A distributed architecture for facilitating the integration of blind musicians in symphonic orchestras

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Abstract

The emergence of new technologies is providing opportunities to develop novel solutions that facilitate the integration of visually impaired people in different activities of our daily life. This paper presents a distributed intelligent architecture, called DIAMI, focused on facilitating the integration of blind musicians into orchestras. The DIAMI architecture provides a distributed, ubiquitous system aimed at providing a way for blind musicians to receive instructions from the orchestra conductor in an unobtrusive manner. The structure of the DIAMI architecture and the preliminary results obtained are presented in detail within this paper.

Introduction

The technological evolution in the last decades (Internet, WWW, e-Commerce, wireless networks, etc.) has led to a new computing paradigm: “computing as interaction”. In this new paradigm, computing is something that happens by and through the communication between computing entities. This approach, based on the notion of computing as an inherently social rather than isolated activity, is leading the way to new forms of conceiving, designing, developing and managing computer systems. An example of the influence of this view is the emerging model of ambient intelligence and distributed computing. The term ambient intelligence (AmI) emerged in 1999 from a proposal put forth by the Information Society Technology Program Advisory Group (ISTAG) of the European Community (ISTAG, 2003), based on the concepts of ubiquitous computing, which is applicable in such areas as artificial intelligence, home automation, intelligent agents, etc. (Aarts, 2004, Friedewal and Da Costa, 2003). Ubiquitous computing and AmI influence the design of protocols, communications, systems integration, devices, etc. (Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002). Ambient intelligence is described as a model of interaction (Tse & Viswanath, 2005) in which people are surrounded by intelligent devices, aware of their own presence, context sensitive and able to adapt to the user’s needs (Friedewald & Da Costa, 2003) through embedded technology. These non-invasive devices are transparent to users (Anastasopoulos et al., 2005, ISTAG, 2003) and facilitate their daily activities (Corchado, Bajo, et al., 2008, Emiliani and Stephanidis, 2005).

A clear example of an application of this technology can be found in the field of disabled people, particularly the visually impaired. There are many situations that require ambient intelligence solutions in this specific area. This paper presents a system that facilitates the integration of the blind people into several everyday activities. DIAMI architecture provides a mechanism for conveying information to blind people in real time, in a ubiquitous way, using a motion capture system based on WiiMote technology (Cheng, Freeman-Aloiau, Guo, & Pullen, 2007) and a system for transmitting information through a series of vibrations. DIAMI architecture was initially applied to the problem of integrating blind musicians into orchestras, but can be easily adapted to work in other environments. DIAMI allows a conductor to transmit instructions to the blind musician through an infrared LED located on the tip of the baton. The WiiMote system captures the movements of the conductor, which are interpreted in a central computer and sent to a blind musician in the form of vibrations. The blind musician perceives the vibrations through a bracelet.

The aim of the work presented within this paper is to obtain an innovative solution to facilitate the creation of dynamic interactions with visually disabled individuals in scenarios such as symphonic orchestras, educational environments, etc. DIAMI is a dynamic architecture whose goals focus on:

  • Providing a wireless interaction system that can capture movements (for example, those executed by an orchestra conductor) and to transmit these movements to a visually impaired musician in real time.

  • Designing a method for motion capture and encoding.

  • Designing a method for signal reception and decoding that can transform the signals to a format capable of being understood by a blind person.

  • Defining a case study consisting of a symphonic orchestra with blind players, in order to evaluate the system and methods proposed.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the problem that motivates most of this research. Section 3 describes the principal existing alternatives for motion capturing and transmitting vibration signals. Section 4 presents the DIAMI architecture proposed in this paper to facilitate the integration of blind musicians in orchestras. Finally, Section 5 shows the preliminary results obtained and the conclusions extracted from these initial results.

Section snippets

Problem description

The development of ambient intelligence is essential for automatically analyzing data from distributed sensors (Loomis, Golledge, & Klatzky, 1998). One of the main objectives of ambient intelligence is to achieve solutions in the fields of medicine and disability. There is still much work to do, including the development of systems and technology that focus on improving services, particularly for the visually impaired (ISTAG, 2003). Over the last decade, the Internet has revolutionized the

Motion capture and vibration receptors

There are different possibilities for designing systems able to capture movements, as well as signals to describe these movements. The most commonly used motion capture systems are accelerometers and gyroscopes (Albarbar, Badri, Sinha, & Starr, 2009). However, in recent years the WiiMote system has acquired great importance for motion capture (Cheng, 2007). This system is commonly used in games consoles and includes features such as angle, speed, tilt, position, etc. that make it capable of

DIAMI: ambient intelligent-based architecture for blind musicians

This paper proposes an ambient intelligence-based system (ISTAG, 2003) that uses a transparent and ubiquitous communication system to enable a blind musician to receive instructions from an orchestra conductor in real time. In this way, through the use of a transmitter installed on the baton of a conductor, a minimally invasive system receiver worn by the musician, and a coding system that allows the transformation of movements into vibrating instructions, a blind musician can receive orders

Results and discussion

Wireless technology is particularly promising as a support to the new paradigm of computation as interaction. Sensors and communication devices facilitate sending and receiving information in a ubiquitous manner. The DIAMI system proposed in this paper presents an innovative technological solution to efficiently and dynamically facilitate the reception and processing of instructions in real time for visually impaired individuals in areas such as orchestral music or education.

The DIAMI system

Conclusions

The proposed solution provides an intelligent interface for visually impaired people, facilitating a ubiquitous and transparent access to the information. The bracelet device was designed to be minimally invasive and provide computation capabilities. In this sense, the research presented within this paper can be classified in terms of ambient intelligence (Corchado, Glez-Bedia, et al., 2008, Friedewal and Da Costa, 2003), and provides improvements in the field of disabled and dependant people.

Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by the Fundación Caja Duero. Special thanks to the ONCE and CIDAT for their support.

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