Month: January 2013

Title:
Multimodal mobile interaction – making the most of our users’ capabilities

Abstract:
Mobile user interfaces are heavily based on small screens and keyboards. These can be hard to operate when on the move which limits the applications and services we can use. This talk will look at the possibility of moving away from these kinds of interactions to ones more suited to mobile devices and their dynamic contexts of use where users need to be able to look where they are going, carry shopping bags and hold on to children at the same time as using their phones. Multimodal (gestural, audio and haptic) interactions provide us new ways to use our devices that can be eyes and hands free, and allow users to interact in a ‘head up’ way. These new interactions will facilitate new services, applications and devices that fit better into our daily lives and allow us to do a whole host of new things.
I will discuss some of the work we are doing on input using gestures done with fingers, wrist and head, along with work on output using  3D sound and haptic displays in applications such as for mobile devices such as text entry and navigation. I will also discuss some of the issues of social acceptability of these new interfaces; we have to be careful that the new ways we want people to use devices are socially appropriate and don’t make us feel embarrassed or awkward.

Title:
Quantal elements in musical experience

Abstract:
The aim of my talk is to present a model for understanding unit formation, what we prefer to call chunking, at short-term timescales in musical experience, typically in the du­ration range of approximately 0,5 to 5 seconds. The idea is that at these short-term timescales, chunks of sound and associated body motion are perceived and conceived holistically, hence demonstrate what may be called quantal elements in musi­cal experience. Very many salient musical features for identifying style, motion and affect, can be found at such short-term timescales (and sometimes at even shorter time­scales as suggested by Gjerdingen and Perrott 2008). A better understanding of such quan­tal elements in musical experience could be useful in the fields of music perception, music analysis, and music information retrieval, as well as in var­ious practi­cal artistic and educational contexts.