field study of the Reactable, a tabletop tangible user interface (TUI) for music performance, in a hands-on science centre. The goal was to investigate visitors’ social interactions in a public setting. We describe liminality and cross-group interaction, both synchronous with fluid transitions and overlaps in use between groups and asynchronous. Our findings indicate the importance of: (i) facilitating smooth transitions and overlaps between groups and (ii) supporting not only synchronous but also asynchronous group interaction. We discuss the lessons learned on how best to enable liminal situations in the design of interactive tabletops and TUIs for social interaction and particularly collaborative tangible music in public museum settings.

Presentation of a video-based field study describing cross-group interaction.

Description of exemplar vignettes of video for illustrating liminal situations in social interaction.

Discussion of the nature of different levels of cross-group interaction and their relevance for social interaction and collaboration.

Lessons learned in how best to enable liminal situations in the design of collaborative tangible user interfaces for promoting social interaction and collaboration.

An approach to teaching computer science (CS) in high-schools is using EarSketch, a free online tool for teaching CS concepts while making music. In this demonstration we present the potential of teaching music information retrieval (MIR) concepts using EarSketch. The aim is twofold: to discuss the benefits of introducing MIR concepts in the classroom and to shed light on how MIR concepts can be gently introduced in a CS curriculum. We conclude by identifying the advantages of teaching MIR in the classroom and pointing to future directions for research.

This paper focuses on the potential of collaborative live coding in educational settings. In particular, it draws from our experience with EarSketch, a free online platform for algorithmic composition and computational music remixing that allows students to learn Computer Science Principles (CSP) by making music using either Python or JavaScript. We argue that collaborative live coding is a promising approach to learning CSP through computer music in the classroom. We draw on interviews with teachers and observations in schools. We discuss how collaboration can be better supported in educational settings when learning CSP using EarSketch, and the challenges and potential for learning music and code using a computer-supported collaborative environment.

— The EarSketch computer science learning environment and curriculum (http://earsketch.gatech.edu) seeks to increase and broaden participation in computing using a STEAM (STEM + Arts) approach. EarSketch creates an authentic learning environment in that it is both personally meaningful and industry relevant in terms of its STEM component (computing) and its artistic domain (music remixing). Students learn to code in JavaScript or Python, tackling learning objectives in the Computer Science Principles curricular framework as they simultaneously learn core concepts in music technology. They create music through code by uploading their own audio content or remixing loops in popular genres created by music industry veterans. No prior experience in music or computer science is required. EarSketch is entirely browser-based and free.

The amount of digital music has grown unprecedentedly during the last years and requires the development of effective methods for search and retrieval. In particular, content-based preference elicitation for music recommendation is a challenging problem that is effectively addressed in this paper. We present a system which automatically generates recommendations and visualizes a user's musical preferences, given her/his accounts on popular online music services. Using these services, the system retrieves a set of tracks preferred by a user, and further computes a semantic description of musical preferences based on raw audio information. For the audio analysis we used the capabilities of the Canoris API. Thereafter, the system generates music recommendations, using a semantic music similarity measure, and a user's preference visualization, mapping semantic descriptors to visual elements.

The music we like (i.e. our musical preferences) encodes and communicates key information about ourselves. Depicting such preferences in a condensed and easily understandable way is very appealing, especially considering the current trends in social network communication. In this paper we propose a method to automatically generate, given a provided set of preferred music tracks, an iconic representation of a user's musical preferences - the Musical Avatar. Starting from the raw audio signal we first compute over 60 low-level audio features. Then, by applying pattern recognition methods, we infer a set of semantic descriptors for each track in the collection. Next, we summarize these track-level semantic descriptors, obtaining a user profile. Finally, we map this collection-wise description to the visual domain by creating a humanoid cartoony character that represents the user's musical preferences. We performed a proof-of-concept evaluation of the proposed method on 11 subjects with promising results. The analysis of the users' evaluations shows a clear preference for avatars generated by the proposed semantic descriptors over avatars derived from neutral or randomly generated values. We also found a general agreement on the representativeness of the users' musical preferences via the proposed visualization strategy.

A range of systems exist for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces. Some of them have been highly successful, but currently there is no systematic way of designing them, to maximise collaboration for a particular user group. We are particularly interested in systems that will engage novices and experts. We designed a simple application in an initial attempt to clearly analyse some of the issues. Our application allows groups of users to express themselves in collaborative music making using pre-composed materials. User studies were video recorded and analysed using two techniques derived from Grounded Theory and Content Analysis. A questionnaire was also conducted and evaluated. Findings suggest that the application affords engaging interaction. Enhancements for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces are discussed. Finally, future work on the prototype is proposed to maximise engagement.

We present an audio waveform editor that can be operated in real time through a tabletop interface. The system combines multi-touch and tangible interaction techniques in order to implement the metaphor of a toolkit that allows direct manipulation of a sound sample. The resulting instrument is well suited for live performance based on evolving loops.