ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
This article is part of the Research TopicEmbodied Perspectives on Sound and Music AIView all 15 articles
Inverse and Indirect Mappings in Embodied AI Systems in Everyday Environments
Provisionally accepted
- University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This paper explores how musicking technologies—interactive systems with musical properties— can enhance everyday public environments. We are particularly interested in investigating the effects of musical interactions in non-musical settings, such as offices, meeting rooms, and social work areas. Traditional music technologies (such as instruments) are built for goal-directed, conscious, and voluntary interactions. We propose a new perspective on embodied AI through systems that utilize indirect, inverse, unconscious, and, at times, involuntary interactions. Four different sound/music systems are examined and discussed with regard to their activity level: a reactive "birdbox," a reactive painting, active self-playing guitars, and interactive music balls. All these systems are multimodal, containing sensors that detect various physical inputs to produce sound and light, and having varying levels of perceived agency. The paper explores differences between direct/indirect and regular/inverse embodied AI paradigms. This study demonstrates how minimalistic interactions have the potential to yield complex and engaging musicking experiences, challenging the norms of overly intricate AI implementations.
Keywords: musicking technology, interactive sound systems, affordances, indirect interaction, Inverse mapping, human–computerinteraction, embodied AI
Received: 31 Mar 2025; Accepted: 28 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Riaz, Erdem and Jensenius. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Maham Riaz
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.