Context-awareness and active listening

The project will have a strong focus on context-awareness as a key property of mobile music applications and services. It is by definition that the mobile music device is always with the user, and therefore it is only natural to expect the device to react to changes in context as appropriate. Context is understood as everything that may affect the music listening experience in different situations, and the most relevant contextual information includes identity (who), location (where), time (when), and activity (what). The context is changing constantly in a mobile music listening experience, in contrast to traditional home or concert listening. Current mobile music devices can be endowed of context awareness thanks to the sufficiently powerful processing capabilities of platforms found in smartphones. The definition of context-aware music application and service concepts has only started, and the project will undergo a thorough concepting phase, where potential applications and end-to-end services are considered. The project will create a reference implementation of new kinds of personalized, context-aware music applications and services. The project will integrates context-awareness mobile music features with multimodal, highlevel and expressive/emotional interaction with music and related multimedia content: the user will be empowered to influence, interact, shape, and mould the listened content, by intervening actively in the experience. In this novel scenario, active listening is the paradigm to start to create new applications for both individual users and user communities. The user will be able to perform a virtual navigation in the orchestra of a music piece she is listening, therefore changing the perspective and the 3D audio rendering of the piece (interactive re-mixing); the user will be able to enter into the music piece, to mould the voice of a famous singer, or playing a solo or duet using a virtual musical instrument enabled by the natural and multimodal interfaces available thru her mobile. User’s emotional state and expressive gesture will be at the centre of these scenarios.