Time's up for the Myo? The smartwatch as a ubiquitous alternative for audio-gestural analyses.

William Francis Wilson, Niccolo Granieri, and Islah Ali-Maclachlan

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

The utility of gestural technologies in broadening analytical- and expressive-interface possibilities has been documented extensively; both within the sphere of NIME and beyond. Wearable gestural sensors have proved integral components of many past NIMEs. Previous implementations have typically made use of specialist, IMU and EMG based gestural technologies. Few have proved, singularly, as popular as the Myo armband. An informal review of the NIME archives found that the Myo has featured in 21 NIME publications, since an initial declaration of the Myo’s promise as “a new standard controller in the NIME community” by Nyomen et al. in 2015. Ten of those found were published after the Myo’s discontinuation in 2018, including three as recently as 2022. This paper details an assessment of smartwatch-based IMU and audio logging as a ubiquitous, accessible alternative to the IMU capabilities of the Myo armband. Six violinists were recorded performing a number of exercises using VioLogger; a purpose-built application for the Apple Watch. Participants were simultaneously recorded using a Myo armband and a freestanding microphone. Initial testing upon this pilot dataset indicated promising results for the purposes of audio-gestural analysis; both implementations demonstrated similar efficacy for the purposes of MLP-based bow-stroke classification.

Citation:

William Francis Wilson, Niccolo Granieri, and Islah Ali-Maclachlan. 2023. Time's up for the Myo? The smartwatch as a ubiquitous alternative for audio-gestural analyses.. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11189306

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{nime2023_85,
 abstract = {The utility of gestural technologies in broadening analytical- and expressive-interface possibilities has been documented extensively; both within the sphere of NIME and beyond. 

Wearable gestural sensors have proved integral components of many past NIMEs. Previous implementations have typically made use of specialist, IMU and EMG based gestural technologies. Few have proved, singularly, as popular as the Myo armband. An informal review of the NIME archives found that the Myo has featured in 21 NIME publications, since an initial declaration of the Myo’s promise as “a new standard controller in the NIME community” by Nyomen et al. in 2015. Ten of those found were published after the Myo’s discontinuation in 2018, including three as recently as 2022.

This paper details an assessment of smartwatch-based IMU and audio logging as a ubiquitous, accessible alternative to the IMU capabilities of the Myo armband. Six violinists were recorded performing a number of exercises using VioLogger; a purpose-built application for the Apple Watch. Participants were simultaneously recorded using a Myo armband and a freestanding microphone. Initial testing upon this pilot dataset indicated promising results for the purposes of audio-gestural analysis; both implementations demonstrated similar efficacy for the purposes of MLP-based bow-stroke classification.},
 address = {Mexico City, Mexico},
 articleno = {85},
 author = {William Francis Wilson and Niccolo Granieri and Islah Ali-Maclachlan},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.11189306},
 editor = {Miguel Ortiz and Adnan Marquez-Borbon},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {May},
 numpages = {4},
 pages = {590--593},
 title = {Time's up for the Myo? The smartwatch as a ubiquitous alternative for audio-gestural analyses.},
 track = {Work in Progress},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2023/nime2023_85.pdf},
 year = {2023}
}