Luiz Naveda

Trabajo publicado en M. Aramaki, R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad (eds.) (2015). Music, Mind, and Embodiment. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR). Marseille: The Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics.

Musicologists and musicians tend to think that the organic features of a musical style are annotated in the musical score. However, musicians add innumerous types of variations during performance, accounting for a range of differences within the boundaries of the style itself. Tango musicians are aware of these features when they speak about the melodic phrasing during performance. In some music styles, such as jazz and samba, the systematic recurrence of rhythmic-melodic patterns became an idiosyncratic feature that supports the identification of the style itself (Benadon, 2006; Naveda et al, 2011). An expressive characteristic of melodic phrasing in tango would consist of the production of temporal recurrences in the peculiar elongation and shortening of rhythmic-melodic patterns embedded in the microstructure of the phrase.

Neste ensaio, exploramos os processos criativos e tecnologicos envolvidos no desenvolvimento do espetaculo “Embodied in varios Darmstadt’58” a partir do ponto de vista da cognicao estendida e distribuida. Embora as dimensoes de interpretacao da arte telematica ja tenham sido discutidas sob perspectivas similares, a obra “Embodied in varios Darmstadt’58" apresenta uma configuracao incomum de aberturas e aleatoriedades, complexidade e minimalismo, engenharia e arte, que permitem um aprofundamento distinto sobre as relacoes entre tecnologias, arte e cognicao. No decorrer do ensaio apresentaremos alguns conceitos norteadores no campo das teorias da mente incorporada e descreveremos parte dos processos de desenvolvimento de ferramentas computacionais utilizadas no processo de criacao. Argumentaremos que a complexidade dos conceitos criativos envolvidos do espetaculo promoveu a extensao de elementos poeticos da obra e cargas cognitivas ao dominio tecnologico das maquinas.

How can we develop an open, future-oriented, multimedia-rich, and institutionally recognised publication ecosystem for NIME practitioners and researchers? This workshop will continue previous discussions about the need for a NIME journal, and for solutions to share ideas, hardware designs, code, scores, and performances, systematically. Concerns about C19, climate change, and accessibility make these discussions urgent and demand reimagining our expectations for a publication venue. What solutions can we start implementing right away, and which goals do we have as a community? This open workshop will lay the ground for concrete experimentation in the year(s) to come.

In this essay, we explore the creative and technological processes involved in the development of the performance “Embodied in various Darmstadt’58” from the viewpoint of the extended and distributed cognition. Although the literature has discussed the telematic art from a variety of similar points of view, the project “Embodied in various Darmstadt’58” features an unusual conFiguretion of openings and randomness, complexity and minimalism, engineering and art, which allow a distinguished approach on the relationship between technology, art and cognition. In this essay, we present guiding concepts that substantiate the theories of embodied mind and describe part of development of computational tools used in the creative process. We argue that the complexity of creative concepts involved the performance had promoted the extension of poetic elements and cognitive loads to the technological domain of the machines.

The dissemination of multimedia technologies in the information societies created an interesting scenario: the unprecedented access to a diverse combination of music, image, video and other media streams raised demands for more interactive and expressive multimodal experiences. How to support the demands for richer music-movement interactions? How to translate spatiotemporal qualities of human movement into relevant features for music making and sound design? In this paper we study the realtime interaction between choreographic movement in space and music, implemented by means of a collection of tools called Topos. The tools were developed in the Pure Data platform and provide a number of feature descriptions that help to map the quality of dance gestures in space to music and other media. The features are based concepts found in the literature of cognition and dance, which improves the computational representation of dance gestures in space. The concepts and techniques presented in...

In the field of computer music, melodic based forms of vocalizations have often been used as channels to access subject’s queries and retrieve information from music databases. In this study, we look at percussive forms of vocalizations in order to retrieve rhythmic models entrained by subjects in Samba culture. By analyzing recordings of vocal percussions collected from randomly selected Brazilian subjects, we aim at comparing emergent rhythmic structures with the current knowledge about Samba music forms. The database of recordings was processed using a psychoacoustically inspired auditory model and further displayed on loudness and onset images. The analyses of emergent rhythmic patterns show intriguing similarities with the findings in previous studies in the field and put different perspectives on the use of vocal forms in music information retrieval and musicology.

The present work explores the design of multimodal interfaces that capture hand gestures and promote interactions between dance, music and wearable technologic garment. We aim at studying the design strategies used to interface music to other domains of the performance, in special, the application of wearable technologies into music performances. The project describes the development of the music and wearable interfaces, which comprise a hand interface and a mechanical actuator attached to the dancer’s dress. The performance resulted from the study is inspired in the butoh dances and attempts to add a technological poetic as music-dance-wearable interactions to the traditional dialogue between dance and music.

Trabajo publicado en M. Aramaki, R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad (eds.) (2015). Music, Mind, and Embodiment. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR). Marseille: The Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics.

Trabajo publicado en M. Aramaki, R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad (eds.) (2015). Music, Mind, and Embodiment. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR). Marseille: The Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics.

In this paper we propose an approach for the representation of dance gestures in Samba dance. This representation is based on a video analysis of body movements, carried out from the viewpoint of the musical meter. Our method provides the periods, a measure of energy and a visual representation of periodic movement in dance. The method is applied to a limited universe of Samba dances and music, which is used to illustrate the usefulness of the approach.

The connection of “groove” with low-level features in the audio signal has been mostly associated with temporal characteristics of fast metrical structures. However, the production and perception of rhythm in Afro-Brazilian contexts is often described as a result of multiple experience flows, which expands the description of rhythmical events to multiple features such as loudness, spectrum regions, metrical layers, movement and others. In this study, we analyzed how the microtiming of samba music interacts with an expanded set of musical descriptors. More specifically, we analyzed the interaction between fast timing structures with meter, intensity and spectral distribution within the auditory domain. The methodology for feature detection was supported by a psychoacoustically based auditory model, which provided the low-level descriptors for a database of 106 samba music excerpts. A cluster analysis technique was used to provide an overview of emergent microtiming models present in ...

The process of retrieving meaningful information from rhythmic responses to music imposes several methodological challenges. For one side, the indivisible connection between body actions and the musical action confines the musical phenomenon in a closed cycle of action and perception. For another side, attempts to examine internalized rhythm descriptions always require body movements, which are the natural medium for musical actions. In this study, we propose strategies that are capable of retrieving emergent rhythmic and metrical structures encoded in free movements, which are less constrained by experimental designs and less dependent on previous assumptions. The first technique processes zero-crossing events across velocity patterns in order to estimate the changes of directions across metric levels. The second technique uses local accumulation of instantaneous velocity in order to describe the profiles of metric engagement abstracted from the morphology of the movement trajector...

From all hidden assumptions behind the models of musical meter and rhythm, the notion that all individuals understand the periodic structure of music in the same way might be the most intractable and risky one. A number of evidences show that musical cultures differ in a number of aspects including cognitive priorities, musical function and relationships between music, movement and dance. From the methodological point of view, it is very difficult to describe the understanding of rhythm structures: tapping methods are limiting and biased, surveys can be too subjective and analyses of performances are ambiguous and multivariate. From the point of view of culture, cultural preferences may be subtle and comparisons between contrasting cultures might be unreliable. In this study we realize cross-cultural comparisons between free movement responses to musical cultures of samba and chacarera music, executed by Brazilian and Argentinian acculturated subjects. We use methods that track the ...

Dance is an expressive form of human motion characterized by strong non-verbal modes of expression, diver-sity of expressive forms and rich cross-modal interactions with music and the environment. Attempts to represent and synthe-size dance have been focusing on its ...

Neste ensaio, exploramos os processos criativos e tecnológicos envolvidos no desenvolvimento do espetáculo Embodied in varios Darmstadt 58 como se fossem partes de uma forma de cognição estendida e distribuída. Embora as dimensões de interpretação da arte telemática já tenham sido discutidas sob pontos de vista similares, a obra Embodied in varios Darmstadt 58 apresenta uma configuração incomum de aberturas e aleatoriedades, complexidade e minimalismo, engenharia e arte, que permitem um aprofundamento distinto sobre as relações entre tecnologias, arte e cognição. No decorrer do ensaio apresentaremos alguns conceitos norteadores no campo das teorias da mente incorporada e descreveremos parte dos processos de desenvolvimento de ferramentas computacionais utilizadas no processo de criação. Argumentaremos que a complexidade dos conceitos criativos envolvidos do espetáculo promoveu a extensão de elementos poéticos da obra através de extensões de demandas criativas e cargas cognitivas ao domínio tecnológico das máquinas.

In this essay, we explore the creative and technological processes involved in the development of the performance " Embodied in various Darmstadt'58 " from the viewpoint of the extended and distributed cognition. Although the literature has discussed the telematic art from a variety of similar points of view, the project " Embodied in various Darmstadt'58 " features an unusual conFiguretion of openings and randomness, complexity and minimalism, engineering and art, which allow a distinguished approach on the relationship between technology, art and cognition. In this essay, we present guiding concepts that substantiate the theories of embodied mind and describe part of development of computational tools used in the creative process. We argue that the complexity of creative concepts involved the performance had promoted the extension of poetic elements and cognitive loads to the technological domain of the machines.

Musical interpretation demands specific skills that are dependent on the technology of musical instruments.
The theories of the mind, concepts of extended cognition and enactive knowledge have suggested that both
the musical instrument and these skills are essential for music cognition. In this paper, we study how
differences in the body of the musical instrument and associations between keys and musical notes alter the
interpretation on the accordion. The experiments used a musical touch interface and simple musical tasks.
17 professional musicians, accordion players, pianists and guitarists participated in the study. The results
show that, for the same task, the impact of changes in the body of the instrument and associations between
keys and notes are higher in the accomplishment of the performance of accordionists than of other
musicians. The results suggest that the cognitive domain for the instrument is not limited to a simple list of
technical operations. Cognition of musical performance involves a thorough knowledge of interdependent
relationships in the interaction with the musical intention, the body of the musician, instrument and
strategies of motor relearning.

Music and dance practices have always attracted the interest of scholars of the “two cultures”, hu-manities and sciences. While researchers in the cultural studies seem to strive to translate dance and music phenomena to texts, computer scientists make a parallel effort to categorize and model patterns of sounds and choreography according to mathematical and physical definitions. In this essay I suggest that the impact of the theories of embodiment in both cultures forced an approximation that produces new representations of knowledge flowing from sciences to humanities and art, without clear borders. In the cultural studies, the demands for narratives that go beyond textual descriptions created a theories that attempt to re-write dance and music phenomena according to its own symbolic elements. In the sciences, the efforts to understand human motor and musical behaviour, fostered the application of non-linear methods and a strong criticism on Cartesian metrics and traditional sta-tistics that provided new multimedia and symbolic representations for dance and music. These new forms of representations respond to the problems envisaged in both fields by making use of infor-mation technologies, visualization and human-machine interaction, which disrupt the linear narra-tive of textual representation while keeping the consistence with the objective structure of the data. We discuss the impact of these tendencies in the related fields and the perspectives of multidiscipli-nary research, specialization and knowledge.

The dissemination of multimedia technologies in the information societies created an interesting scenario: the unprecedented access to a diverse combination of music, image, video and other media streams raised demands for more interactive and expressive multimodal experiences. How to support the demands for richer music-movement interactions? How to translate spatiotemporal qualities of hu man movement into relevant features for music making and sound design? In this paper we study the realtime interaction between choreographic movement in space and music, implemented by means of a collection of tools called To- pos. The tools were developed in the Pure Data platform and provide a number of feature descriptions that help to map the quality of dance gestures in space to music and other media. The features are based concepts found in the literature of cognition and dance, which improves the computational representation of dance gestures in space. The concepts and techniques presented in the study introduce new problems and new possibilities for multimedia applications involving dance and music interaction.

THE GOAL OF THE PRESENT STUDY IS TO GAIN BETTER
insight into how dancers establish, through dancing, a spatiotemporal reference frame in synchrony with musi- cal cues. With the aim of achieving this, repetitive dance patterns of samba and Charleston were recorded using a three-dimensional motion capture system. Geometric patterns then were extracted from each joint of the dancer’s body. The method uses a body-centered refer- ence frame and decomposes the movement into non- orthogonal periodicities that match periods of the musical meter. Musical cues (such as meter and loud- ness) as well as action-based cues (such as velocity) can be projected onto the patterns, thus providing spa- tiotemporal reference frames, or ‘basic gestures,’ for action-perception couplings. Conceptually speaking, the spatiotemporal reference frames control minimum effort points in action-perception couplings. They reside as memory patterns in the mental and/or motor domains, ready to be dynamically transformed in dance movements. The present study raises a number of hypotheses related to spatial cognition that may serve as guiding principles for future dance/music studies.

In this study, we focus on the interaction between microtiming patterns and sev- eral musical properties: intensity, meter and spectral characteristics. The data-set of 106 musical audio excerpts is processed by means of an auditory model and then divided into several spectral regions and metric levels. The resulting segments are described in terms of their musical properties, over which patterns of peak positions and their intensities are sought. A clustering algorithm is used to systematize the process of pattern detection. The results confirm previously reported anticipations of the third and fourth semiquavers in a beat. We also argue that these patterns of microtiming deviations interact with different profiles of intensities that change according to the metrical structure and spectral characteristics. In particular, we suggest two new findings: (i) a small delay of microtiming positions at the lower end of the spectrum on the first semiquaver of each beat and (ii) systematic forms of accelerando and ritardando at a microtiming level covering 2-beats and 4-beats phrases. The results demonstrate the importance of multidimensional interactions with timing aspects of music. However, more research is needed in order to find proper representations for rhythm and microtiming aspects in such contexts.

How are dancers and musicians dealing with style? How do they perform music and dance styles that are so
associated with their culture, community and time? Music and dance cultures evolved from entangled transformation
vectors into styles that mark a culture. The styles reflect gender roles, socio-economic (and geographic)
differences, but they also reflect aspects of the bodies that express the movements, and aspects of
the musical structures that support their functioning in the social context. Style is idiomatic. In this paper we
study idiomatic expressions of style by mapping them into a universe of Afro-Brazilian dances and music
styles. We collected the trajectories of 30 samba dances using motion-tracking technologies and analyzed
the periodic structure of the gesture’ trajectories. The information from the shape of the gesture was used to
trace comparisons and generate a dissimilarity map. From this map we used data visualization methods
(MDS) in order to test how the classes of gender, origin and musical metrical structure were discriminated.
The results show relevant traces of idiomatic differences in different degrees of significance. We discuss hypotheses
for the emergence of these traces and how the interaction between music and dance could support
cues of dance and music styles.

Music and dance cannot be easily dissociated in the culture of Afro-Brazilian samba. Together, these experiences convey a sort of unified gesture, or cross-modal gesture, which is acquired and performed through sound, movement and other modalities. In this study, we investigate how this gesture is modeled through sound and movement and how the interdependence between these modalities has influenced samba music and samba dances.

Starting from commercial audio excerpts and field recordings, we demonstrated that samba is characterized by particular micro-timing deviations, as well as an unclear configuration of periodicities in the metrical structure of music. From motion capture and video recordings of dance, we developed methods that allow the description of gestures in terms of shapes and spatiotemporal reference frames. The applications of these methods to data-sets of motion capture recordings of samba dances show that the musical meter is indeed strongly represented in the gestures and in the dance space. In addition, we argue that the metric signature of samba music may actually be dependent on the metric structure of dance.

The research shows that the sounding structure of samba cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the role of the human body and the structure of dances. However, characteristic models of samba dances and music are beyond invariant properties of repetitive gestures or rhythm motives. More research is needed in order better understand the involvement of cultural factors in the structure of dances and music forms.