With its capability of merging virtual and real worlds, Augmented Reality (AR) provides a new framework for professional practices in numerous disciplines: it can deliver interactive pieces of information in real-time and in space. In music, such capabilities can have an important role in music notation and interfaces for electronic music performance. Numerous experimental musical applications have been developed since the early 2000s both for education and performance. However, in most circumstances, AR has been seen more as an aide towards the understanding and/or realization of traditional repertoire rather than a game-changing technology able to foster new artistic practices. There are still many uses yet to be explored, especially concerning compositional practice This dissertation also paves the way to a new repertoire in which the unprecedented possibilities offered by AR might be fully adopted and developed. This is an explorative work, structured mainly by a series of articles written solely by the author and published during his PhD studies (or accepted for publication at the time of writing). In these papers, a set of differentiated applications and compositions in the AR field are realized. The main thread that links all of the studies lies in the investigation of the relationship between AR and gesture-based musical practices (such as gesture-based control of spatialization and AR augmented instruments). A central role played by gesture-based music notation is the capability to notate a gesture in the space, with its exact coordinates and its exact velocity. Such a novel form of notation, enabled by AR technology and impossible in other domains, can also be enriched with interactive capabilities. As discussed in some studies included in this dissertation, virtual objects assigned to notational functions can also be assigned, simultaneously, to interface functions, thus creating interface-notation hybrids. Other studies of this dissertation address the capability of a virtual object changing its functions over time: AR notation can also be transformed into a virtual performer or into a visual augmentation of gesture. Another hopeful contribution of this dissertation to the musical use of AR lies in providing technical explanations of implementation procedures that could serve as a background for the creation of best practices

OMEN (On-demand Metadata Extraction Network) addresses a fundamental problem in Music Information Retrieval: the lack of universal access to a large dataset containing significant amounts of copyrighted music. This thesis proposes a solution to this problem that is accomplished by utilizing the large collections of digitized music available at many libraries. Using OMEN, libraries will be able to perform on-demand feature extraction on site, returning feature values to researchers instead of providing direct access to the recordings themselves. This avoids copyright difficulties, since the underlying music never leaves the library that owns it. The analysis is performed using grid-style computation on library machines that are otherwise under-used (e.g., devoted to patron web and catalogue use).

People express their national identity not only through hot nationalist sentiments, but also in their daily conversations and practices. The theory of banal nationalism highlights the everyday routines and discourses through which mundane national sentiments are produced. In China, a number of young people are engaged in the creation of Ancient Chinese-style songs which, incidentally, reveal understanding of their national identity. Ancient Chinese-style songs (Gufeng 古风 in Chinese), a variety of digital songs that are created by young netizens online with special emphasis on traditional Chinese elements, provides data through which young people's interpretation and performance of national identity in their daily lives can be examined. Drawing on the theory of banal nationalism, this research analyzes the participants' construction of their national identity in music creating and listening activities. The research uses the qualitative method of web content analysis in order to understand the song lyrics and listeners' comments on the songs. The analysis presented here reveals various aspects of the participants' sense of banal nationhood. Findings show that the participants in Ancient Chinese-style songs not only provide multiple interpretations of national culture and history, but also engage in embodied performance of the nation through music creating and listening activities. In the process, the young people link their daily experience of online entertainment with national culture, and attach new meanings to the cultural elements they draw on. It is argued here that the young people exercise agency in their interpretation of the nation. Moreover, the diverse expressions of banal national sentiment created by the participants in this music style suggests that cultural traditions are not only the stereotyped concepts identified in hot nationalism studies, but that they also include everyday experiences that the young music lovers identify with. Key words: banal nationalism, national identity, Chinese youth, online music

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The main contribution of this dissertation is a system for locating and indexing audio files on the World Wide Web. The idea behind this system is that the use of both web page and audio file analysis techniques can produce more relevant information for locating audio files on the web than is used in full-text search engines. / The most important part of this system is a web crawler that finds materials by following hyperlinks between web pages. The crawler is distributed and operates using multiple computers across a network, storing results to a database. There are two main components: a set of retrievers that retrieve pages and audio files from the web, and a central crawl manager that coordinates the retrievers and handles data storage tasks. / The crawler is designed to locate three types of audio files: AIFF, WAVE, and MPEG-1 (MP3), but other types can be easily added to the system. Once audio files are located, analyses are performed of both the audio files and the associated web pages that link to these files. Information extracted by the crawler can be used to build search indexes for resolving user queries. A set of results demonstrating aspects of the performance of the crawler are presented, as well as some statistics and points of interest regarding the nature of audio files on the web.

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