While breathing is essential to living and for sound production in some instruments, for pianists, it is often a hidden and automatic process, making it difficult to analyze or refine. A critical gap exists between data and awareness: while sensors record precise physical metrics, they fail to capture the performer's somatic experience. Conversely, the high cognitive load of performance makes it nearly impossible for musicians to recall their internal states with temporal precision. To address this, we present a system, Breathing Mirror, and associated methodology designed to externalize the pianist's internal somatic experience through three analytical lenses: a Baseline View (synchronized signals), a First-Person View (subjective recall), and an Interpersonal View (collaborative reflection). Through a four-week longitudinal study with a skilled amateur pianist (35 years of experience), we evaluated the system's effectiveness by recording respiratory data using textile-integrated strain sensor belts. The results show that the Breathing Mirror reveals some patterns of breathing-music coupling and identifies critical blind spots where objective data diverges from subjective perception. Furthermore, we propose four somatic themes regarding the link between breathing and musical elements, offering a foundation for future large-scale validation across a broader range of pianists. This work provides a new way to study body signals, transforming breathing from an internal biological function into an articulate expressive parameter.
Synthesizing realistic piano hand motions requires both precision and naturalness. Physics-based methods achieve precision but produce stiff motions; data-driven models learn natural dynamics but struggle with positional accuracy. Piano motion exhibits a natural hierarchy: fingertip positions are nearly deterministic given piano geometry and fingering, while wrist and intermediate joints offer stylistic freedom. We present [OURS], a four-stage framework exploiting this hierarchy: (1) statistics-based fingertip positioning, (2) FiLM-conditioned trajectory refinement, (3) wrist estimation, and (4) STGCN-based pose synthesis. We contribute expert-annotated fingerings for the FürElise dataset (153 pieces, 10 hours). Experiments demonstrate F1 = 0.910, substantially outperforming diffusion baselines (F1 = 0.121), with user study (N=41) confirming quality approaching motion capture. Expert evaluation by professional pianists (N=5) identified anticipatory motion as the key remaining gap, providing concrete directions for future improvement.
Sight-reading is a core skill in music education. It refers to the ability to play a written piece of music correctly the first time it is seen. Developing this skill requires frequent practice with completely new musical excerpts that match the difficulty level of the student. However, creating new sight-reading exercises at a specific difficulty level requires significant time and expert knowledge. As a result, students and teachers often rely on pieces from the existing piano literature, even though sight-reading exams typically use compositions written specifically for the exam. Generative music systems provide a promising approach for creating new sight-reading material with explicit control over performance difficulty. In this work, we frame the creation of sight-reading exercises as a symbolic music generation task that produces piano scores with controllable difficulty. Existing approaches typically rely on control tokens to guide generation, but we show that this strategy does not result in piano scores with reliably controlled difficulty. To address this issue, we introduce an auxiliary difficulty prediction objective using synthetic difficulty labels produced by an expert-based system, enabling scalable training. Our method improves difficulty conditioning accuracy from 69.3% to 92.9% compared to a baseline that conditions generation solely on difficulty control tokens, and reduces mean squared error from 0.30 to 0.09. A user study with expert pianists shows that the generated scores are rated comparable or superior to human-written material in readability and naturalness, while maintaining appropriate playability across difficulty levels. These results represent a step toward the generation of music exercises for a variety of educational applications.
Adult height may reflect early-life environmental conditions that influence the risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). While taller height has been linked to lower DM risk, evidence from East Asia remains limited and inconsistent. Given that DM in East Asians often occurs at lower BMI levels, population-specific research is needed. We examined the prospective association between adult height and incident DM in a large Japanese working population, focusing on differences by sex and birth cohort. Data were obtained from annual health checkups of 63,264 workers from 12 companies in Japan, comprising 54,188 men and 9076 women aged 20–64 years at baseline. Participants were classified by quartile of adult height for each sex. DM was defined as either when the participants had glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) ≥ 6.5
Spatial control of reverberation is essential for delivering a natural or augmented sound experience in immersive audio systems. This presentation introduces two core technologies integrated into the updated object-based audio platform, which incorporates a 3-D reverberation effect. The first is an algorithm of spatial reverberation that measures sound intensity in real venues and estimates virtual source distributions to optimize reverberation processing based on sound object positions and loudspeaker layout. The second is a control method that applies spatial gain and delay weighting to reverberant signals, creating three-dimensional gradients to manipulate attributes, such as reverberation directionality and perceived source width. These techniques are designed to operate across diverse loudspeaker configurations and architectural scales. An evaluation framework combining physical acoustic metrics and subjective listening tests will also be outlined, demonstrating how these approaches influence spatial impression and listener experience.
