Computer and electronic music

This paper examines the aesthetic impetus for Milton Babbitt’s rhythmic systems of composition and his use of complex rhythmic strata. The author examines the history of two of Babbitt’s early works including synthesizer with live performer, Vision and Prayer and Philomel, addressing issues in the composer’s rhythmic notation, particularly in Philomel. The first section of Philomel is rhythmically analyzed and re-notated in an effort to challenge Babbitt’s use of 3/4 time signatures as an arbitrary delineator for his system of time-point serialization., providing a more accurate rhythmic demarcation for the phrases of the section according to event onsets. Rhythmic notational errors in Babbitt’s score are also addressed, with possible solutions given.

Digital computers offer unprecedented flexibility and accuracy for the composition and performance of polytemporal music involving multiple time streams: polyrhythms, metric modulations, multiple tempi, and precisely calculated independent continuous tempo changes (accelerandi and decelerandi). This article addresses some important musical and technical issues encountered in music with multiple simultaneous tempi, including music with independently fluctuating tempi. The article includes a brief summary of some important precedents in pre-computerized music, a look at some implementations of polytemporality in computer music, and some suggested techniques for designing and manipulating multiple time streams in computer music composition.

The revolution of sound recording, synthesis and transformation (commenced in 1948 with concrete music and in 1950 with electronic music), followed by the birth of computer music (since 1957), caused the natural emergence of a new professional profile – someone who can work in the phase of researching, writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performing live during concerts. From the early days, laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse but intertwined competencies. This is true for the Milan, Cologne, Paris and San Francisco centres during the first analogue generation; this has continued with the digital revolution (at CCRMA in Stanford and other centres in the United States, in France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, East Asia, to name a few). Although books and essays dedicated to the history of Computer Music do agree, in principle, on the interdisciplinary nature of this music and the importance of collaboration, and the field of music collaboration starts at last being investigated, the existence of the musical assitant has been often unreasonably neglected. In both the musical score and the program notes, or in written sources (a least in the published ones), his/her presence remains hidden most of the time, and literature on the collaboration composer/musical assistant is scattered. In this chapter I report findings from a study based on primary and secondary sources and administrative documents, conserved at three computer music centres: the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford University and the CSC (Centro di Sonologia Computazionale) in Padova. The analysis examines two points: 1) institutionalisation and recognition: I would investigate the presence (or absence or understatement, as the case may be) of an express concern for the theme of collaboration and the role of the musical assistant; 2) the presence of passages inside the sources, describing the ways in which this collaboration was undertaken between musical assistants and composers. My study covers the technological historical period which runs from the early computer programs until the first real time experiments. It is intended to enlighen the hidden art-science collaboration, the emergence of a profession, the traces remaining from the habitually wordless communication between a composer and an assistant, in the early era of computer music. It introduces questions about cooperation and the way it could induce dilemmas when considering authorship. The choice of these three centres is motivated by the close historical, musical, organisational, scientific and technological connections, and by the numerous technical, cultural and scientific exchanges between the three.

Structured for use in university courses, the book is an overview of the theory and practice of Max/MSP, with a glossary of terms and suggested tests that allow students to evaluate their progress. Comprehensive online support, running parallel to the explanations in the book, includes hundreds of sample patches, analyses, interactive sound-building exercises, and reverse engineering exercises. This book will provide a reader with skill and understanding in using Max/MSP for sound design and musical composition.

Second Edition updated for MAX 6) More than 500 pages, interactive examples, hundreds of patches, online support, theory and Max/MSP glossary, test, reverse engineering exercises, analyses, completion and correction of patches, etc.

Chapter I – Introduction to Sound Synthesis and Signal Processing
Chapter II – Additive Synthesis
Chapter III – Subtractive Synthesis
Chapter IV – Controls and LFO

Electroacoustic and Computer Music timelines are projects created by Paolo Zavagna in collaboration with students from Conservatories of Venezia and Padova (Italy). Timelines are organized by events, biographies, composi- tions, technologies and other relevant topics about elec- troacoustic and computer music, each one viewable with additional information. The project is totally open-source and uses the SIMILE widget (MIT) that adapts to the most commonly-used browsers. In the figure below you can see an overall view of one of the two websites.

This thesis concerns the application of psychoacoustic phenomena relating to the non-linear nature of the inner ear as an electroacoustic compositional tool. The compositions included in this portfolio explore the validity of a variety of non-linear inner ear phenomena within composition by employing them as primary compositional devices.

Psychoacoustics research into the non-linearities of the inner ear has proven that the inner ear has much more to offer the composer than has been previously considered. By reversing the role of the ear from, what Christopher Haworth describes as, 'being a submissive receiver',  to becoming an active participant in the creative process, an exciting level of opportunity opens up for both the composer and listener. A focus is given in this research to auditory distortion products and bandwidth phenomena with references to the author's own compositional material.

While it is relatively common for composers to have explored various elements of psychoacoustics in their work, a project of this size, which explicitly explores such material, has not been carried out until now. The work of Maryanne Amacher, Alvin Lucier, Diana Deutsch, and others has highlighted the possibilities of employing psychoacoustic principles in music. This research takes a new approach by placing a direct focus on the benefits of the utilisation of these non-linear mechanisms of the inner ear for the composer, while also positing a number of new creative methodologies with respect to the non-linearities of the inner ear.

Bregman claims that just a 'trickle of studies' in auditory research had been published by the late 1960s. Such a finding coincides with the birth of digital audio, which has facilitated such research to flourish and so the employment of electroacoustic music as an investigative tool into auditory studies seems a natural inclusion into the field.

Adorno once stated that the ear is a 'dozy and inert' organ and, by reconsidering such a view, one can destabilise common assumptions about psychoacoustics and the potential of the ears within music composition.  With a specific focus on phenomena relating to the non-linear biomechanical mechanisms of the inner ear, this research seeks to highlight the added physical dimension that can be experienced by the listener whose ears are being performed.

Il presente lavoro, dopo aver ripercorso velocemente alcune importanti fasi della storia della musica elettronica e alcuni momenti fondamentali della prima computer music istituzionale, si occupa di vedere cosa succede quando alcune di queste pratiche sperimentali accademiche e le tecniche di sintesi (frutto del lavoro di compositori e ricercatori nelle università e nei laboratori di ricerca), fuoriuscendo dai loro mondi d'origine, penetrano nel mondo della musica elettronica popular. Uno dei possibili risultati di questo incontro tra culture, pratiche ed approcci differenti è rappresentato dalla musica ambient ed in particolare dalla glitch music che secondo alcuni studiosi è stata  fortemente influenzata dalla riscoperta delle pratiche messe in atto dai compositori sperimentali storici e dai ricercatori della computer music, pratiche e sonorità, queste, che ri – attualizzate grazie soprattutto alla rivoluzione digitale e alla conseguente disponibilità di strumenti musicali elettronici hanno prodotto nuovi frutti.

Il lavoro in esame è diviso quindi in due macro aree: in una, quella storica, si analizza quell'espressione musicale elettronica e sperimentale contemporanea chiamata glitch music (oppure glitch sound, independent microsound, dsp music) ed in particolare, ripercorrendone le tappe e gli autori fondamentali che vi si sono dedicati, focalizza la propria attenzione, nell'altra, la parte monografica, sul lavoro di uno dei suoi esponenti più interessanti, ovvero il chitarrista e compositore austriaco Christian Fennesz, sia dal punto di vista della tecnica e delle tecnologia usate per comporre che dal punto di vista estetico.

During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer's role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, nonexistent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/ performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation?

Questo articolo è focalizzato su Atomi distratti, un lavoro per ensemble e live electronics del compositore italiano Mario Garuti, ed è organizzato su tre differenti livelli:
1. analisi poietico-estesica del brano;
2. presentazione dell’ambiente esecutivo del live electronics approntato per la prima esecuzione;
3. elaborazione di un algoritmo di sintesi in ambiente Max/MSP per l’esecuzione della parte di tastiera elettronica.
Dopo una breve introduzione in cui si chiarisce l’idea all’origine delle scelte musicali operate nel brano, viene precisata la metodologia di approccio all’analisi.
Il primo livello include un’analisi dei cambiamenti contrastivi in cui viene mostrato come, in Atomi distratti, a un’organizzazione gerarchica debole (Imberty) corrisponda un’esperienza del tempo musicale coesa e unitaria, attraverso cui la rappresentazione simbolica e fantasmatica sottesa al
brano (proprio la frammentazione del tempo interno, mise en abyme dell’ipotesi stessa) viene trasmessa integra ed intelligibile. Al fine di ottenere un tracciato delle immagini linguistiche, poetiche, musicali ed extra-musicali all’origine
del brano viene utilizzato il mezzo dell’intervista, in cui il compositore è chiamato in prima persona a indagare il proprio lavoro.
Il secondo livello include due sotto-livelli: in primo luogo viene data descrizione del materiale pre-registrato e del suo ruolo nell’economia del brano, quindi una descrizione tecnologica dell’ambiente esecutivo del live electronics di Atomi distratti si accompagna a un’osservazione comparata longitudinale delle opere di Mario Garuti che includono in organico il mezzo elettronico, al fine di chiarire il ruolo del live electronics all’interno del brano e l’evolversi del rapporto che il compositore modenese intrattiene con l’elettronica nei suoi lavori. Anche in questo caso l’intervista è lo strumento privilegiato per accedere al mondo interno del compositore.
Il terzo livello è strutturato a partire da una traduzioneinterpretazione in termini tecnologici delle descrizioni, registrate utilizzando il mezzo dell’intervista, che il compositore fornisce dei due preset di tastiera elettronica presenti in partitura. Di seguito viene descritto il progetto per lo strumento di sintesi, della cui realizzazione in ambiente Max/MSP si dà descrizione nel paragrafo conclusivo

This is an encyclopaedia entry that was published in 2015.

Electronic music is the great adventure of music from the beginning of the 20th century. Music has always embraced the latest technology, from drawn metal strings replacing gut strings, and the mechanical and manufacturing sophistication of the pianoforte replacing the harpsichord. The latest technology has always been used to extend and expand music's expressive possibilities, and that has included electronic music, where technology has been pressed into the service of music and many of the musical developments have been made possible by technological developments.

The authors describe recent insights and developments of the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), a performer controlled delay based network of digital sound processing devices designed to be an improvising environment for acoustic musicians. Since its introduction to Leonardo Music Journal readers by Pauline Oliveros in Volume 5, the EIS has undergone a continued evolution, while remaining grounded in Oliveros' practice of Deep Listening. The technical changes made by composer and performer David Gamper have been incremental, keeping the user interface as simple as possible and changing functionality as compositional and performance experience demand. The core of the current configuration has proved to be flexible and adaptable to many demands, several of which are described. The authors include examples of how experiencing the Expanded Instrument System has influenced and been influenced by the aesthetics of the musicians using it.

Artykuł charakteryzuje kulturowy fenomen retromanii, stara się w ten sposób wyjaśnić dlaczego współcześni twórcy posługując się stylami minionych dekad oraz nawiązując do przeszłości, próbują ją wywołać i wskrzesić. W dalszej części przedstawia zjawisko muzycznego zjawiska hauntology, dając tym samym wgląd w największe lęki pokolenia artystów dorastającego w Wielkiej Brytanii w latach 70 XX wieku. W tym celu autor analizuje książki Simona Reynoldsa: "Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past" (2013) oraz "Ghosts of my Life. Writings on depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures" (2014) Marka Fishera.

When people use a new technique, they are often unable at first to bring out its strengths and take advantage of its unique characteristics because they unwittingly limit the ways they use it to conform to their past experience.  Our attempts to realize the musical potentials of microcomputers are often molded by concepts we have inherited from three of its predecessors: written instrumental music, analog synthesizers, and large mainframe computer music systems.

Beginning in 1967/8 and continuing for the remainder of his career, Hugh Davies constructed over 120 self-built musical instruments, many of which consisted of every-day objects amplified via contact microphones. The purpose of this conference paper is to identify points of similarity between Davies’s practice and the present-day practice of live coding, defined here as the use of a computer programming language to generate music in a live performance. The paper is part of a broader attempt to place Davies’s instrument-building practice in a broader historic and cultural context, and is an extension and further development of a previous conference paper that I delivered in March 2015.

This paper discusses processes used to develop an interactive, participatory work that attempts to exemplify many of Grainger’s philosophies, goals, and approaches to creativity. In and Out, Over and Under, referencing Grainger’s “hills and dales” description of the scores for the Kangaroo Pouch instrument, integrates the author’s approaches to Grainger’s New Music Machines, the Grainger Museum (where In and Out ... ,was first performed as part of NiteArt2014), and presents a possible interpretation of what Grainger may have made if he had the options currently available. It discusses the systems used and how they represent aspects of Grainger’s philosophies regarding interaction, democracy and music. These ideas informed approaches to participatory music creation, interaction between audio and visual participatory creation and response, and introducing a major part of Australia’s musical history to a new audience.

This paper concerns the hypersampler implemented for my piece "Il grifo nelle perle nere" for piano and hypersampler, composed in 2008 and premiered during the 54th Venice Biennale’s International Festival of Contemporary Music, in the framework of XVII CIM – Colloquium on Music Informatics.
The hypersampler involves a real-time synthesis engine based on processes of feature extraction as an alternative to hyperinstruments’ physical control paradigm.
Features are derived from the performance of a traditional musician on an acoustic instrument – a piano
– and are used as a control for the mapping between the instantaneous power spectrum of the acoustic instrument’s sound output (the musical dynamics performed by the pianist) and real-time synthesis engine’s parameters.

Jordan Alexander Key (b. 1990): "To Say Pi," a Black-MIDI Ballet (electro-acoustic);

Video recording of dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMCrv7hSv4
Audio recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B_NdbgEqWY

Performance: Digital, multi-channel work for dancers.

Performances:
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, DC - May 17 & 18, 2019)
The Dance Place (Washington, DC 20017 - December 8 & 9, 2018)

Visual Art: "To Say Pi" (Circular Cantor Set with Mountain-Scape) by Jordan Alexander Key (Fall, 2018)

To Say Pi was commissioned under the National Science Foundation’s grant-1751989, awarded to Dr. Leslie Lamberson and sponsored by Drexel University. Special thanks to Lucy Bowen, choreographer of the dance component of this mini ballet.

To Say Pi focuses on a seemingly simple aspect of mathematics that makes its way into every part of our lives. We often first hear of pi as "the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter of that same circle" or only casually referenced in formulas like that of the area of a circle: A=pi(r^2). Pi lives in all things circular, cylindrical, and spherical in nature as a result, but maybe less clear is that it is also apparent in periodic things. For instance, the orbits of the planets around the sun and the sun around the galactic core are governed by mechanics that rely on pi.

One of the most surprising aspects of pi that this piece focuses on is its irrationality. There exists no pair of integers a and b such that a/b = pi. We can approximate it as well as we like, but this was not even proven to be true until the 1760s by Johann Lambert. For reference, modern calculus was largely finished by 1687. There were hints of the number’s own intractability as far in the past as the ancient Egyptians. They determined values in terms of continued fractions and noted that they seemed to be able to improve on these values without much thought. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Indian mathematician, Madhava determined a certain infinite sum would converge to pi. 200 years later, Liebniz would make the same discovery in Europe. Both the continued fraction representation and the Madhava-Liebniz Series, along with some less important representations make their way into the fabric of this piece. These mathematical structures inform and create melodies and rhythm to the limit of the perception of the human ear. Utilizing these two particular mathematical structures also ties together the work of many cultures: African, Indian, and European across many generations and emphasizes the depth of history and collaboration by numerous, often nameless, people that gave us our current understanding of pi.

To Say Pi attempts to bring together not only mathematics and music in a non-trivial way but also bridge numerous musical genres, looking both to music’s past and the future of music in the 21st century. Just as composer Conlon Nancarrow realized the limitations of human performability and consequently sought new modes of expression in the mechanical performers of his day – player pianos – To Say Pi seeks modes of expression in the digital capabilities of the computer. Nearly half a century ago, Nancarrow attempted to build his own mechanized orchestra and ultimately failed, but now at every composer’s disposal are the nearly infinite possibilities of MIDI in conjunction with synthesized and sampled sound. Unfortunately, many of MIDI’s digital possibilities to supersede typical styles of performance have often been under utilized. Thus, To Say Pi exploits the digital orchestra allowed through MIDI not merely to synthetically replicate what human orchestras can do or create sounds wholly unique to the digital world, but rather to create a music of familiar sounds organized in a truly superhuman fashion, pointing to a new “third-stream” music in the space between sub-genres of digital pop music, like Black-MIDI, and 20th century classical music, like Sound Mass, New Complexity, and Post-Minimalism.

One recurrent thought in both popular culture and my mind as I wrote this piece was “How can math communicate in a way that is beyond words and perhaps universally intelligible?”. One of my sincere hopes is that if an alien intelligence were to watch this piece carefully enough they would walk away understanding that humans know something deep and beautiful about the relationship of pi to the cosmos.

Throughout the history of electroacoustic music, creative collaboration has been a constant feature due to the complexity of the technology. All laboratories and electronic music studios involved the presence of different individuals with diverse, intertwined competencies. In particular, the embedding of technological tools into the process of musical creation prompted the rise of a new " agent " called the Computer Music Designer (CMD), who can work in writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performance. Audiences as well as the academia have long been unaware of this emerging profession and its crucial role in the creative process of electroacoustic, electronic and computer music. This study sheds light on the socio-professional profile and expertise of the CMD in order to better understand how computer music design contributes to shaping electronic music as we know it. We present the methodology and outcomes of a questionnaire submitted to several CMDs. The purpose was to investigate this emerging community by means of an instrument permitting anonymity. Findings help to understand how the CMDs perceive their profession; trace common paths and habits among CMDs; and study this community from the point of view of their age, training, tasks, legal status, recognition, skills, professional identity and involvement in technological migration. The questionnaire instrument is appended.

In this paper, I use the program for a concert of electroacoustic music as a point of departure for discussing issues related to teaching electroacoustic music in the musicology or music theory classroom. Specifically, I examine the implied pedagogical framework of the Masterpieces of 20th Century Multi-channel Tape Music concert (hosted by Columbia University in the summer of 2000 as part of the Lincoln Center 2000 Festival) as it presented six works to a general, non-academic audience. In conclusion I suggest educators resist the urge to establish new canons of electroacoustic works,  and instead employ pedagogical approaches that encourage critical engagement with contemporary musical works from a variety of perspectives.

Using digital technology, a composer has access to a previously unimaginable level of control over both envelope and timbre.  But at the present time, some composers have not yet taken advantage of these rich digital options for varying timbre and envelope.  In this article on New Music Box I present some options for more effective timbral and envelope development, including the development of musical material from non-pitched sounds, variation techniques, and exercises in the placement of sounds based on the study of rhetoric in language.  You can also see the article online at:
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/timbre-envelope-and-variation-in-electroacoustic-music/

"Dalla Sua Orbita" is a piece for hyperviolin written in 2007 and revised in 2011 in which the hyperinstrument system produces modifications of sound and structure starting from incoming data. The musical data is encoded through processes of feature extraction and preprocessed by a limiter, then routed to algorithms for sound transformation/generation, which produce a musical result which varies, according to process intensity, from morphologically independent sound material (e.g. sound materials generated by the granulators [Patch 5] and pitch transposers [Patch 3]) to a reinforcement of the starting instrumental materials (spatialisation), timbre modifications (ring modulation with distortion of negative sideband output signal [Patch 2], live-sampling subsequent reading of fragments varying rate [Patch 4]).
The instrumental performer must be aware of how the hyperinstrument system interprets his actions instant by instant, so to provide significance to his technical and interpretational choices, in connection with the performance of the live-electronics interpreter.
The mapping is directly applied to the traditional musical instrument, implemented by specific hardware designed by professor Matteo Ricchetti and realized by InfoMus- Lab of Genoa.

This paper concerns the hypersampler implemented for my piece Il grifo nelle perle nere for piano and hypersampler, composed in 2008 and premiered during the 54 th Venice Biennale's International Festival of Contemporary Music, in the framework of XVII CIM-Colloquium on Music Informatics. The hypersampler involves a real-time synthesis engine based on processes of feature extraction as an alternative to hyperinstruments' physical control paradigm. Features are derived from the performance of a traditional musician on an acoustic instrument-a piano-and are used as a control for the mapping between the instantaneous power spectrum of the acoustic instrument's sound output (the musical dynamics performed by the pianist) and realtime synthesis engine's parameters. 1 T. Machover, Hyperinstruments: A Progress Report. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1992, p. 4. 2 Feature extraction is intended as "a form of data processing that takes a set of values and returns amore compact representation of those values. The compact representation is called a feature, and the initial set of values could be referred to as the input vector. The process of feature extraction is a form of dimension reduction, because it involves the mapping of an input vector of dimension N onto an output scalar or vector that has dimensionality that is smaller than N". J. Bullock, Implementing audio feature extraction in live electronic music, Ph. D. Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Birmingham Conservatoire,

Throughout the history of electroacoustic music, creative collaboration has been a constant feature due to the complexity of the technology. All laboratories and electronic music studios involved the presence of different individuals with diverse, intertwined competencies. In particular, the embedding of technological tools into the process of musical creation prompted the rise of a new “agent” called the Computer Music Designer (CMD), who can work in writing, creating new instruments, recording and/or performance. Audiences as well as the academia have long been unaware of this emerging profession and its crucial role in the creative process of electroacoustic, electronic and computer music. This study sheds light on the socio-professional profile and expertise of the CMD in order to better understand how computer music design contributes to shaping electronic music as we know it. We present the methodology and outcomes of a questionnaire submitted to several CMDs. The purpose was ...

Le logiciel eua'oolin-nahuatl : eua, prendre son envol ; oolin, mouvement-a pour but la conversion en notation musicale du libre tracé de trajectoires dans un espace tridimensionnel. (Estrada 1994b, 94-99) eua'oolin propose une forme originale de capture simultanée de trois composantes, sonores ou rythmiques, dans une trajectoire unique qui, au moyen d'un captage chronométrique, inclut le développement temporel à travers la vitesse que le tracé acquiert à tout moment. Un espace cubique sert à représenter les trajectoires dont l'exécution se fait à la main avec l'aide d'un bâton au bout duquel se trouve une petite boule. Celle-ci représente un point qui indique l'évolution temporelle de la trajectoire tridimensionnelle. Chaque trajectoire est filmée constamment par deux petites caméras de télévision, toutes les deux fixes à l'extérieur de l'espace de représentation [ILLUSTRATION A] :  caméra No. 1, placée au fond, capte les mouvements sur le plan frontal du cube  caméra No. 2, située sur un côté, capte les mouvements du plan latéral. ILLUSTRATION A. eua'oolin, CHRONO-PHOTOGRAPHIES D'UNE TRAJECTOIRE DANS L'ESPACE CUBE DE REPRÉSENTATION. Les deux images captent simultanément une même trajectoire à partir de l'angle frontal x-y-photo à gauche-et de l'angle latéral x-zdroite 2 .

This article arises from the need to reflect upon the possibility of developing new ways of teaching electroacoustic music, based on the opportunities recently offered by technology and the theories about learning that have been developed in recent decades. After taking into consideration the limits of the current teaching methods, the article examines various theories and approaches that involve questioning the objectivity of the learning process, the concept of multiple intelligences, the concentration on the experience as the focal point of learning and so forth. On the basis of these reflections, and after evaluating various teaching experiences over the past twenty years, the authors make some practical proposals, without imagining a curriculum, but rather by outlining several possible activities within an organic teaching project. To this end, a software program is described and realised in which the learner is engaged through the use of an interactive game format that can be ...

This paper was published in the Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2016 (pp. 270-274). It was presented (in a different version) at that conference on Wednesday 14 September 2016 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The Proceedings are available for free at http://www.icmc2016.com/proceedings.pdf.

Abstract:
The preservation of electroacoustic and computer music is highly problematic. This is also true for media art and for born-digital cultural heritage in general. This paper dis-cusses the observations, conclusions and recommenda-tions of a Dutch research project on the preservation of born-digital heritage in film, photography, architecture and art that are relevant for electroacoustic and computer music. References are made to research on the preserva-tion of electroacoustic music. OAIS, the ISO standard reference model for digital repository, serves as a starting point. Discussed are the difference between born-digital vs. digitized heritage and the specific concerns regarding born-digital cultural heritage. Attention is paid to the lack of standardization. The recommendations include: to use a distributed OAIS model; to start soon and in an early stage, with simple, basic steps; the importance of education in preservation for art and music students and profes-sionals. The preservation of electro-acoustic and computer music is linked to concerns relating to digital heritage in other cultural-artistic realms.

This paper discusses computer aided and automated composition/analysis, and related aesthetic understanding. It discusses the program ICIA, prototyped with the Max environment, that integrates: sound analysis systems; sound effecting and manipulation systems; algorithmic composition processes; and gesture recognition systems.
ICIA segments sounds selected by the composer/improviser into usable parts and groupings via a user and machine defined stochastic processes. The groupings are represented on a display for manipulation through a variety of compositional processes by the composer/improviser in real time. The sounds that the composer/improviser may use include: the sounds of the environment; sounds previously stored; sounds being generated by ICIA; or any other kind of audible input the composer/improviser chooses.
It provides a provocative environment for the composer/improviser by interpreting their physical, sonic, intentional and non-intentional actions and decisions through a set of algorithms that the composer/improviser has varying control over. These algorithms have built into them a ‘degree of predictability’ scale that the composer or machine may set. Terms such as ‘more’ or ‘less’, ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, ‘regular or ‘irregular’ are also used in relation to aspects of the compositional/improvisational process. Using such ‘non-musical’ terms causes the composer/improviser to consider their approach outside of traditional composition systems. Therefore the composer/improviser is provoked to take into account all aspects of their interaction with ICIA in the creation of a sound art/musical artwork, exposing their conscious and unconscious, intentional and non-intentional, aesthetic approaches in the process of creation.

Proceedings of Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society's 2015 Annual Conference (KEAMSAC2015) Seoul, Korea, 2-3 October 2015

This paper concerns the hypersampler implemented for my piece "Il grifo nelle perle nere" for piano and hypersampler, composed in 2008 and premiered during the 54th Venice Biennale’s International Festival of Contemporary Music, in the framework of XVII CIM – Colloquium on Music Informatics.
The hypersampler involves a real-time synthesis engine based on processes of feature extraction as an alternative to hyperinstruments’ physical control paradigm. Features are derived from the performance of a traditional musician on an acoustic instrument – a piano – and are used as a control for the mapping between the instantaneous power spectrum of the acoustic instrument’s sound output (the musical dynamics performed by the pianist) and realtime synthesis engine’s parameters.