Sam Ferguson | University of Technology Sydney (original) (raw)
Papers by Sam Ferguson
International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval
In most Music Emotion Recognition (MER) tasks, researchers tend to use supervised learning models... more In most Music Emotion Recognition (MER) tasks, researchers tend to use supervised learning models based on music features and corresponding annotation. However, few researchers have considered applying unsupervised learning approaches to labeled data except for feature representation. In this paper, we propose a segment-based two-stage model combining unsupervised learning and supervised learning. In the first stage, we split each music excerpt into contiguous segments and then utilize an autoencoder to generate segment-level feature representation. In the second stage, we feed these time-series music segments to a bidirectional long short-term memory deep learning model to achieve the final music emotion classification. Compared with the whole music excerpts, segments as model inputs could be the proper granularity for model training and augment the scale of training samples to reduce the risk of overfitting during deep learning. Apart from that, we also apply frequency and time ma...
With the rise of ubiquitous computing, comes new possibilities for experiencing audio, visual and... more With the rise of ubiquitous computing, comes new possibilities for experiencing audio, visual and tactile media in distributed and situated forms, disrupting modes of media experience that have been relatively stable for decades. We present the Distributed Interactive Audio Devices (DIADs) project, a set of experimental interventions to explore future ubiquitous computing design spaces in which electronic sound is presented as distributed, interactive and portable. The DIAD system is intended for creative sound and music performance and interaction, yet it does not conform to traditional concepts of musical performance, suggesting instead a fusion of music performance and other forms of collaborative digital interaction. We describe the thinking behind the project, the state of the DIAD system’s technical development, and our experiences working with userinteraction in lab-based and public performance scenarios.
In this paper we discuss the results of a workshop study for the HappyBrackets system – a develop... more In this paper we discuss the results of a workshop study for the HappyBrackets system – a development framework for creatively coding multi-device musical performances, sound installations and interactive media artworks – in which new users using the system are invited to create new multidevice music compositions in a rapid creative and collaborative hacking session. We consider the types of works made, the problems encountered and the methods used, including how some of the new features we have added to the system support exploratory creative search. We develop our observations into design principles that we speculate will better support more rapid creative exploration of multi-device creative musical compositions.
We describe a project in which a game of lawn bowls was recreated using Distributed Interactive A... more We describe a project in which a game of lawn bowls was recreated using Distributed Interactive Audio Devices (DIADs), to create an interactive musical experience in the form of a game. This paper details the design of the underlying digital music system, some of the compositional and design considerations, and the technical challenges involved. We discuss future directions for our system and compositional method.
![Research paper thumbnail of Strategies to Facilitate Rapid Creative Development with Multiple Networked Devices Using [ANON1]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/91890431/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](We present an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs to remote networ... more We present an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs to remote networked devices. It is designed to support efficient creative exploratory search in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), where one or more devices must be configured, programmed and interact over a network, with applications in digital musical instruments, networked music performance and other digital experiences. Users can easily monitor and hack what multiple devices are doing on the fly, enhancing their ability to perform ``exploratory search'' in a creative workflow. We present two creative case studies using the system: the creation of a dance performance and the creation of a distributed musical installation. Analysing different activities within the production process, with a particular focus on the trade-off between more creative exploratory tasks and more standard configuring and problem-solving tasks, we show how the system supports creative exploratory search for m...
Organised Sound, 2021
In this article we discuss our practice-based research into effective architectures and creative ... more In this article we discuss our practice-based research into effective architectures and creative workflows for creatively coding massive multidevice light and sound installation artworks. We discuss the challenges of working with networked multidevice systems and illustrate these challenges with examples of the type of content that one may wish to display on these systems. We then consider how the structuring of a creative framework can strongly influence how an artist approaches the creation of such work, eases the process of creative search and discovery and reduces the time cost and risk of solving technical problems of architecture design. We take a design perspective on how to make effective creativity support tools and also consider a holistic perspective on creative practice that attempts to satisfy creative ideals grounded in the reality of practice.
2020 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Sustainable Computing & Communications, Social Computing & Networking (ISPA/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom), 2020
Much research has sought to recognize and retrieve music on the basis of emotion labels. These la... more Much research has sought to recognize and retrieve music on the basis of emotion labels. These labels are usually obtained from either subjective test or social tags. Researchers use social tags usually either by grouping tags to emotion categories or clusters directly, or by mapping tags to dimensional quadrants simply. Few research work have undertaken semantic analysis on social tags for projecting them into a dimensional emotion space, especially based on recent neural word embedding techniques using large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective solution to analyse music tag information and represent them in a 2-dimension emotion plane without limiting the corpus to contain only emotion terms. In our solution, we apply neural word embedding methods for tag representation, including Skip-gram, Continuous Bag-Of-Words (CBOW) and Global Vectors (GloVe). In our experiment, we compare these methods with traditional Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model based on Procrustes Analysis evaluation metrics. The results shows that neural tag embedding methods outperform LSA and represent tags with high approximations with classic circumplex emotion definitions.
As an important computer vision task, 3d human pose estimation in a multi-camera, multi-person se... more As an important computer vision task, 3d human pose estimation in a multi-camera, multi-person setting has received widespread attention and many interesting applications have been derived from it. Traditional approaches use a 3d pictorial structure model to handle this task. However, these models suffer from high computation costs and result in low accuracy in joint detection. Recently, especially since the introduction of Deep Neural Networks, one popular approach is to build a pipeline that involves three separate steps: (1) 2d skeleton detection in each camera view, (2) identification of matched 2d skeletons and (3) estimation of the 3d poses. Many existing works operate by feeding the 2d images and camera parameters through the three modules in a cascade fashion. However, all three operations can be highly correlated. For example, the 3d generation results may affect the results of detection in step 1, as does the matching algorithm in step 2. To address this phenomenon, we pro...
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 2017
This workshop will introduce creative coding audio for the Raspberry Pi, using the 'beads'... more This workshop will introduce creative coding audio for the Raspberry Pi, using the 'beads' platform for audio programming, and the 'HappyBrackets' platform for inter-device communication and sensor data acquisition. We will demonstrate methods to allow each self-contained battery-powered device to acquire sensor data about its surroundings and the way it is being interacted with, as well as methods for designing systems where groups of these devices wirelessly communicate their state, allowing new interaction possibilities and approaches.
Enterprise IT (EIT) governance has become the primary approach in leveraging the IT function to a... more Enterprise IT (EIT) governance has become the primary approach in leveraging the IT function to achieve business objectives. We found in previously published work that decision making is the core of EIT governance. We collected quantitative data from professionals on decision making in Agile Software Development (ASD) projects, which we analyzed using Spearman's Ranked Correlation Coefficient. Decision-making clarity in implementation and decisionmaking distribution in the organization layers positively impact ASD project success. However, our finding that tailoring the decision-making process does not impact ASD project success was most surprising. We conclude that the impact of decision-making factors in an ASD project's success needs to be explored more deeply.
We present HappyBrackets, an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs t... more We present HappyBrackets, an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs to remote networked devices. It is designed to support efficient creative exploratory search in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), where one or more devices must be configured, programmed and interact over a network, with applications in digital musical instruments, networked music performance and other digital experiences. Users can easily monitor and hack what multiple devices are doing on the fly, enhancing their ability to perform “exploratory search” in a creative workflow. We present two creative case studies using the system: the creation of a dance performance and the creation of a distributed musical installation. Analysing different activities within the production process, with a particular focus on the trade-off between more creative exploratory tasks and more standard configuring and problem-solving tasks, we show how the system supports creative exploratory search ...
Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2020
The project investigates how interactions with complex (biologically inspired swarming) behaviors... more The project investigates how interactions with complex (biologically inspired swarming) behaviors of multiple robots are understood by human participants within a performative and dramaturgical system. Nonanthropomorphic robots in the form of roller skates are used in innovative ways by Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
This paper describes the sound design for Bloom, a light and sound installation made up of 1000 d... more This paper describes the sound design for Bloom, a light and sound installation made up of 1000 distributed independent audio-visual pixel devices, each with RGB LEDs, Wifi, Accelerometer, GPS sensor, and sound hardware. These types of systems have been explored previously, but only a few systems have exceeded 30-50 devices and very few have included sound capability, and therefore the sound design possibilities for large systems of distributed audio devices are not well understood. In this article we describe the hardware and software implementation of sound synthesis for this system, and the implications for design of media for this context.
Computer Music Journal, 2020
This article introduces an open-source Java-based programming environment for creative coding of ... more This article introduces an open-source Java-based programming environment for creative coding of agglomerative systems using Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies. Our software originally focused on digital signal processing of audio—including synthesis, sampling, granular sample playback, and a suite of basic effects—but composers now use it to interface with sensors and peripherals through general-purpose input/output and external networked systems. This article examines and addresses the strategies required to integrate novel embedded musical interfaces and creative coding paradigms through an IoT infrastructure. These include: the use of advanced tooling features of a professional integrated development environment as a composition or performance interface rather than just as a compiler; techniques to create media works using features such as autodetection of sensors; seamless and serverless communication among devices on the network; and uploading, updating, and running of new ...
Multimedia Systems, 2020
This research aims to assist users to seek information efficiently while interacting with speech-... more This research aims to assist users to seek information efficiently while interacting with speech-based information, particularly in multimedia delivery, and reports on an experiment that tested two speech-based designs for communicating multiple speech-based information streams efficiently. In this experiment, a high-rate playback design and a concurrent playback design are investigated. In the high-rate playback design, two speech-based information streams were communicated by doubling the normal playback-rate, and in the concurrent playback design, two speech-based information streams were played concurrently. Comprehension of content in both the designs was also compared with the benchmark set from regular baseline condition. The results showed that the users' comprehension regarding the main information dropped significantly in the high-rate playback and the concurrent playback designs compared to the baseline condition. However, in answering the questions set from the detailed information, the comprehension was not significantly different in all three designs. It is expected that such equeryfficient communication methods may increase productivity by providing information efficiently while interacting with an interactive multimedia system.
Leonardo, 2018
This paper proposes the term "media multiplicities" to describe contemporary media artworks that ... more This paper proposes the term "media multiplicities" to describe contemporary media artworks that create multiples of "internet of things" devices. It discusses the properties that distinguish media multiplicities from other forms of media artwork, provides parameters for categorizing media multiplicities, and discusses aesthetic and creative factors in the production of media multiplicities.
PLOS ONE
Creativity can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century. It provide... more Creativity can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century. It provides us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our complex and fast-changing world. The question as to what facilitates creative cognitionthe ability to come up with creative ideas, problem solutions and products-is as old as the human sciences, and various means to enhance creative cognition have been studied. Despite earlier scientific studies demonstrating a beneficial effect of music on cognition, the effect of music listening on creative cognition has remained largely unexplored. The current study experimentally tests whether listening to specific types of music (four classical music excerpts systematically varying on valance and arousal), as compared to a silence control condition, facilitates divergent and convergent creativity. Creativity was higher for participants who listened to 'happy music' (i.e., classical music high on arousal and positive mood) while performing the divergent creativity task, than for participants who performed the task in silence. No effect of music was found for convergent creativity. In addition to the scientific contribution, the current findings may have important practical implications. Music listening can be easily integrated into daily life and may provide an innovative means to facilitate creative cognition in an efficient way in various scientific, educational and organizational settings when creative thinking is needed.
Sam Ferguson Empirical Musicology Group University of New South Wales Sydney, 2052 +61-2-9385 680... more Sam Ferguson Empirical Musicology Group University of New South Wales Sydney, 2052 +61-2-9385 6808, Australia Samuel.Ferguson@unsw.edu.au ... Emery Schubert Empirical Musicology Group University of New South Wales Sydney, 2052 +61-2-9385 6808, Australia ...
This paper describes the interface design of our AeSon (Aesthetic Sonification) Toolkit motivated... more This paper describes the interface design of our AeSon (Aesthetic Sonification) Toolkit motivated by user-centred customisation of the aesthetic representation and scope of the data. The interface design is developed from 3 premises that distinguish our approach from more ubiquitous sonification methodologies. Firstly, we prioritise interaction both from the perspective of changing scale, scope and presentation of the data and the user's ability to reconfigure spatial panning, modality, pitch distribution, critical thresholds and granularity of data examined. The user, for the majority of parameters, determines their own listening experience for real-time data sonification, even to the extent that the interface can be used for live data-driven performance, as well as traditional information analysis and examination. Secondly, we have explored the theories of Tufte, Fry and other visualization and information design experts to find ways in which principles that are successful in ...
International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval
In most Music Emotion Recognition (MER) tasks, researchers tend to use supervised learning models... more In most Music Emotion Recognition (MER) tasks, researchers tend to use supervised learning models based on music features and corresponding annotation. However, few researchers have considered applying unsupervised learning approaches to labeled data except for feature representation. In this paper, we propose a segment-based two-stage model combining unsupervised learning and supervised learning. In the first stage, we split each music excerpt into contiguous segments and then utilize an autoencoder to generate segment-level feature representation. In the second stage, we feed these time-series music segments to a bidirectional long short-term memory deep learning model to achieve the final music emotion classification. Compared with the whole music excerpts, segments as model inputs could be the proper granularity for model training and augment the scale of training samples to reduce the risk of overfitting during deep learning. Apart from that, we also apply frequency and time ma...
With the rise of ubiquitous computing, comes new possibilities for experiencing audio, visual and... more With the rise of ubiquitous computing, comes new possibilities for experiencing audio, visual and tactile media in distributed and situated forms, disrupting modes of media experience that have been relatively stable for decades. We present the Distributed Interactive Audio Devices (DIADs) project, a set of experimental interventions to explore future ubiquitous computing design spaces in which electronic sound is presented as distributed, interactive and portable. The DIAD system is intended for creative sound and music performance and interaction, yet it does not conform to traditional concepts of musical performance, suggesting instead a fusion of music performance and other forms of collaborative digital interaction. We describe the thinking behind the project, the state of the DIAD system’s technical development, and our experiences working with userinteraction in lab-based and public performance scenarios.
In this paper we discuss the results of a workshop study for the HappyBrackets system – a develop... more In this paper we discuss the results of a workshop study for the HappyBrackets system – a development framework for creatively coding multi-device musical performances, sound installations and interactive media artworks – in which new users using the system are invited to create new multidevice music compositions in a rapid creative and collaborative hacking session. We consider the types of works made, the problems encountered and the methods used, including how some of the new features we have added to the system support exploratory creative search. We develop our observations into design principles that we speculate will better support more rapid creative exploration of multi-device creative musical compositions.
We describe a project in which a game of lawn bowls was recreated using Distributed Interactive A... more We describe a project in which a game of lawn bowls was recreated using Distributed Interactive Audio Devices (DIADs), to create an interactive musical experience in the form of a game. This paper details the design of the underlying digital music system, some of the compositional and design considerations, and the technical challenges involved. We discuss future directions for our system and compositional method.
We present an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs to remote networ... more We present an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs to remote networked devices. It is designed to support efficient creative exploratory search in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), where one or more devices must be configured, programmed and interact over a network, with applications in digital musical instruments, networked music performance and other digital experiences. Users can easily monitor and hack what multiple devices are doing on the fly, enhancing their ability to perform ``exploratory search'' in a creative workflow. We present two creative case studies using the system: the creation of a dance performance and the creation of a distributed musical installation. Analysing different activities within the production process, with a particular focus on the trade-off between more creative exploratory tasks and more standard configuring and problem-solving tasks, we show how the system supports creative exploratory search for m...
Organised Sound, 2021
In this article we discuss our practice-based research into effective architectures and creative ... more In this article we discuss our practice-based research into effective architectures and creative workflows for creatively coding massive multidevice light and sound installation artworks. We discuss the challenges of working with networked multidevice systems and illustrate these challenges with examples of the type of content that one may wish to display on these systems. We then consider how the structuring of a creative framework can strongly influence how an artist approaches the creation of such work, eases the process of creative search and discovery and reduces the time cost and risk of solving technical problems of architecture design. We take a design perspective on how to make effective creativity support tools and also consider a holistic perspective on creative practice that attempts to satisfy creative ideals grounded in the reality of practice.
2020 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Sustainable Computing & Communications, Social Computing & Networking (ISPA/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom), 2020
Much research has sought to recognize and retrieve music on the basis of emotion labels. These la... more Much research has sought to recognize and retrieve music on the basis of emotion labels. These labels are usually obtained from either subjective test or social tags. Researchers use social tags usually either by grouping tags to emotion categories or clusters directly, or by mapping tags to dimensional quadrants simply. Few research work have undertaken semantic analysis on social tags for projecting them into a dimensional emotion space, especially based on recent neural word embedding techniques using large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective solution to analyse music tag information and represent them in a 2-dimension emotion plane without limiting the corpus to contain only emotion terms. In our solution, we apply neural word embedding methods for tag representation, including Skip-gram, Continuous Bag-Of-Words (CBOW) and Global Vectors (GloVe). In our experiment, we compare these methods with traditional Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model based on Procrustes Analysis evaluation metrics. The results shows that neural tag embedding methods outperform LSA and represent tags with high approximations with classic circumplex emotion definitions.
As an important computer vision task, 3d human pose estimation in a multi-camera, multi-person se... more As an important computer vision task, 3d human pose estimation in a multi-camera, multi-person setting has received widespread attention and many interesting applications have been derived from it. Traditional approaches use a 3d pictorial structure model to handle this task. However, these models suffer from high computation costs and result in low accuracy in joint detection. Recently, especially since the introduction of Deep Neural Networks, one popular approach is to build a pipeline that involves three separate steps: (1) 2d skeleton detection in each camera view, (2) identification of matched 2d skeletons and (3) estimation of the 3d poses. Many existing works operate by feeding the 2d images and camera parameters through the three modules in a cascade fashion. However, all three operations can be highly correlated. For example, the 3d generation results may affect the results of detection in step 1, as does the matching algorithm in step 2. To address this phenomenon, we pro...
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 2017
This workshop will introduce creative coding audio for the Raspberry Pi, using the 'beads'... more This workshop will introduce creative coding audio for the Raspberry Pi, using the 'beads' platform for audio programming, and the 'HappyBrackets' platform for inter-device communication and sensor data acquisition. We will demonstrate methods to allow each self-contained battery-powered device to acquire sensor data about its surroundings and the way it is being interacted with, as well as methods for designing systems where groups of these devices wirelessly communicate their state, allowing new interaction possibilities and approaches.
Enterprise IT (EIT) governance has become the primary approach in leveraging the IT function to a... more Enterprise IT (EIT) governance has become the primary approach in leveraging the IT function to achieve business objectives. We found in previously published work that decision making is the core of EIT governance. We collected quantitative data from professionals on decision making in Agile Software Development (ASD) projects, which we analyzed using Spearman's Ranked Correlation Coefficient. Decision-making clarity in implementation and decisionmaking distribution in the organization layers positively impact ASD project success. However, our finding that tailoring the decision-making process does not impact ASD project success was most surprising. We conclude that the impact of decision-making factors in an ASD project's success needs to be explored more deeply.
We present HappyBrackets, an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs t... more We present HappyBrackets, an audio-focused creative coding toolkit for deploying music programs to remote networked devices. It is designed to support efficient creative exploratory search in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), where one or more devices must be configured, programmed and interact over a network, with applications in digital musical instruments, networked music performance and other digital experiences. Users can easily monitor and hack what multiple devices are doing on the fly, enhancing their ability to perform “exploratory search” in a creative workflow. We present two creative case studies using the system: the creation of a dance performance and the creation of a distributed musical installation. Analysing different activities within the production process, with a particular focus on the trade-off between more creative exploratory tasks and more standard configuring and problem-solving tasks, we show how the system supports creative exploratory search ...
Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2020
The project investigates how interactions with complex (biologically inspired swarming) behaviors... more The project investigates how interactions with complex (biologically inspired swarming) behaviors of multiple robots are understood by human participants within a performative and dramaturgical system. Nonanthropomorphic robots in the form of roller skates are used in innovative ways by Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
This paper describes the sound design for Bloom, a light and sound installation made up of 1000 d... more This paper describes the sound design for Bloom, a light and sound installation made up of 1000 distributed independent audio-visual pixel devices, each with RGB LEDs, Wifi, Accelerometer, GPS sensor, and sound hardware. These types of systems have been explored previously, but only a few systems have exceeded 30-50 devices and very few have included sound capability, and therefore the sound design possibilities for large systems of distributed audio devices are not well understood. In this article we describe the hardware and software implementation of sound synthesis for this system, and the implications for design of media for this context.
Computer Music Journal, 2020
This article introduces an open-source Java-based programming environment for creative coding of ... more This article introduces an open-source Java-based programming environment for creative coding of agglomerative systems using Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies. Our software originally focused on digital signal processing of audio—including synthesis, sampling, granular sample playback, and a suite of basic effects—but composers now use it to interface with sensors and peripherals through general-purpose input/output and external networked systems. This article examines and addresses the strategies required to integrate novel embedded musical interfaces and creative coding paradigms through an IoT infrastructure. These include: the use of advanced tooling features of a professional integrated development environment as a composition or performance interface rather than just as a compiler; techniques to create media works using features such as autodetection of sensors; seamless and serverless communication among devices on the network; and uploading, updating, and running of new ...
Multimedia Systems, 2020
This research aims to assist users to seek information efficiently while interacting with speech-... more This research aims to assist users to seek information efficiently while interacting with speech-based information, particularly in multimedia delivery, and reports on an experiment that tested two speech-based designs for communicating multiple speech-based information streams efficiently. In this experiment, a high-rate playback design and a concurrent playback design are investigated. In the high-rate playback design, two speech-based information streams were communicated by doubling the normal playback-rate, and in the concurrent playback design, two speech-based information streams were played concurrently. Comprehension of content in both the designs was also compared with the benchmark set from regular baseline condition. The results showed that the users' comprehension regarding the main information dropped significantly in the high-rate playback and the concurrent playback designs compared to the baseline condition. However, in answering the questions set from the detailed information, the comprehension was not significantly different in all three designs. It is expected that such equeryfficient communication methods may increase productivity by providing information efficiently while interacting with an interactive multimedia system.
Leonardo, 2018
This paper proposes the term "media multiplicities" to describe contemporary media artworks that ... more This paper proposes the term "media multiplicities" to describe contemporary media artworks that create multiples of "internet of things" devices. It discusses the properties that distinguish media multiplicities from other forms of media artwork, provides parameters for categorizing media multiplicities, and discusses aesthetic and creative factors in the production of media multiplicities.
PLOS ONE
Creativity can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century. It provide... more Creativity can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century. It provides us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our complex and fast-changing world. The question as to what facilitates creative cognitionthe ability to come up with creative ideas, problem solutions and products-is as old as the human sciences, and various means to enhance creative cognition have been studied. Despite earlier scientific studies demonstrating a beneficial effect of music on cognition, the effect of music listening on creative cognition has remained largely unexplored. The current study experimentally tests whether listening to specific types of music (four classical music excerpts systematically varying on valance and arousal), as compared to a silence control condition, facilitates divergent and convergent creativity. Creativity was higher for participants who listened to 'happy music' (i.e., classical music high on arousal and positive mood) while performing the divergent creativity task, than for participants who performed the task in silence. No effect of music was found for convergent creativity. In addition to the scientific contribution, the current findings may have important practical implications. Music listening can be easily integrated into daily life and may provide an innovative means to facilitate creative cognition in an efficient way in various scientific, educational and organizational settings when creative thinking is needed.
Sam Ferguson Empirical Musicology Group University of New South Wales Sydney, 2052 +61-2-9385 680... more Sam Ferguson Empirical Musicology Group University of New South Wales Sydney, 2052 +61-2-9385 6808, Australia Samuel.Ferguson@unsw.edu.au ... Emery Schubert Empirical Musicology Group University of New South Wales Sydney, 2052 +61-2-9385 6808, Australia ...
This paper describes the interface design of our AeSon (Aesthetic Sonification) Toolkit motivated... more This paper describes the interface design of our AeSon (Aesthetic Sonification) Toolkit motivated by user-centred customisation of the aesthetic representation and scope of the data. The interface design is developed from 3 premises that distinguish our approach from more ubiquitous sonification methodologies. Firstly, we prioritise interaction both from the perspective of changing scale, scope and presentation of the data and the user's ability to reconfigure spatial panning, modality, pitch distribution, critical thresholds and granularity of data examined. The user, for the majority of parameters, determines their own listening experience for real-time data sonification, even to the extent that the interface can be used for live data-driven performance, as well as traditional information analysis and examination. Secondly, we have explored the theories of Tufte, Fry and other visualization and information design experts to find ways in which principles that are successful in ...