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TimToShape: Supporting Practice of Musical Instruments by Visualizing Timbre with 2D Shapes based on Crossmodal Correspondences

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Timbre is high-dimensional and sensuous, making it difficult for musical-instrument learners to improve their timbre. Although some systems exist to improve timbre, they require expert labeling for timbre evaluation; however, solely visualizing the results of unsupervised learning lacks the intuitiveness of feedback because human perception is not considered. Therefore, we employ crossmodal correspondences for intuitive visualization of the timbre. We designed TimToShape, a system that visualizes timbre with 2D shapes based on the user's input of timbre-shape correspondences. TimToShape generates a shape morphed by linear interpolation according to the timbre's position in the latent space, which is obtained by unsupervised learning with a variational autoencoder (VAE). We confirmed that people perceived shapes generated by TimToShape to correspond more to timbre than randomly generated shapes. Furthermore, a user study of six violin players revealed that TimToShape was well-received in terms of visual clarity and interpretability.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIUI 2023 - Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages850-865
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9798400701061
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023 Mar 27
Externally publishedYes
Event28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2023 - Sydney, Australia
Duration: 2023 Mar 272023 Mar 31

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI

Conference

Conference28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2023
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CitySydney
Period23/3/2723/3/31

Keywords

  • crossmodal correspondences
  • musical instrumental practice
  • timbre
  • timbre-shape correspondences
  • variational autoencoder

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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