Interactive Performance of Ubiquitous Music (original) (raw)
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Gesture and Emotion in Interactive Music: Artistic and Technologial Challenges
This dissertation presents a new and expanded context for interactive music based on Moore’s model for computer music (Moore 1990) and contextualises its findings using Lesaffre’s taxonomy for musical feature extraction and analysis (Lesaffre et al. 2003). In doing so, the dissertation examines music as an expressive art-form where musically significant data is present not only in the audio signal but also in human gestures and in physiological data. The dissertation shows the model’s foundation in human perception of music as a performed art, and points to the relevance and feasibility of including expression and emotion as a high-level signal processing means for bridging man and machine. The resulting model is multi-level (physical, sensorial, perceptual, formal, expressive) and multi-modal (sound, human gesture, physiological) which makes it applicable to purely musical contexts, as well as intermodal contexts where music is combined with visual and/or physiological data. The model implies evaluating an interactive music system as a musical instrument design. Several properties are examined during the course of the dissertation and models based on acoustic music instruments have been avoided due to the expanded feature set of interactive music system. A narrowing down of the properties is attempted in the dissertation’s conclusion together with a preliminary model circumscription. In particular it is pointed out that high-level features of real-time analysis, data storage and processing, and synthesis makes the system a musical instrument, and that the capability of real-time data storage and processing distinguishes the digital system as an unprecedented instrument, qualitatively different from all previous acoustic music instrument. It is considered that a digital system’s particular form of sound synthesis only qualifies it as being of a category parallel to the acoustic instruments categories. The model is the result of the author’s experiences with practical work with interactive systems developed 2001-06 for a body of commissioned works. The systems and their underlying procedures were conceived and developed addressing needs inherent to the artistic ambitions of each work, and have all been thoroughly tested in many performances. The papers forming part of the dissertation describe the artistic and technological problems and their solutions. The solutions are readily expandable to similar problems in other contexts, and they all relate to general issues of their particular applicative area.
COMPUTER-CONTROLLED VIDEO AS A MULTIMODAL INTERFACE IN LIVE ACOUSMATIC MUSIC
ICMC, 2010
"This paper presents techniques for the novel use of projected video in a live improvised performance context. In particular, the use of digital video camera and computer to reveal information about an otherwise acousmatic performance will be discussed. An investigation of acousmatic musical performance which goes beyond fixed media works will be considered, where electroacoustic and instrumental performers are hidden from view and where video provides the only visual interface to the musicians. Aesthetic issues linked to the control of live video by the musicians will be discussed, including the expressive impact of using software to selectively revealing details of live instrumental and electronic techniques to the audience as part of an improvised performance. The potential ambiguity of the video interface will be explored where distortions of time are introduced using Max/MSP/Jitter to break direct causal relationships between visual gestures and sound, introducing moments of cross-modal discrepancy for audience members. Deliberate blurring of source identity between instrumental and electronic sounds in a live acousmatic context will also be considered."
Watermark, 2012
Electronic music, even when designed to be interactive, can lack performance interest and is frequently musically unsophisticated. This is unfortunate because there are many aspects of electronic music that can be interesting, elegant, demonstrative and musically informative. The use of dancers to interact with prototypical interfaces comprising clusters of sensors generating music algorithmically provides a method of investigating human actions in this environment. This is achieved through collaborative work involving software and hardware designers, composers, sculptors and choreographers who examine aesthetically and practically the interstices of these disciplines. The proposed paper investigates these interstices.
Reflections on Aspects of Music Interactivity in Performance Situations
Music interactivity is a sub-field of human-computer interaction studies. Interactive situations have different degree of structural openness and musical “ludicity” or playfulness. Discussing music seems inherently impossible since it is essentially a non-verbal activity. Music can produce an understanding (or at least prepare for an understanding) of creativity that is of an order neither verbal nor written. A human listener might perceive beauty to be of this kind in a particular music. But can machine-generated music be considered creative and if so, wherein lies the creativity? What are the conceptual limits of notions such as instrument, computer and machine? A work of interactive music might be more pertinently described by the processes involved than by one or several instanciations. While humans spontaneously deal with multiple process descriptions (verbal, visual, kinetic…) and are very good at synthesising, the computer is limited to handling processes describable in a formal language such as computer code. But if the code can be considered a score, does it not make a musician out of the computer? As tools for creative stimulus, composers have created musical systems employing artificial intelligence in different forms since the dawn of computer music. A large part of music interactivity research concerns interface design, which involves ergonomics and traditional instrument maker concepts. I will show examples of how I work with interactivity in my compositions, from straight-forward applications as composition tools to more complex artistic work.
This paper describes the conception, design and implementation of a number of hardware/software musical interfaces and their use in performance with a group of dancers and as units for public interaction. It investigates the design and development of such interfaces.
Embodiment and agency: Towards an aesthetics of interactive performativity
The aim of this paper is to take first steps in direction of a scientifically oriented aesthetics of New Media Art, taking into account the transformation of musical aesthetics taking place at present induced by new digital methods in artistic sound and music computing. Starting from the observation of relevant current issues in music composition and performances such as gesture control in algorithmic sound synthesis, live coding, musical robotics, and live algorithms for music, certain important concepts concerning a theory of human-machine interaction, which are at present under development in our research project C10 "Artistic Interactivity in Hybrid Networks" as part of the collaborative research center SFB/FK 427 "Media and Cultural Communication", are introduced and related to artistic practices. The essential concept of this theory – "interactivity" – is used as a generic term for different kinds of human-machine interactions and is closely relat...
The embodiment of music/sound within an multimediaperformance space
2010
Coming from a background of new music (audio) theatre composition / performance and acousmatics, we examine an ongoing collaboration from the perspective of these disciplines. Documenting the process of exchange at each stage has allowed for a constant analysis of methods used to facilitate our communication and procedure of developing musical collaboration within a larger context of a multimedia performance project - a choreographic installation encompassing dance, video, animation, visual design, and virtual worlds. We will focus on our use of terminologies / languages / systems as tools for research, as well as on the subjective experience of working with live electronics. Meta-technical ideas are explored with regard to the spatial and temporal considerations involved in this kind of process, that is to say the acoustic, the threei?½ dimensional, and the audio-visual relationship: the absence / presence of a sound source, its physicality, its virtuality but also the evolving rel...
(Keynote) Interactive Music: Social Considerations of Gesture and Vocality
In this keynote presentation, I critically reflect on what interactive music is about and how it has developed in recent years. Among interactive music, I include what is often called Interactive (Computer) Music, Interactive Gesture Music (IGM) or ‘gesture controlled’ music, ‘multimodal’ (interaction) environments (MEs) and live electronics. Central to my argument are two small case studies of interactive music performances that share some features in gestural control and composition through, but are also very different in many ways: Swiss interactive vocal performer, singer and sound artist Franziska Baumann’s Electric Renaissance and German singer and composer Alex Nowitz’s Studies for Selfportrait. Rather than discussing these clips at great length, I would rather focus on the theoretical underpinnings of my own considerations regarding these performances, particularly with regard to related issues of interactive music technology, which have an inherent social interest.
How can Visual Music be composed and presented in such an engaging way that it will turn spectators into participants? How to connect a youthful, twenty-first century audience who are keen to update their Instagram story with Visual Music? Visual Music is an art form, which is "an equal and meaningful synthesis of the visible and audible" (Lund & Lund 2009 149) and "is typically non-narrative and non-representational" (Evans 2005 11). Visual Music is often presented as cinema. Cinema audiences are generally considered to be passive spectators, whose "reactions are pre-programmed by the director, crew, cast and writer" (Mackintosh 2003 2). This paper highlights the nexus between, to use McCall's (2004) terms 'the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial', with a focus on creating interactive Visual Music installations.