Gabriel Beaudoin
I am a Ph.D. student at the Université de Montréal in the HCI lab, supervised by Prof. Damien Masson, and associated with Mila.
Research Projects
TextBand: Writing by Visualizing and Editing the Sound of Text
UIST '26Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '26)
An interactive writing environment that enables writers to visualize, listen to, and edit the soundscape of their writing (rhythm, meter, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration) in real time with bidirectional editing.
@inproceedings{10.1145/3830398.3830606,
author = {Beaudoin, Gabriel and Masson, Damien},
title = {TextBand: Writing by Visualizing and Editing the Sound of Text},
year = {2026},
isbn = {9798400728563},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3830398.3830606},
doi = {10.1145/3830398.3830606},
abstract = {Traditional writing tools focus on how text looks, not how it sounds. We introduce TextBand, a writing tool that helps edit the sonority and musicality of text using a design inspired by music composition software: text is on a timeline to help visualize and edit rhythm; sentences can be heard through text-to-speech playback; and sonorities can be viewed and edited on a phonetic grid similar to a MIDI editor. Results from a user study showed that TextBand helps identify 35\% more sonority patterns and successfully fix 57\% more sonority issues while helping consciously use figures of speech such as assonance and alliteration. Our work challenges the design of existing writing software and paves the way for more sound-based support when writing.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
numpages = {12},
location = {Detroit, MI, USA},
series = {UIST '26}
}