Pilots

Music with babies

Logo Cooperativa Paulo Lameiro
In the context of a concert for babies, in real time, technological tools will transform the reactions that babies have when listening to music into graphic musical notation.

Pilot leader

Cooperativa Paulo Lameiro CRL and MUSICALMENTE

Location

Portugal

Website

Technology tested

AMPLIFY PORTABLE

Sensors that capture a human being’s emotional reactions when listening to music, and tools that translate those same emotions into a graphic score.

Description of pilot

Babies are the human beings with the greatest capacity to transform the lives and values of those around them. Music is probably the human activity that most easily brings together people of different ages, cultures and values around a common experience. Concerts for Babies is a pioneering international project that offers music, with a special focus on classical languages, but cultivating a wide range of musical grammars from Pop to Traditional, Jazz to World. Despite an already abundant seasons of Concerts for Babies, given the small audience that these concerts allow, the experience is reduced to a small group of families.

Over the last 30 years in which Musicalmente and Paulo Lameiro have developed various Music for Babies projects all over Europe, it has become clear that these musical experiences are unidirectional: mothers sing for babies, and musicians play for babies and their parents. Babies are not given the opportunity to participate and interact on the same level. As babies are the target audience for this artistic practice, and have a much higher level of listening skills than adults, it would be important for them to be given a voice. We would like the non-verbal information that babies communicate with their mothers and the artists to be translated, reintegrated into the process of emission and fruition, and thus offer a multi-directional experience with the babies at the center.

Our goal

AMPLIFY’s biggest challenge in the baby trial is being able to give babies a musical voice, effectively making them the center of the process. To this end, it is important that technology, without invading babies’ privacy, nor taking away the pleasure and experience of live musical enjoyment, can collect from them enough information that can be translated into musical notation for musicians and/or for parents.

Challenges

How can we collect information about a baby’s emotions? How can we organize and translate that information into a score? How can we offer that score to a musician on stage in real time?

The technological solution

To allow the co-experience of concerts for babies outside the concert hall, we need to develop a first tool for capturing the sound and image of each baby in close-up. The capture source could be on the cell phone of a family member present at the concert. It is important to have general images and sounds captured in the concert hall, and to develop a tool that offers those who are located remotely to choose to see specific images of a particular baby, or the general environment of the concert.

For the second challenge of the trial, which almost aims for the baby to return a lullaby to his mother, or offer a score of his liking to the musician who plays for him, two groups of tools will have to be developed: a first which consists of reading of the information that the baby offers, and a second which is the translation of the collected signals into a notation that the musician, or artificial intelligence software can read and play.

It is expected that a grandparent of a baby who went to the concert with his parents, at home or in a nursing home, can watch having a general idea of the concert hall environment, but can choose to see the sound and movement reactions that his grandson in particular reacts to the music and to the other babies. The concert experience can also be offered to families who cannot attend, but can project the concert on a screen (VR headsets?) in their homes and can also choose to see the stage in general, or choose to follow some of the more or less active babies during the performance.

Because long before human beings organised sounds, sounds organised human beings.

Expected impact

Planned activities

29th November 2024

Press conference to present AMPLIFY PORTUGUESE TRIAL 

December 2024

Meetings with all the partners, families and artists 

January to November 2025

Labs with babies, families and artists 

December to 2025

Evaluation

January to December 2026

Test and adjust technological tools

January to May 2027

Labs and Concertos for babies using technological tools 

26th and 27th June 2027

FESTIVAL AMPLIFY BABIES 

July to August 2027

Evaluation with all the participants and partners