Hybridism: a practice-led investigation

Keele University PhD Thesi

User serviceable parts: Practice, technology, sociality and method in live electronic musicking

In live electronic musical research there is a need to confront the interrelationships between the social and the technological in order to understand our music as practice. These interrelationships form a complex and dynamic ecosystem that not only forms the context to, but is constitutive of practice. I interrogate from a variety of perspectives the musical practice that has formed over the course of this research in order to reveal the dispositions towards technology, the social situatedness and the musical approach that underlies my work. By taking a disposition towards musical practice-led research that is non-hierarchical, performative, ecological, phenomenological and pragmatic, I place into wider context compositional and technological decisions, in terms of their relationships to improvising, skill, design, performance and research. This work contributes both new theories of live electronic musical practice and new suggestions for practice-led methods aimed at investigating the interplay of social and material factors in musicking, and at interrogating the disciplinary status of our field vis-a-vis musical and technical disciplines

(M)ad to see me?: Intelligent Advertisement Placement: Balancing User Annoyance and Advertising Effectiveness

Advertising is an unavoidable albeit a frustrating part of mobile interactions. Due to limited form factor, mobile advertisements often resort to intrusive strategies where they temporarily block the user's view in an attempt to increase effectiveness and force the user's attention. While such strategies contribute to advertising awareness and effectiveness, they do so at the cost of degrading the user's overall experience and can lead to frustration and annoyance. In this paper, we contribute by developing Perceptive Ads as an intelligent advertisement placement strategy that minimizes disruptions caused by ads while preserving their effectiveness. Our work is the first to simultaneously consider the needs of users, app developers, and advertisers. Ensuring the needs of all stakeholders are taken into account is essential for the adoption of advertising strategies as users (and indirectly developers) would reject strategies that are disruptive but effective, while advertisers would reject strategies that are non-disruptive but inefficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique through a user study with N = 16 participants and two representative examples of mobile apps that commonly integrate advertisements (a game and a news app). Results from the study demonstrate that our approach can improve perception towards advertisements by 43.75% without affecting application interactivity while at the same time increasing advertisement effectiveness by 37.5% compared to a state-of-the-art baseline.Peer reviewe

Interrogating the live : a DJ perspective

This PhD is driven by practice-led research that interrogates the notion of ‘live’ performance in a mediatised culture. At its core it is concerned with the tension between body and machine. Argued from a DJ perspective the work addresses issues raised by creative tools and platforms currently being developed and distributed. Questions of digitally technologised and mediatised versus analogue creative media inform a position on the challenges posed by ‘remediated’ live uses of technologies, particularly as read against more traditionally held views of liveness. On the one hand, solo practical work directs an investigation into existing and emerging DJ technologies; negotiating a path between an analogue paradigm rooted in Turntablism and the virtual world of digital media. On the other, a series of collaborative projects explore the DJ as a ‘live’ ensemble player, confronting the paradoxical whilst gaining insight into contemporary conditions of musical creativity. The textual commentary provides a self-critical narrative of a personal research process informed by DJ practice and musicology scholarship. Questions relating to liveness are dealt with at the outcome of each stage of the process and critical positions devised. The practical projects are informed by several years’ sustained interest and empirical enquiry into improvisation with audio and visual materials. Included in this submission are a number of CDs and DVDs containing this work. Without wanting to initiate a detailed debate on the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ my own position is that I consider the written element of this thesis – the references to cultural/media theory and writings by practitioners working in my field – as inextricable from the music making itself. Readings have influenced my thinking which has in turn affected my practice, and I have used practical enquiry to problematise what has been said or written in relation to my discipline. The practice/theory debate has gathered momentum since artists began bringing their research into the academy. However, a simple polarisation of a posteriori and a priori knowledge has a tendency to lead us in circles and, having fallen victim to many heated discussions concerning the relevance of theory to practice and how to resolve the problem, it is my own belief that the two sides cannot be separated. For that reason I have chosen not to engage with the debate in this thesis, as I believe that this would have detracted from the larger research aims of my project. On the topic of collaborative research - such as that carried out with John Ferguson in the Tron Lennon duo, for example - I do not consider my own contribution to be fifty percent of the work, instead I believe that myself and my collaborators have invested one hundred percent respectively, for each has had his own specific research agenda that happened to find its impetus in collaborative music making. Finally, given the critical context of mediatisation to the practical work hereinafter, some readers may be surprised to see photographic slides set to music as part of the documentation. Though it may seem incongruous the format serves to condense history, providing a narrative of the processes that encapsulate the work of the creative practitioner, processes that are often overshadowed by the product such as the sense of occasion leading up to a performance and the technologies or tools that facilitate the creative process.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Interaction with embodied media

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-222).The graphical user interface has become the de facto metaphor for the majority of our diverse activities using computers, yet the desktop environment provides a one size fits all user interface. This dissertation argues that for the computer to fully realize its potential to significantly extend our intellectual abilities, new interaction techniques must call upon our bodily abilities to manipulate objects, enable collaborative work, and be usable in our everyday physical environment. In this dissertation I introduce a new human-computer interaction concept, embodied media. An embodied media system physically represents digital content such as files, variables, or other program constructs with a collection of self-contained, interactive electronic tokens that can display visual feedback and can be manipulated gesturally by users as a single, coordinated interface. Such a system relies minimally on external sensing infrastructure compared to tabletop or augmented reality systems, and is a more general-purpose platform than most tangible user interfaces. I hypothesized that embodied media interfaces provide advantages for activities that require the user to efficiently arrange and adjust multiple digital content items. Siftables is the first instantiation of an embodied media interface. I built 180 Siftable devices in three design iterations, and developed a programming interface and various applications to explore the possibilities of embodied media.(cont.) In a survey, outside developers reported that Siftables created new user interface possibilities, and that working with Siftables increased their interest in human-computer interaction and expanded their ideas about the field. I evaluated a content organization application with users, finding that Siftables offered an advantage over the mouse+graphical user interface (GUI) for task completion time that was amplified when participants worked in pairs, and a digital image manipulation application in which participants preferred Siftables to the GUI in terms of enjoyability, expressivity, domain learning, and for exploratory/quick arrangement of items.by David Jeffrey Merrill.Ph.D

Rebecoming analogue : groove, breakbeats and sampling

In this thesis I address two related questions: how does groove work in breakbeats, and how might it enable musical participation across time and space?In order to do this, I analyse breakbeats as they are heard in their original funk context and then in various subsequent genres for which they provide a percussive backbone via the process of recontextualization made possible by digital sampling. From this seemingly narrow focus, more broadly useful ideas about groove emerge and I discuss these in relation to current groovological thought. Of particular significance within my findings is the often‐overlooked role which timbre plays in groove. I propose that the groove in breakbeats operates as a result of timbral, as much as temporal, factors, and that breakbeats can therefore be seen to embody the complementary concepts of Wilson’s heterogeneous sound ideal and Small’s musicking. By exploring groove, breakbeats and sampling from a range of perspectives I show that the potent conceptual combination of musicking and the heterogeneous sound ideal accounts for the perennial appeal of breakbeats as a fundamental building block in contemporary popular music. In order to explore these ideas, following initial chapters that establish a theoretical framework, each successive chapter then deals with a particular manifestation of the breaks. Overall, this structure builds a kaleidoscopic conceptual picture that is appropriate to the multi--‐faceted nature of groove and the enduring versatility of breakbeats.[Note: audio samples available with hard copy of thesis only.

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Creating music in the classroom with tablet computers: An activity system analysis of two secondary school communities.

Tablet computers are becoming inextricably linked with innovation and change in schools. Increasingly therefore, music teachers must consider how tablet computers might influence creative musical development in their own classroom. This qualitative research into two secondary school communities aims to develop understandings about what really happens when students and a music teacher-researcher compose music in partnership with a tablet computer. A sociocultural definition of creativity, theories of Activity, and the musicking argument inform a new systemic framework which guides fieldwork. This framework becomes the unit of analysis from which the research questions and a multi-case, multimodal methodology emerge. The methodology developed here honours the situated nature of those meanings which emerge in each of the two school communities. Consequently, research findings are presented as two separate case reports. Five mixed-ability pairs are purposively sampled from each community to represent the broad range of musical experience present in that setting. A Video-enhanced, participant-observation method ensures that systemic, multimodal musicking behaviours are captured as they emerge overtime. Naturalistic group interviewing at the end of the project reveals how students’ broader musical cultures, interests and experiences influence their tablet-mediated classroom behaviour. Findings develop new understandings about how tablet-mediated creative musical action champions inclusive musicking (musical experience notwithstanding) and better connects the music classroom and its institutional requirements with students’ informal music-making practices. The systems of classroom Activity which emerge also compensate for those moments when the tablet attempts to overtly determine creative behaviour or conversely, does not do enough to ensure a creative outcome. In fact, all system dimensions (e.g. student partner/teacher/student/tablet) influence tablet- mediated action by feeding the system with musical and technological knowledge, which was also pedagogically conditioned. This musical, technological and pedagogical conditioning is mashed-up, influencing action just-in-time, according to cultural, local and personal need. A new method of visual charting is developed to ‘peer inside’ these classroom-situated systems. Colour-coded charts evidence how classroom musicians make use of and synthesize different system dimensions to find, focus and fix their creative musical ideas over time. There are also implications for research, policy and practice going forward. In terms of researching digitally-mediated creativity, a new social-cultural Activity framework is presented which encourages researchers to revise their definition of creativity itself. Such a definition would emphasise the role of cultural, local and personal constraint in creative musical development. With reference to classroom practice, this research discovers that when students partner with tablet computers, their own musical interests, experiences and desires are forwarded. Even though these desires become fused with institutional requirements, students take ownership of their learning and are found rightfully proud of their creative products. This naturalistic, community-driven form of tablet- mediated creative musical development encourages policy makers and teachers to reposition the music classroom: to reconnect it with the local community it serves

Creativity, Exploration and Control in Musical Parameter Spaces.

PhDThis thesis investigates the use of multidimensional control of synthesis parameters in electronic music, and the impact of controller mapping techniques on creativity. The theoretical contribution of this work, the EARS model, provides a rigorous application of creative cognition research to this topic. EARS provides a cognitive model of creative interaction with technology, retrodicting numerous prior findings in musical interaction research. The model proposes four interaction modes, and characterises them in terms of parameter-space traversal mechanisms. Recommendations for properties of controller-synthesiser mappings that support each of the modes are given. This thesis proposes a generalisation of Fitts' law that enables throughput-based evaluation of multi-dimensional control devices. Three experiments were run that studied musicians performing sound design tasks with various interfaces. Mappings suited to three of the four EARS modes were quantitatively evaluated. Experiment one investigated the notion of a `divergent interface'. A mapping geometry that caters to early-stage exploratory creativity was developed, and evaluated via a publicly available tablet application. Dimension reduction of a 10D synthesiser parameter space to 2D surface was achieved using Hilbert space-filling curves. Interaction data indicated that this divergent mapping was used for early-stage creativity, and that the traditional sliders were used for late-stage one tuning. Experiment two established a `minimal experimental paradigm' for sound design interface evaluation. This experiment showed that multidimensional controllers were faster than 1D sliders for locating a target sound in two and three timbre dimensions. iv The final study tested a novel embodied interaction technique: ViBEAMP. This system utilised a hand tracker and a 3D visualisation to train users to control 6 synthesis parameters simultaneously. Throughput was recorded as triple that of six sliders, and working memory load was signiffcantly reduced. This experiment revealed that musical, time-targeted interactions obey a different speed-accuracy trade-of law from accuracy-targeted interactions.Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mar

Lalang, Zes ek Kiltir - Multimodal Reference Marking in Kreol Seselwa

This dissertation is the first cross-disciplinary study of the interaction of speech, gesture and culture in a Creolophone community. Focusing on the multimodal strategies of person and spatial reference of Kreol Seselwa (KS), it combines theoretical and methodological approaches from Creolistics, Gesture Studies, and Anthropological Linguistics. It constitutes a holistic analysis of communicative interaction in the very special linguistic, sociohistorical and sociocultural environment of the Seychelles. The overall hypothesis is that reference is an inherently dynamic process involving three levels: (1) the linguistic forms available in both speech and gesture, (2) the mobilisation of these forms in situated communicative interaction, and (3) embedding these forms and strategies in a micro-ecology of communication specific to the Seychelles. After introducing key theoretical notions of the study of Reference, Creole languages, Gesture, and Anthropological Linguistics, the analysis starts with the first level – gestural and spoken form features of KS. Combining previous work on KS with data from my own corpus I describe the lexical and grammatical features relevant to reference in this languages, such as the article system, number marking and the occurrence of bare nouns. Also the form features of KS gestures are presented, some of which already show differences in person and spatial reference. In a second step, the study analyses the mobilisation of these reference forms in communicative interaction. The close interaction between the two modalities is demonstrated in both spatial and person reference. In spatial reference, it is shown that gesture and speech complement each other in the construction of figure-ground arrays. Furthermore, the absolute frame of reference tends to be expressed in the gestural modality while the relative frame of reference is conveyed in speech. In person reference, I provide evidence that in KS the preferences for recognition and association are ranked higher than the preference for minimisation. The high level of context-dependency and the role of information structure in KS person and spatial reference is further illustrated with multimodal examples. In a third step, the patterns of multimodal reference marking are embedded in a micro-ecology of communication specific to the Seychelles. It is argued that geographic, sociocultural and sociohistorical aspects of this Postcolonial society are reflected in the strategies of referring to individuals and locations. A focus is set on the factors of shared cultural knowledge, hybridity and flexibility. Finally, I discuss the implications of the results for the nature of gesture as well as the nature of reference, leading to the conclusion that reference is indeed a multimodal and dynamic process that involves not only static reference forms but is actively constructed in a communicative interaction that is embedded in a micro-ecology of communication