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NAUTILUS. A Musical, Collaborative and Interactive Sonification Toolkit

Title NAUTILUS. A Musical, Collaborative and Interactive Sonification Toolkit
Publication Type Master Thesis
Year of Publication 2008
Authors G. Risueño, M.
Abstract

This master thesis describes the design a vast part of implementation, functional by itself, of a sonification toolkit called Nautilus. There are several characteristics that make Nautilus an attractive seed from diverse fonts, such as human-computer interaction, psychoacoustics, communication theory, sound design, art or sociology. These disciplines are in charge of providing a theoretical frame through out this Thesis. Only since this multidisciplinary analysis we will be able to comprehend why auditory display is one of the most important fields in the Sound and Music Computing roadmap. We will also see how exploring the auditory display techniques and using them with the intelligent analysis tools we will be able to obtain a wide range of sonic results, suitable for a big amount of people, situations and contexts in general.

Although nowadays music is part of most people's life, many of them have acquired a role in which they passively participate of it. It would not be crazy to think that the only boundary that exists between a human being without music theory knowledge and a musical "output" is the intermediate system, the "instrument". Providing that instrument of certain intelligence (that does not make the user useless) and providing the user of a known, intuitive and efficient interface we could achieve that, through a good implementation, that every human being is able to know the feeling of doing or performing music.

The objective of this work is not just to obtain an knowledge interchange between the scientific community, that can help future projects, but it is also pretended to introduce and bring the new musical and sound interaction ways closer to that part of society that, probably because of a social imposition or a lack of knowledge, have decided to stay passive in the sound world.

In conclusion, a real analysis of situations where the sonification toolkit has been used is done. Starting from the results of that analysis we will set out a constructive critic from which we derive the advantages and disadvantages of our system. Finally we will try to raise a series of generic guidelines in the design of new auditory display systems and we will set certain future work paths about Nautilus.