Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM)

Research

Music provides deep pleasure and value to people. It supports expression and emotion, creates powerful experiences, and influences social, cognitive, and motor functions. At IPEM, we study music through humans’ lived, embodied interactions — “the body in action.”

Using new eXtended Reality (XR) technologies, we explore embodied interaction with music and creative culture. XR enables immersive, multisensory environments with objects, avatars, and agents. Through bodily interaction technologies, we create both simulations of real spaces and entirely new ones born from imagination. At IPEM, we investigate how these spaces can serve as innovative research labs, museums, and concert halls of the future.

MusiXR

MusiXR: a music research lab of the future.

Human music interaction exhibits various patterns of coordinated activity; in sound, bodily movement and (neuro)physiological responses. Adopting XR as core methodological tool in empirical-cognitive musicology, we try to understand the foundations of how coordinated patterns emerge and evolve over time, and how this creates value in humans’ subjective experience.

XRhive

XRhive - a museum of the future

Cultural heritage connects us to our past, shapes individual and collective narratives, and raises cross-cultural awareness. Using XR as technological framework, our ambition is to develop an interaction-based approach to cultural heritage preservation, embedding and valuing heritage in a living culture of human interaction; what we call a “living archive”.

Reliving cultural Heritage: Embodied interaction with the cultural past in meaningful ways

Cultural heritage provides concrete and tangible connections to our past. It shapes individual and collective narratives and values, and raises cross-cultural awareness and exchanges.

At IPEM, we develop an art-science-technology framework for innovating cultural heritage preservation in the broad domain of performance art. The central ambition is to complement traditional “document-based heritage” with “interaction-based heritage”, embedding and valuing heritage in a living culture of human interaction and experience; what we call a “living archive”.

We use cutting-edge digital tools and technologies to foster this interaction-based approach to cultural heritage and the re-creation of cultural value. This endeavor is fundamentally interdisciplinary as technology-development is informed by knowledge on the cultural and historical object and art praxis (art-science) and by knowledge on principles drive human interaction with art and culture, such as expressivity, reward, etc.

XRt 

XRt (a concert hall of the future)

Spurred by the creative impulses of artists, IPEM wants to be at the forefront of art-science research on XR-based forms of experience and interaction in the arts. By exploring the possibilities of immersive audiovisual displays, bodily interaction technologies, and data networks, we want to proactively innovate practices in the cultural-creative sector.

Studying and augmenting human interaction in XR musical environments

XR multimodal displays allow simulating existing real-life musical environments, creating for users the feeling of actually being present in this context. XR displays may also create radically new immersive, multimodal and imaginary environments for users. Complemented with motion capture technologies and high-speed data networks, it becomes possible for users to (socially) interact in a highly embodied manner, within an XR environment, even when they are not physically together. In addition, virtual agents in all shapes and colors may be created to interact creatively in real time with users. Given these possibilities, we consider XR environments as a radically new space for the study and practice of creative and artistic interactions.

At IPEM, we want to study human interactions within these XR musical environments. The ability to accurately simulate multimodal environments, to control the behavior of virtual agents therein, and to create scenarios which are otherwise impossible in our physical environment, turns XR into a performance space that radically extents research frontiers in empirical and cognitive musicology.

From churches in Medieval times to classical concert halls and digital IPods, musical practices and experiences have always been shaped by the spaces in which they occurred. XR unlocks a new space that holds enormous possibilities for music experience and interaction. By integrating scientific knowledge with the creative spark of artists and the possibilities of new technologies, IPEM wants to be at the forefront in developing new, XR-based forms of experience and interaction, innovating practices in the cultural-creative sector.

Music & Wellbeing

Music & Wellbeing (Improving a healthy lifestyle through creativity and art)

To build and sustain a healthy and active life, motivation and successful motor control are of utmost importance. As music taps into the human cognitive, emotional, social, and sensorimotor capacities of human beings, we belief that it can contribute substantially to an active and healthy life.

At IPEM, we explore how music and musical feedback systems (sonification strategies) may be of benefit for sports activities (running, cycling, body building, etc.) as well as for cognitive and motor rehabilitation in clinical populations, such as Parkinson disease, Alzheimer, stroke, multiple sclerose, and developmental coordination disorder patients.

Musical biofeedback for sports

Musical Biofeedback for clinical populations

Digital and augmented humanities

We contribute to a digital and augmented humanities approach to musicology, by focusing on an advanced human artificial intelligence approach.

Artistic research

In 1963 IPEM started as a studio for electro-acoustic music production. Today scientists, researchers, and technicians still collaborate with artists using the new art-science-interaction lab [ASIL] and our know-how as a support for the innovation of expressive forms in music and interactive multimedia arts.