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One person playing the guitar on a stage.
Remote Performance 2022. Hanna Harvigsson on stage. Photo: ShareMusic & Performing Arts

MuseIT is now entering its last year

The three year long research project MuseIT, which started in October 2022 is now entering its last year. The MuseIT project aims to combine and develop advanced technology to facilitate and widen access to cultural assets in an inclusive way. With a focus on variations in abilities and perceptual modalities, MuseIT address the challenges of inclusion and a broader access to cultural assets on multiple fronts. ShareMusic’s part in the MuseIT project is focused on the part concerning cultural co-creation. We work on the development of a Remote Performance Platform that will enable music co-creation at a distance together with other project partners. In this text we will summarise som of the progress so far.

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Work on the EU Horizon platform for remote creativity is going well. Engineers from Share Music’s principal technical partner, X-System based in Scotland, have succeeded in using techniques similar to frequency modulation to add sensor data to Jack Trip’s audio channel. This means that information about co-creators’ states of body and mind can be sent to co-creation partners directly and without delay, together with sound.

Share Music and X-System have also developed a haptic channel. During participatory workshops in Goteborg and Edinburgh, users were shocked by how powerful and emotionally informative holding the heartbeat of a co-creator “in your hand” can be.

Technology to co-creation

The team also developed a system whereby co-creators can hear the sound of the electrical activity of their brains in almost real time through headphones. The system can also identify the existing music in the world’s repertoire closest to the activity of the user’s brain. This proved a “hit” at the Consortium meetings participatory workshops in Thessaloniki in early October 2024. The relevance of this technology to co-creation is that musical material can be generated directly from the brain. It is the coming of age of Arthur C. Clarke’s visionary science fiction:

Creative musicians don’t have to write or improvise scores - they can “think” what they want to hear.

This is of course invaluable for people with difficulties in moving, controlling instruments or making sound.

Transmitted through haptics

Share Music’s partners CERTH, from Greece, have created a system using EEG and sensors to “diagnose” the mood of users, and another important partner, Catalink, from Cyprus, has produced a system using video and analysis of facial expression to establish levels of stress. This information about the state of mind and body of the user can be used to generate sound, or to be transmitted through haptics so that users can "feel" emotion, and through “avatars” - or images indicating mood and emotion - so that users can "see" what their co-creators are feeling.

We are delighted that Ronnie del Carmen, originally responsible, with Pete Docter, for Pixar’s extraordinary “Inside Out” animation film, has agreed to mentor us in the generation of emotional “avatars”. We believe that a new medium, somewhere between co-creation, emotional navigation, animation and gaming, may well emerge from this pioneering work.

Read more about the last consortium meeting in Thessaloniki

To learn more about the MuseIT project and follow its progress you can also visit: https://www.muse-it.eu/news

or follow its Newsletter

To learn more about the partners who are also working on the Remote Performance Platform, visit:  

https://www.x-system.co.uk/

https://catalink.eu/

https://www.certh.gr/

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/

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MuseIT Fact Box

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MuseIT Fact Box

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Pictures from the last Consortium meeting in Thessaloniki, October 2024.

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