Scenario

Music making and listening are a clear example of a human activity that is above all interactive and social, two big challenges for the new communication devices and applications. To date mediated music making and listening is usually a passive, non–interactive, and non-context sensitive experience. The current electronic technologies, with all their potential for interactivity and communication, have not yet been able to support and promote this essential aspect of music making and listening. This can be considered a significant degradation of the traditional live listening and music making experience, in which the public was (and still is) able to interact in many ways with performers to modify the expressive features of a music piece.

Mobile devices are commonly used for music consumption, and more often as the sole music playback device. Recent advances in networked media and in sound and music computing enable experiencing and interactively manipulating music in countless ways. Music can be reused, distributed, and shared with practically no extra effort. As a consequence, new behavioural patterns are emerging as the modern way for people to capture, share, and re-live their experiences and personal histories. The need for an end-to-end framework enabling new creative forms of interactive music experience in context-aware mobile scenarios is increasingly evident. This means that the SAME end-to-end platform will be grounded on integrated, embodied representation for improved processing of music, gesture, and context.

SAME will address multi-user experiences of content in a mobile end-to-end platform, including various declinations of the active listening paradigms and pervasive music games. The project will start from a significantamount of research results, including those obtained in previous EU projects by the partners in this consortium, to face SAME core research challenges on end-to-end mobile music systems, on real-time expressive sound and music processing and rendering (including interactive control of 3D sound, real-time singing voice processing, sound morphing), on novel gestural interfaces (including emerging multimodal paradigms based on tangible acoustic interfaces investigated in the TAI-CHI EU project), on social networks and contextawareness.

The SAME project will face the research and development challenges involved in such emerging social and technological trends and needs. In other words, this project will try to answer questions like:
“Which will be in the next 5 years the device corresponding to the current iPod?”
“What kind of potential new markets would such new devices open up?