Music making and listening are clear examples of a human activity that is above all interactive and social, two of the major issues facing new communication devices and applications. However, to date, music making and listening has been, in general, a passive, non–interactive, and non-context sensitive experience. The current electronic technologies, with their potential for interactivity and communication, have not yet been able to support and promote this essential aspect of music making and listening. This can be considered a significant degradation of the traditional listening and music making experience, in which the public was (and still is) able to interact in many ways with performers to modify the expressive features of a music piece.
The main objective of the SAME project was to create new end-to-end systems for mobile active, experience-centric, and context-aware active music listening. The project tried to answer to questions like "What device will correspond to today’s iPod in 5 years?" or "What potential new markets would such new devices open up?" The objectives of the SAME project were threefold:
- To define and develop an innovative end-to-end research platform for novel mobile music applications for participative, experience-centric, context-aware, social/shared active listening of music for a broad target of non-expert as well as expert users.
- To investigate and implement new communication and interaction paradigms for mobile music applications based on high- level, expressive, non-verbal multimodal interfaces, enabling the user to influence, interact, and mold and shape the listened content, by intervening actively and physically into the experience.
- To develop new mobile context-aware music applications, starting from the active listening paradigm, which will bring back the social and interactive aspects of music to our information technology age.