Hello my name is Duncan Williams at the University of Salford in
Manchester where I'm based at the Acoustics Research Centre.
I'm going to take five minutes to talk through our NIME paper
with colleagues Bruno Fazenda, also at the University of Salford
Victoria Williamson, at the University of Sheffield and George Fazekas,
at Queen Mary University of London. The paper itself is about using
biosensors, specifically wearable devices
to measure cadence, gate and heart rate in running and to use that data
to generate in real-time cadence gate or heart rate synchronous
music, to see whether synchronous music helps
our runners to perform and the performance criteria are how far
they ran, how fast they ran and how long it took
them to feel maximum exertion. A key part of this very
long title is trail runners so this is based
outside on a real course not inside in a treadmill, so it's a slightly different
set of circumstances to a traditional physiological evaluation. Here's the
paper itself, if you want to look it up the title is
"Biophysiologically synchronous computer generated music improves
performance and reduces perceived effort in trail runners". Here's an overview of
the system itself, and what this will tell you is that
we're using a markov model based algorithmic
composition engine with three musical features three
times. There's a bass line, a melody and a drum loop which is summed
together in real time and played back to our
runners as they run around the course.
Because of the screen capture software I'm using
i can't show you the video of this actually working in real time
but you can look this up on youtube the url
is down at the bottom, I won't read the whole url
out but hopefully this will give you enough time to copy and paste that if
you're interested in seeing the system work
and in seeing it adapt to a different range of
input signals as the tempo changes, and here is the evaluation of the system
itself. So this is the course we had 56 runners take part
with a pretty even split between male and female runners
and you can see that some of this course is actually very very steep
so it's a very tricky testing course down in the southwest of the UK
in Cornwall.
A quick peek at the results and what you'll notice
is that there are marked differences in the
pace per mile and the duration of running for
heart rate synchronous music versus cadence synchronous music,
and the quicker pace per mile is seen both in men
and women in decadence synchronous condition.
There's less of a difference in the duration ran and there's some more
detail about the complete breakdown of these results in the paper of course.
Just to summarize our our findings and what you'll be able to read about the
paper we've used an algorithmic music
generator to make continuous streaming of music according
to a variable tempo input which is derived from our wearable
wrist-based biosensors and this gives us information about the
heart rate of the runner as I said before the cadence or the gate
of the running. We found that the heart rate synchronous
conditions were not an improvement
across the board but that cadence synchronous music
improved running performance in male subjects
who ran further and faster and partially in the female
subjects who ran faster but not further. Also
we found that the perceived maximum effort was longer
in the cadence synchronous music condition for male
participants but not female participants. In other words
it took people longer to feel really at their
most tired when they were in the cadence
synchronous condition. I hope you've enjoyed this
short video and that you're encouraged to seek out the paper
or if you want to contact me with any questions here are my details you can
find me on Twitter @duncancipher my email address is
d.a.h.williams@salford.ac.uk and our website urls
acoustics.salford.ac.uk or www.duncanwilliams.info
Again this is for me but I'd be happy to pass on your comments
to the co-authors as well. Thanks for your time.