Analyzing sound tracings - A multimodal approach to music information retrieval

Abstract

This paper investigates differences in the gestures people relate to pitched and non-pitched sounds respectively. An experiment has been carried out where participants were asked to move a rod in the air, pretending that moving it would create the sound they heard. By applying and interpreting the results from Canonical Correlation Analysis we are able to determine both simple and more complex correspondences between features of motion and features of sound in our data set. Particularly, the presence of a distinct pitch seems to influence how people relate gesture to sound. This identification of salient relationships between sounds and gestures contributes as a multi-modal approach to music information retrieval. © 2011 ACM.