Musical Interactions (Volume II)

Dear Colleagues,

I am happy to announce the call for a second Special Issue on Musical Interaction in the Journal Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. This call has been prompted by the positive responses to the first issue, which heightened the community’s recognition of the importance of this topic. Let me offer all authors my congratulations for their high-quality papers and the first issue’s success. It is notable that all contributing authors are based in interdisciplinary research environments around the world. Thanks also to the reviewers for their meticulous recommendations; throughout the cycle, review processes were beyond rigorous due to the nature of the research topic, which encouraged new ways of thinking and expression. It was a truly engaging cycle.

The first issue of Musical Interaction included wide-ranging yet connected topics, from engaging mobile devices to supercomputers, from prototyping pedagogy to production of musical events, from tactile sensing of music to communicating musical control by eye gaze, and from literature survey to development perspectives. By leveraging the diverse paths demonstrated by the first issue’s authors, the second issue can expand horizons toward possible impacts on diverse research domains and application areas. New horizons will deepen our understanding of the anchor point of musical interaction and how it can influence ways of engaging devices and technologies to mediate human activities and experiences in daily life.

Music is a structured sonic event for listening, which evolves around literature (in the form of musical scores with implicit performance practice and music theory), performance repertoire (a canon of compositions written for an instrument or ensemble), and instrument design (for example viola da gamba vs. violin). Both making music and listening to music are events that require actions, where the actions collectively shape a musical experience. It is this nature of music that the call is focused on, which is why the research topic is designated as Musical Interaction rather than Interactive Music. The aim is to inspire the concept of musical experience toward research and use cases of multimodal technologies and interaction. What is missing in the current research landscape around related topics is the concurrent development of literature, repertoire, and instrument design through which coherence can be achieved. It is a contextual shift that requires an interdisciplinary research team.

The multimodality of musical performance and listening experience is well recognized in research, including in multimedia modeling, music information retrieval, music therapy, enactive interfaces, and new interfaces for musical expression. While these investigations are well-structured, musical experiences are always contextualized by listeners’ situated encounters with episodic events and memory. Many situated interactions arise in the context of technology applications into daily life, where the qualities of some experiences are less desirable than others. The proliferation of embedded systems for multimedia and action sensing includes mobiles and wearables, personal data appliances, and equipment for medicine, sports, and wellness, for training as well as gameplay and socialization. Across this spectrum, where is it desirable to apply musical interactions?

To substantiate a possible ecology of Musical Interaction within diverse research domains, and to project where the future paths may further emerge, we welcome researchers from fields including but not limited to AI, HCI, Music, Design and Engineering, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science. We invite your inquiries and articles, and we invite you to participate in generating insights and better understandings of multisensory experience and multimodality through musical interaction, including broader implications beyond the domain of music.

Dr. Insook Choi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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