State of the Art
The aim of this section is to give an overview of current research trends (we deliberately refrain from trying to summarise the state of the art, as that would go far beyond what can be done here), with a special emphasis on the open issues that wait to be addressed, or are currently being worked on. Faced with the great variety of research topics within SMC, we have tried to give our summary a coherent structure by grouping the topics into three major areas – Sound, Interaction and Music – which are further divided into sub-areas.
The figure depicts the relationships between the different research areas and sub-areas as we see them. We make a basic distinction between research that focuses on sound (left-hand side of the figure) and research that focuses on music (right-hand side of the figure). For each research field, there is an analytic and a synthetic approach. The analytic approach goes from encoded physical (sound) energy to meaning (sense), whereas the synthetic approach goes in the opposite direction, from meaning (sense) to encoded physical (sound) energy. Accordingly, analytic approaches to sound and music pertain to analysis and understanding, whereas synthetic approaches pertain to generation and processing. In between sound and music, there are multi-faceted research fields that focus on interactional aspects. These are performance modelling and control, music interfaces, and sound interaction design.
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Updating the Roadmap
When writing this Roadmap we found a way to organise the different SMC research topics into three main sections: Sound, Interaction and Music. We were conscious of some of the problems of such a structure, but we thought that it worked. Now, after two years, I believe that another organisation might be better to organize the current research activities in SMC.
One problem with the existing organisation is the overlap between Sound and Music in the issues of Description and Understanding. The research on describing and understanding both sound and music are basically addressed by the same community and using common methodologies, thus it might be better to join them. Another problem is that the section on Interaction covers topics that are quite different in terms of methodologies, thus it might be better to separate them. In fact each one of the 3 topics is addressed by quite different communities. Another problem is related to the Music Generation and Modeling topic, quite difficult to approach from a traditional research point of view and which includes issues that are quite diverse. On top of that, the topic on computational creativity, that is currently being addressed by a number of research communities, was not really present in the roadmap. To solve this issue a term like "Assisted sound and music creation" could be used instead of "Music Generation". Also this topic could cover issues like sound design and other topics related to collaborative creativity.
So I would propose to organise the SMC State of the Art in the following sections:
There are also topics that are quite active now and that are not well reflected with the existing organization, such as computation creativity or social interaction. Now in the structure proposed these topics could fit into the "Assisted sound and music creation" section.
I have added more specific comments in each of the three sections: Sound, Interaction, Music.
...xavier