SBM

Music making and listening are a clear example of human activities that are above all interactive and social. On the one hand, however, nowadays mediated music making and listening is usually still a passive, non-context sensitive, and non-social experience. The current electronic technologies, with their potential for interactivity and communication, have not yet been able to fully support and promote these essential aspects. On the other hand, new mediated forms of sharing music experience in a social context with local or remote users or as a part of a community are emerging. Novel research challenges are faced and novel disciplines develops, e.g., Social Signal Processing. Foundational issues such us techniques for identifying the leader in a group of users, for measuring the cohesion of the group, for recognizing and stimulating empathy between the participants, find in music an ideal test-bed for research and for scientific and technological investigation. In this framework, new paradigms for embodied and active experience of music are needed, where multimodal non-verbal communication channels, and in particular movement and gesture, play a central role. Perspectives such as pervasive embodied social music networks, grounded on the Future Internet, become a concrete scenario for the near future.

This workshop focuses on the social signals and their features that are most significant for a qualitative and quantitative analysis of social behavior and experience in music. It will discuss computational models, algorithms, and techniques for analysis of social behavior in music, their application in concrete test-beds, their evaluation in experimental set-ups, and their exploitation in future scenarios. The workshop will explore many-to-many human interplay, such as performer-listener, performer-performer, performer-conductor, and listener-listener interaction, in novel scenarios where the distinction between listeners and performers fades out and users become producers and consumers of music experience.

The Second International Workshop on Social Behavior in Music (SBM2011) represents an occasion for researchers and practitioners to meet and discuss about social behavior in music: e.g., which are the multimodal signals characterizing social experience in performers and listeners interplay?; how to model interaction in groups of performers, in the audience, between audience and performers?; which is the minimal set of low-level features describing interaction in performance? which are the social signals that better describe social interaction in music? To face such challenges, integration is needed of research in engineering and physics, as well as in human sciences, e.g., social psychology.