Starting to record music again..
Cog
May 16th, 2012Live interfaces: Performance, Art, Music conferece
May 11th, 2012Happily we’ve been awarded some funding for a conference on live performance technology from Vitae Yorkshire! This will be a great start to my new position in ICSRiM. Here’s the call:
LIVE INTERFACES
Performance, Art, Music
http://icsrim.org.uk/liveinterfaces/
Date: 7th-8th September, 2012
Venue: ICSRiM, School of Music, University of Leeds, UK
CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES
Live Interfaces is a conference on live, technology-mediated interaction in performance. The conference seeks to investigate cross-disciplinary understandings of performance technology with a particular focus on issues related to the notion of ‘liveness’ in interaction.
Live Interfaces will consist of paper and poster presentations, performances and workshops over two days. Researchers, theorists and artists from diverse fields are encouraged to participate, including: digital performance, live art, computer music, choreography, music psychology, interaction design, human computer interaction, digital aesthetics, computer vision, smart materials and augmented stage technology.
We invite submissions addressing the conference theme of technology-mediated live interaction in performance, and suggest the following indicative topics:
- Audience perception/interaction
- Biophysical sensors
- Brain-computer interfaces
- Computer vision/real-time video in performance
- Cross-modal perception/illusion
- Digital dramaturgy/choreography/composition
- Digital performance phenomenology
- Gesture recognition and control
- Historical perspectives
- Live coding in music, video animation and/or dance
- Participatory performance
- Performance technology aesthetics
- Redefining audience interaction
- Tangible interaction
Paper submissions should be in extended abstract form, with a suggested length of 500 words. Please format all submissions using either the Word or LaTeX template available from the website.
Performance proposals should include a description of the performance and the live interaction technology used, as well as a list of technical requirements. Attaching recordings of past performances is strongly encouraged.
We hope to announce a journal special issue on performance technology following the conference as a publication opportunity for extended papers.
Extended abstracts must be submitted electronically via the website by midnight (GMT+1) on the 17th June 2012. All submissions will be subject to cross-disciplinary peer review, and notified of acceptance by 1st July.
Please address all queries to liveinterfaces@icsrim.org.uk
Key dates:
- 17th May – Submissions system open
- 17th June – Submission deadline
- 1st July – Notification of selected papers/performances
- 29th July – Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers
- 7-8th September – Conference
Registration will open nearer the date, with a fee in the region of £25, including lunch for both days.
Please keep an eye on one of the following for updates, including information on conference workshops and co-located events.
Website: http://icsrim.org.uk/liveinterfaces/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/liveinterfaces/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/liveinterfaces/
Identica: http://identi.ca/liveinterfaces/
Planning committee:
Alex McLean, University of Sheffield, University of Leeds (from August)
Kate Sicchio, University of Lincoln
Maria Chatzichristodoulou, University of Hull
Scott Hewitt, University of Huddersfield
Ben Dornan, University of Sheffield
Stephen Pearse, University of Sheffield
Phoebe Bakanas, ICSRiM, University of Leeds
Ash Sagar, York St Johns University
Senior advisor:
Kia Ng, Director of ICSRiM, University of Leeds
Supported by Vitae Yorkshire, the University of Leeds and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Computer Music Journal – Special Issue on Live Coding – Call for Submissions
April 24th, 2012I’m guest editing an issue of the Computer Music Journal on live coding together with Julian Rohrhuber and Nick Collins. Really excited about this already, despite the submissions deadline being some eight months away from now.. The call for proposals is below.
We are excited to announce a call for papers for a special issue of Computer Music Journal, with a deadline of 21st January 2013, for publication in Spring of the following year. The issue will be guest edited by Alex McLean, Julian Rohrhuber and Nick Collins, and will address themes surrounding live coding practice.
Live coding focuses on a computer musician’s relationship with their computer. It includes programming a computer as an explicit onstage act, as a musical prototyping tool with immediate feedback, and also as a method of collaborative programming. Live coding’s tension between immediacy and indirectness brings about a mediating role for computer language within musical interaction. At the same time, it implies the rewriting of algorithms, as descriptions which concern the future; live coding may well be the missing link between composition and improvisation. The proliferation of interpreted and just-in-time compiled languages for music and the increasing computer literacy of artists has made such programming interactions a new hotbed of musical practice and theory. Many musicians have begun to design their own particular representational extensions to existing general-purpose languages, or even to design their own live coding languages from scratch. They have also brought fresh energy to visual programming language design, and new insights to interactive computation, pushing at the boundaries through practice-based research. Live coding also extends out beyond pure music and sound to the general digital arts, including audiovisual systems, linked by shared abstractions.
2014 happens to be the ten-year anniversary of the live coding organisation TOPLAP. However, we do not wish to restrict the remit of the issue to this, and we encourage submissions across a sweep of emerging practices in computer music performance, creation, and theory. Live coding research is more broadly about grounding computation at the verge of human experience, so that work from computer system design to exposition of live coding concert work is equally eligible.
Topic suggestions include, but are not limited by:
- Programming as a new form of musical exploration
- Embodiment and linguistic abstraction
- Symbology in music interaction
- Uniting liveness and abstraction in live music
- Bricolage programming in music composition
- Human-Computer Interaction study of live coding
- The psychology of computer music programming
- Measuring live coding and metrics for live performance
- The live coding audience, or live coding without audience
- Visual programming environments for music
- Alternative models of computation in music
- Representing time in interactive programming
- Representing and manipulating history in live performance
- Freedoms, constraints and affordances in live coding environments
Authors should follow all CMJ author guidelines, paying particular attention to the maximum length of 25 double-spaced pages.
Submissions should be received by 21st January 2013. All submissions and queries should be addressed to Alex McLean <alex.mclean@icsrim.org.uk>
We have no idea what we are doing: exclusion in free software culture
April 10th, 2012The following is a live post which includes some strong statements which I might temper later. If anyone asks, I do know what I’m doing and understand recursion just fine.
There’s an interesting thread on the eightycolumn mailing list on gender and exclusion in free software, which has prompted me to write up some thoughts I’ve been having on why programming cultures have such a problem with diversity.
In particular, I have come to the conclusion that programmers have no idea what they are doing. Actually I think it is generally true; people have no idea what they are doing. We all do things anyway, because knowledge and practice can be embodied in action, rather than being based entirely on theory. But we find this idea uncomfortable somehow, so come up with somewhat arbitrary theories to structure our lives. For example floor traders have algorithms that they follow when making their decisions, but if they take them too seriously the result is a market crash, because they are following models rather than ground truths. (World leaders are also known to externalise their decisions when confronted with the unfathomable, with catastrophic results.)
When it comes to programming, there are all manner of pseudoscientific theories for software development, but humans really lack the powers of introspection to know what programming is and how we do it. That’s a pretty wonderful thought, really, that we can construct these huge systems together without understanding them. However when you’re learning programming, it can result in a pretty scary leap. We have mathematical theory from computer science, and the half-arsed broken metaphors around object orientation, and the constraints of strict interpretations of agile development (which no-one actually adheres to in practice), and learners might get the impression that somehow internalising all this theory is essential before you can start programming. No it isn’t, you learn programming by doing it, not by understanding it! Programs are fundamentally non-understandable.
As an example, I seriously doubt whether we can really grasp the notion of recursion, at least without extensive meditation. But we don’t have to, we just internalise a bunch of heuristics that allow us to feel our way around a problem until we have a solution that works. In the case of recursion, we focus on single cases and terminating conditions, but I don’t think this is understanding recursion, it’s using a computer as cognitive support, to reach beyond our imagination.
Another example is monads, computational constructs often beloved by Haskell programmers. It’s fascinating that those new to Haskell gain an intuition for monads through a lot of practice, then come up with a post-hoc theory to structure that intuition, and then invariably write a tutorial based on that theory. However that tutorial turns out to be useless for everyone else, because the theory structures the intuition (or in Schön’s terms, knowledge-in-action), and without the intuition, the theory is next to useless.
Anyway, returning to my actual point.. To learn programming is to embark on years of practice, learning to engage with the unknowable, while battling with complex and sometimes unhelpful theory. With such barriers to entry, no wonder that it seems so very easy to exclude people from developer communities. Of course this just means we have to try harder, and I think part of this involves rethinking programming culture as something grounded in engaged activity as well as theory.
Live Notation first performance
April 4th, 2012A couple of weekends ago I collaborated on a performance with Hester Reeve at the LoveBytes festival for the Live Notation project.
As I was struggling with my new “smoothdirt” live coding language, Hester moved around the cinema carrying out actions including with bells, pebbles in her mouth and a large rock. This aspect seems like a form of live ritual; developing rituals while following them. We had decided that the performance should be an engagement through sound, and without any technologically mediated connection beyond microphone and loudspeakers.
I used a wireless keyboard with the cinema as my screen, and had planned to move around more while playing with the multi channel sound in the cinema, but the audience was unexpectedly large, and so I settled in the seats at the front. This meant I missed out on seeing much of what Hester was up to, and the interaction was just through sound.
This was an experimental performance in that there was no rehearsal and it was certainly possible that it could have been a failure. It wasn’t that in my eyes, but I wish I could know what the audience’s experience of it was, good and bad. For me it was a struggle, but in the way that it should have been for a research performance — I was learning a new way of working, with new software I have written but have not yet properly understood. I think the experience was similar with Hester, whose work had not foregrounded sound in this way before. I wonder how much of this the audience picked up on.
In the end time passed very quickly for me, and at some point Hester completed her live work and decided to sit next to me, while I brought the music to a conclusion. The music by the way was intended to shift between “grid-based” techno and smoother textures, using the quadrophonic system to contrast and integrate these themes. This is what I’m writing smoothdirt for, and I’m really happy that I got enough of my ideas working to form the basis of my part of this performance.
Most of all though this collaboration is opening up a broader understanding for what performing with programming languages means. We’ll be discussing this, alongside perspectives from the “other side” of live artists, at an event in London on April 19th, I’m really looking forward to seeing where all this leads.
Fellowship
March 23rd, 2012I’m excited to be joining Kia Ng in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music (ICSRiM) within the faculty of Performance, Visual Arts & Communications (PVAC) for the new academic year, as a two year fellowship.
I’ll be a research fellow in Human/Technology Interface, a research strand supported within the cross disciplinary Culture, Society & Innovation Hub.
All very central to my interests, the ideal context for developing embodied approaches to live coding, perhaps. I’m really looking forward to getting started, although it won’t be for another four months or so..
smoothdirt
March 14th, 2012I’ve got some sounds out of my new live coding system, codenamed “smoothdirt”. Here’s an mp3 for you. The sounds are triggered with some C and structured and scheduled with some Haskell. Plenty more to do, but already really happy hearing embedded juxtoposition of timescales, smooth multichannel panning (2 channels in this test, but I’m playing on a quadrophonic cinema soundsystem at lovebytes) and sample accuracy, which I test at the end by playing a kick drum sample a lot.
My new representation also allows me to treat musical structure as both a discrete pattern and a continuous signal, which I’m very happy about, but haven’t explored the depths of yet..
Anyway with a few tweaks and effects it’ll be ready for the algorave in London this weekend.
Events
March 13th, 2012A busy couple of weeks ahead:
- This weekend (Saturday 17th March) I am playing as part of slub at a live algorave in London.
- Then the following weekend I’m doing a few things at the 2012 Lovebytes festival in Sheffield:
- Thursday 22nd March – An experimental (as in we don’t know what will happen) performance with Hester Reeve as part of the live notation project.
- Friday 23rd March – I’ve programmed a MEGADORK with some of my favourite electronic art superheroes, and doing a performance with Jake Harries at the start.
- Saturday 24th March – Some headphone performances in the winter gardens (hopefully streamed).
- Friday 30th March – A performance at PRISM in Sheffield, in collaboration with choreography hacker Kate Sicchio.
- Plus heads up for April 5th, a live coding seminar followed by performances at King’s College, London.
Patterns in Haskell revisited
March 6th, 2012A while back I came up with this way of representing musical patterns as pure functions in Haskell:
data Pattern a = Pattern {at :: Int -> [a], period :: Int}
These patterns can be composed nicely with pattern combinators, creating strange polyrhythmic structures, see my earlier post for info.
This turned out just great for representing acid techno, see for example this video of people dancing to Dave and I. I was using Tidal which uses a representation similar to the above (and Dave was using his lovely SchemeBricks software).
However lately I’ve been wanting to make music other than acid techno, in particular in preparation for a performance with Hester Reeve, a Live Artist.
After a lot of fiddling about, I seem to be settling on this:
PhD Thesis: Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts
February 22nd, 2012
With some minor corrections done, my thesis is finally off to the printers. I’ve made a PDF available, and here’s the abstract:
We consider the artist-programmer, who creates work through its description as source code. The artist-programmer grandstands computer language, giving unique vantage over human-computer interaction in a creative context. We focus on the human in this relationship, noting that humans use an amalgam of language and gesture to express themselves. Accordingly we expose the deep relationship between computer languages and continuous expression, examining how these realms may support one another, and how the artist-programmer may fully engage with both.
Our argument takes us up through layers of representation, starting with symbols, then words, language and notation, to consider the role that these representations may play in human creativity. We form a cross-disciplinary perspective from psychology, computer science, linguistics, human-computer interaction, computational creativity, music technology and the arts.
We develop and demonstrate the potential of this view to inform arts practice, through the practical introduction of software prototypes, artworks, programming languages and improvised performances. In particular, we introduce works which demonstrate the role of perception in symbolic semantics, embed the representation of time in programming language, include visuospatial arrangement in syntax, and embed the activity of programming in the improvisation and experience of art.
Feedback is very welcome!
BibTeX record:
@phdthesis{McLean2011,
title = {{Artist-Programmers} and Programming Languages for the Arts},
author = {McLean, Alex},
month = {October},
year = {2011},
school = {Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London}
}
RIS record:
TY - THES ID - McLean2011 TI - Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts PB - Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London AU - McLean, Alex PY - 2011/10/01
