« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Paper Session 3b: Physiological and Physical Foundations of Creative Systems I

May 12 @ 9:00 am - 10:30 pm
Session Chair: Tony de Ritis

 

Paper abstracts

Amir Abbas Orouji, Ayoub Banoushi and Gilberto Bernardes: “Vibrational Analysis of Traditional Persian Kamanche Sound Box: Experimental and Computational Investigation of Structural Modifications”

The kamanche, a bowed spike fiddle central to Persian classical music, features a spherical sound box covered with stretched animal skin and is played vertically on the performer’s lap. Despite acoustic similarities to the violin, comprehensive research on kamanche acoustics remains limited. This study investigates the acoustic contribution of the sound box to resonance characteristics and tonal quality of the closed-back kamanche, the most prevalent contemporary variant. The research combines COMSOL Multiphysics vibration simulation with experimental validation through impulse response frequency measurements. Investigated modifications include upper and lower hemisphere thickness variations and sound hole area reduction. Results demonstrate that upper hemisphere changes, while preserving internal air volume, substantially affect fundamental resonance patterns, corroborating traditional luthier observations. This study also suggests that the vibration modes 4,5, and especially 7 might be good candidates for maximum contribution to the overall amplifica-
tion of the string’s resonance and the overall sound of the instrument.

Nikolaus Knop: “Ponticello: An Interactive Conducting System for Mixed Music Performance”
In composed music that combines acoustic instruments with electronic processing or fixed media, synchronizing acoustic and electronic layers remains a persistent challenge. The use of click tracks, while technically effective, significantly restricts the performers’ freedom to expressively shape musical time. This paper presents Ponticello, a system that addresses the synchronization problem by inferring the ensemble’s tempo from a video stream of the conductor in real-time. Instead of the ensemble being beholden to a fixed digital click track, the computer follows the flexible pulse indicated by the conductor, which already functions as a shared temporal reference for the human performers. Although the idea of interactive conducting systems is not new —it has been researched since the 1970s — research has largely focused on applications that simulate instrumental performances based on MIDI scores, which limits their applicability to the performance of mixed music. To support a broad range of compositional strategies for mixed music, Ponticello instead models the electronic part as a timeline of temporally extended, electronic processes whose playback tempo is continuously controlled by the conductor. The system has proven sufficiently reliable and accurate in rehearsal and concert settings across multiple conductors.
Lucas Ong, Ruby Crocker and George Fazekas: “Emotion-Based Film Music Retrieval with Handcrafted and Deep Models”

Film music powerfully conveys emotion, yet computational methods for retrieving film tracks that match a target emotional state remain underexplored. This paper presents two approaches for emotion-based film music retrieval using Valence–Arousal (V–A) representations. The models are evaluated on the FME-24 dataset, which provides time-aligned participant-annotated V–A ratings for film music excerpts. The first approach applies k-Means to handcrafted audio features, while the second uses a VaDE model with contrastive learning to align audio and V–A embeddings. Results show that both methods capture emotion-related structure, with the deep model enabling more flexible, fine-grained selection.

 

Details

Organizer

Venue