This article addresses the evaluation of input devices for musical expression. The comparison and evaluation of input devices is a well-developed topic in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research area, a multidisciplinary field that presents several similarities (and many differences) to computer music. We here introduce an overview of various developments from HCI and discuss possible applications of this knowledge to the musical context. Results from previous experiments are commented and a set of musical tasks is suggested and discussed as a first step toward the evaluation of input devices for musical expression

The increasing availability of music in digital format needs to be matched by the development of tools for music accessing, filtering, classification, and retrieval. The research area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) covers many of these aspects. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of this vast and new field. A number of issues, which are peculiar to the music language, are described--including forms, formats, and dimensions of music--together with the typologies of users and their information needs. To fulfil these needs a number of approaches are discussed, from direct search to information filtering and clustering of music documents. An overview of the techniques for music processing, which are commonly exploited in many approaches, is also presented. Evaluation and comparisons of the approaches on a common benchmark are other important issues. To this end, a description of the initial efforts and evaluation campaigns for MIR is provided

Abstract. This paper presents research carried out in order to elicit user needs for the design and development of a digital library and research platform intended to enhance user engagement with cultural heritage collections. It outlines a range of user constituencies for this digital library. The paper outlines a taxonomy of intended users for this system and describes in detail the characteristics and requirements of these users for the facilitation and enhancement of their engagement with and use of textual and visual cultural artefacts.

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Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment

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Abstract. In recent years there has been a marked uptake in the digitisation of cultural heritage collections. Though this has enabled more sources to be made available to experts and the wider public, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with cultural archives. This is largely due to the monolithic nature of many digital archives; the challenge of understanding large collections, especially if the language is inconsistent; and because users vary in expertise and have different tasks and goals that they are trying to accomplish. This paper describes CULTURA, an FP7 funded project that is addressing these specific issues. The various technologies and approaches being used by CULTURA are discussed, along with the lessons learnt thus far, and the future work necessary to be implemented before the project concludes.

This paper presents the MusiClef data set, a multimodal data set of professionally annotated music. It includes editorial metadata about songs, albums, and artists, as well as MusicBrainz identifiers to facilitate linking to other data sets. In addition, several state-of-the-art audio features are provided. Different sets of annotations and music context data -collaboratively generated user tags, web pages about artists and albums, and the annotation labels provided by music experts -are included too. Versions of this data set were used in the MusiClef evaluation campaigns in 2011 and 2012 for auto-tagging tasks. We report on the motivation for the data set, on its composition, on related sets, and on the evaluation campaigns in which versions of the set were already used. These campaigns likewise represent one use case, i.e. music autotagging, of the data set. The complete data set is publicly available for download at