Résumé |
Many of our modern computerized activities, may they be personal, industrial or artistic, involve searching, classi- fying and browsing large numbers of digital objects. The tools we have at hand, however, are poorly adapted as they are often too formal: we illustrate this matter in the first section of this article, with the example of multimedia col- lections. We then propose a software tool for dealing with digital collections in a less formal manner. Finally, we see that our software design is strongly backed up by both artistic and psychological knowledge concerning the an- cient human activity of collecting, which we will see can be described as a metaphor for categorization in which two irreducible cognitive modes are at play: aspectual similarity and spatio-temporal proximity. ReCollection, the software we have designed to experiment and demon- strate these ideas may be useful in many areas of musical creation, from sound synthesis to archiving, editing and publishing content, and also simulating musical percep- tion |