In this paper, we describe how a multidisciplinary undergraduate course in Conducting Robots becomes a venue for fostering creativity and teaching strategies for creativity enhancement. We perform a number of creativity measurements and explain our results in the context of creativity research.

THIS STUDY COMPARED THE EMOTIONAL INTENSITIES of a conductor and audience during a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The affective state of the conductor was estimated unobtrusively with a wearable electrocardiogram, and audience participants selfreported their affective states with manual slider boxes. Results indicated that: 1) the conductor's heart rate variations were temporally aligned with structural patterns in the musical scores; and 2) these variations strongly correlated with the average emotional intensity measurement of the audience. Four consecutive musical selections yielded significant positive correlations (p < .001; r ¼ .86, .84, .48, .61), demonstrating a temporally related emotional intensity shared between the conductor and audience during the performance. Although a causal relationship was not determined, some evidence supported induction as the mechanism of emotional communication. These results suggest possible methods for better understanding the affective experiences of conductors, the reactions of listeners to various stimuli, and the interactions between audiences and musicians during concerts.

In this paper we present a vision system that analyzes the gestures of a noted conductor conducting a real orchestra, a different approach from previous work that allowed users to conduct virtual orchestras with prerecorded scores. We use a low-resolution video sequence of a live performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and we track the conductor's right hand. The tracker output is lined up with the output of an audio beat tracker run on the same sequence. The resulting analysis has numerous implications for the understanding of musical expression and gesture.

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While many have explored multidisciplinary approaches to course content delivery in computer science and engineering, very few have combined engineering with fundamentally different disciplines such as the arts, humanities, or social science. This paper presents a multidisciplinary undergraduate seminar entitled "Conducting Robots" that brings together majors from four disparate disciplines: computer science, mechanical engineering, music, and interactive multimedia. The goal of the course is to teach and support interdisciplinary teamwork while student teams build an artificial system that can conduct the college orchestra. The end-of-semester survey shows that students found the course interesting and challenging, motivating them to collaborate with peers across disciplines.