Active and personalized experience of sound and music content

With active experience and active listening we mean a novel approach to music listening, where listeners are enabled (interactively and in real-time) to access, retrieve, and operate on music content, including the possibility to modify and mould such content. Active listening is the basic concept for a novel generation of interactive music systems, which are particularly addressed to the general users. A key focus is on content personalization and context awareness in the framework of mobile music applications. This paper discusses the research challenges that need to be faced for developing systems and devices for active listening in shared, distributed, and social collaborative environments. It also illustrates a first concrete application demonstrated in a multimodal interactive dance/music installation ldquoMappe per Affetti Errantirdquo, that we presented at our site in Casa Paganini, Genova, Italy, in the framework of ldquoFestival delta Scienzardquo, an international science exhibit held in October November 2007. The work here described includes some novel improvements emerging from this public testing. Research on active listening is carried out in the EU-ICT Project SAME (Sound and Music for Everyone, Everyday, Everywhere, Every Way, www.sameproject.eu).