Nime live blog: Conducting aanalysis

They asked people to conduct however they wanted, to build a data set. Focus on the relationship between motion and loudness.
25 subjects conducting along to a recording. Used kinect to sample data. Used libxtract to measure loudness in the recordings.
Users listen to the recording twice and then conduct it 3 times
Got joint descriptors; velocity, acceleration and jerk; distance to torso.
Got general descriptors about quality of motion, maximum hand height.
they looked for descriptors highly correlated to loudness. they found none. some participants said they didn’t follow dynamics. 8 subjects were removed.
Some users used hand height for loudness, others used larger gestures. they separated users into two groups.

They have been able to find tendencies across users. However,a general model may not be the right approach.

Questions

How do they choose users?
People with no musical training were in the group that raised hand height.

Live blogging flossie: sound body gender

I’m reduced to taking notes with my phone, as my laptop battery life is not great.
i didn’t catch the name of the speaker, but she has a very impressive cv…
gender art started in ancient greece w sappho. She referenced her body and emotion. Women artists get recognised more in ethnography than art history.
Now a slide of Ada Lovelace’s program. Lovelace was the beginning of software. Sylvia Plath also represents a lack of support of women creatives. …..
Conceptual art and performance art of the 70s allowed a feminist critique. Women’s identity is opposed to a masculine tradition. New technologies allows new images and new thoughts. Ideals of masculinity and feminity are dominant in online communities. Most editors of wikipedia are men.
She is now talking aboout the anarchistic and artistic value of floss, talking about the ideology of collaborative working.
Now she is talking about the Art+FOSS book, which is really good. Fcforum.net is a useful resource for artists, tech and activism. Artists were prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws and fcforum helped them.
Free Culture has festivals like piksel in norway. They support a lot of hacker artists.
Composer Shelly Knotts has a controversial post about women in live coding on her website. Norah Lorway is also a live coder, who works collectively. She is part of the OpenLab underground London collective.
Many performers are activists. She seems to be assrting that live code is a path to utopian, collective futures.
Gender art paratice can queer technologies.

live blogging flossie: BCS Women

Talk by Louise Brown.
BCS is the British Computer Science professional body, representing members in the IT profession. A learned society with a royal charter and can charter people and offer qualifications and is a charity. It wishes to be the gold standard for diversity in the IT sector.
15% of the 70k members are women. There are more than 50 specialist groups, one of which is BCS Women (and another is the Open Source Specialist Group).
BCS Women is volunteer-driven group. They aim to support members and raise awareness of women in IT. trying to get more women into IT. They want to put up posters in schools around women in IT. They do Android Programming ‘family fun days’ – a one day workshop, aimed at families, that lets people try coding.
They run a Lovelace Colloquium for undergraduate women. And did Open Source taster days that they ran jointly with the Open source Group and Fossbox. They did AppInventor, intro to git and intro to python.
FLOSS-UK in the spring has a call for papers.
the BCS is also having an AGM in a few days with a foss event.
www.bcs.org/bcswomen
www.bcs.org/category/17484

live blogging flossie: a tv collaboration in barcellona

They use pure data both in software, but also with paper objects and string stuck to walls
Free software changes your relation with your computer and by extension your relationship with a lot of technologies in your daily life.
The collective uses linux. Free software freed them from the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ uses. They found new uses. Their technical experience is considered less valid, but people call on them to discuss politics. This frees them to try to do whatever they want.
they made a ‘possible impossible machine.’ the first version had a terrible interface. it was made collectively by a workshop by all the participants. they had a pd patch to make all decisions. this was absurd. this is not the best way to handle negotiations.
some uses to technology have a tendency to erase the human touch.
they use old tech to resist planned obsolescence.
Gender construction: they don’t know how it works, but they know how to use it. Women there have worked to lose fear of opening the closed boxes. Open source has helped enable this.
she has talked a lot about their process around ‘errors’. failure is part of free software culture – to recognise bugs and not hide problems. there can also be a problem when people ‘celebrate’ the power of a mistake (ie the aesthetics of glitch) in that foss guys sometimes get upset about it. the speaker feels it’s a part of feminism to give less power to the ‘expert’ but to work with people who are experimenting, learning and making interesting material. Her political position is against the specialist.
minipimer.tv

live blogging flossie: screens in the wild

twitter: @wildscreens
Digital media embedded in environment. Mediated urban space. Most common uses of big screens is commercial.
How to do something different with screens and allow people access instead of letting advertisers dictate to us?
there are some big BBC screens in the centre of some communities. 23(?) in the UK? These are supposed to regenerate communities. How will this work? Nobody knows, but we want a big screen. They are high up and it’s hard to do interactive content.
the research challenge is how to integrate the screens into the environment in a way that the community has input.
How does the public engage with them? How can they be used to interact? How can we enable open access?
Active research and iterative design process.
they did community workshops.
they came up with something like a photo booth. easy to use. people do a pose and others in remote locations copy those poses to create an interaction.
Open access is very difficult, especially things that run a long time. The technology is also expensive, which makes it hard to get access.
www.screensinthewild.org

Live blogging flossie: Pulse Project- touching as listening

(Last year, Flossie was women-only and a bunch of men complained. This year, they bowed to pressure and decided to let anyone attend. I’m the only boy in the room.)
Talk by Michelle Lewis-King, an American who uses SuperCollider(!).
This is based on pulse-reading and some Chinese medicine principles. She has an acupuncture degree.
Occidental medicine is based on cutting apart dead bodies. Whereas Chinese medicine is more ‘alchemistic’, she says. Western medicine is from looking at dead bodies. Chinese medicine is based on feeling living bodies.
Pulses are abstractly linked to a type of music of the spheres.
She started drawing people’s pulses at different depths. This is sonic portraiture.
She found the SuperCollider community to be problematic to ask questions due to differences in ‘architecture’ differences. Some of the tutorials are not easy. She says the book is great because of the diversity of approaches. People at conferences have criticised her code, which is not a fun experience.
The community also provides a lot of support. The programme is free, community oriented and a useful tool.
She’s playing one of her compositions. It’s a pulsing very synthesised sound.
More info: journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a12 4th issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies
Twitter @vergevirtual

Sc symposium – chris brown – ritmos

software to explore perception and performance of polyrhythms
inspired by afro-cuban music
ritmos can play in polyrythmic modes and can listen to a live input. It deals with a difference between a player and a clave.
this was first implemented in HMSL!! As a piece called Talking Drum.
Branches is in sc2 and is in the same series of pieces.
so now there’s a new version in sc3.

classes

RitmosPlay defines a voice stream heirachy and scheduling
RitmosCtlGUI
RitmosSeqGUI
RitmosSynthDefs
RitmosXfrm F interaction algorythms
MIDIListener
he uses a genetic algorithm to balance between the specified clave and the input.
he’s got presets and sequences that deal w current settings.
he’s going into a lot of detail about how this works. It’s complex.
this has an impressive gui. And indeed an impressive functionality. And sounds great.
graphics library… I wish i’d caught the name of…

Sc symposium – lily play – bernardo barros

music notation with supercollider
he used to use OpenMusic, but then moved to linux.
OpenMusic is IRCAM software in common lisp for algorithmic music composition. It looks like max, but makes notation.
SC can do everything om can do except the notation visualisation.
he uses LilyPond. INScore might be faster.
LilyPond is free and cross-platform. It’s simple.
He’s done 3 projects? superFomus and LilyCollider.

Fomus

Uses fomus (fomus.sf.net). Works with events and patterns. It outputs to lillypond and mjusescore
this is cool
he’s showing a useage case with xenakis’s sieves. He’s got some functions as sieves and then does set operations.
this doesn’t work well with metric structures. You’re stuck wrt bar lengths.

LilyCollider

division and addition models of rhythm
rhythm trees can represent almost all kins of rythm. It’s an array of duration and division that can be nested.
he is using a syntax that i don’t know at all… Someone in front of me has a help file open on list comprehensions.
he’s got a very compelling looking score open.
in future he wants to use spanners by abjad to handle some markings. And also he wants some help and feedback for future versions.

questions

can you use this to get from MIDI to LilyPond? Yes, with Fomus.
what about includes? You can make a template.

Live blogging the sc symposium – ron kuivila

naming is the fundamental control mechanism of supercollider (unnamed gets garbage collected).
‘play’ generates instances. It returns a new object of a different class, which confuses n00bs. What you see on the screen does not give you a clue.
The object that defines the work gets misidentified as the one doing the work.
jIT lib’s def classes solves this problem. It makes it easier to share code. Play messages go to the def class. The def classs gives it all a name.
node proxies give you a gui for free also and is also useful pedagogically.
PatternConductor is a interactive control easier than EventStreamPlayer. It deals better with sustain issues.
CV is a control value constrained by an associated Spec. CV can bbe applied to several different contexts simutaneously. Touch is a companion class that does something complex about a CV’s value.
Ron is rewriting Conductor and I should talk to him about this.
yield is a bummer for beginners writing co-routines.

x=(x**i).yield

is confusing.
Pspawnern is a class that seeks to be less confusing syntactically. It does something with Prouts that’s slightly confusing….
Syntactic convience yields conceptual confusion…
he’s asking if Pspawnern is a good idea.
Pspawner is a hybrid between patterns and Routines. One of my students would have loved this. He says it’s a compositional strategy about notation and direction in scores. I may also come to love this class.
And he took no questions!

Live Blogging Sc Symposium – Guitar Granulator by Martin Hünniger

He’s got a stomp box that granulates – he has a software and hardware version of this.
2 granulators, fx chains, midi controller knobs, patches etc in software
The hardware version has one granulator and some knobs.
It’s built on a beagle board. And an Arduino Uno for pots, leds
He uses SC running the BeagleBoard linux distro form Stanford. Works out of box. Satellite CCRMA
Granular synthesis is cool. He uses a ‘ring buffer’ because it’s live sampling. This is a buffer that loops.
This is really cool.