Virtual intimacy: Phya as an instrument

Phya is an open source C++ library originally designed for adding physically modeled contact sounds into computer game environments equipped with physics engines. We review some aspects of this system, and also consider it from the purely aesthetic perspective of musical expression

Jiang Zemin's discourse on intellectuals: the political use of formalised language and the conundrum of stability

This article focuses on the specific forms of power that are embodied in the properties and functions of formalised language, as it was used by Jiang Zemin in crucial political documents on the Party’s policy towards intellectuals. This inquiry illuminates various possibilities for the normalisation and inculcation of formalised language in the understudied decade of the 1990s, when the mantra “without stability, nothing can be achieved” became a tautology. The internal constitution of the selected texts is examined with an eye to the dialogic interaction with the production and reception of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s political discourses on intellectuals (Mao 1942; Deng 1978). The analysis of language practices and discursive formations in a comparative per-spective sheds light on the respective socio-political and historical contexts. It also reveals the extreme involution-devolution of formalised language in the Jiang Zemin era, when “preserving stability” was reaffirmed as a crucial concern of the Party leadership with the ultimate aim of preserving its monopoly of power

Physics-Driven Diffusion Models for Impact Sound Synthesis from Videos

Modeling sounds emitted from physical object interactions is critical for immersive perceptual experiences in real and virtual worlds. Traditional methods of impact sound synthesis use physics simulation to obtain a set of physics parameters that could represent and synthesize the sound. However, they require fine details of both the object geometries and impact locations, which are rarely available in the real world and can not be applied to synthesize impact sounds from common videos. On the other hand, existing video-driven deep learning-based approaches could only capture the weak correspondence between visual content and impact sounds since they lack of physics knowledge. In this work, we propose a physics-driven diffusion model that can synthesize high-fidelity impact sound for a silent video clip. In addition to the video content, we propose to use additional physics priors to guide the impact sound synthesis procedure. The physics priors include both physics parameters that are directly estimated from noisy real-world impact sound examples without sophisticated setup and learned residual parameters that interpret the sound environment via neural networks. We further implement a novel diffusion model with specific training and inference strategies to combine physics priors and visual information for impact sound synthesis. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several existing systems in generating realistic impact sounds. More importantly, the physics-based representations are fully interpretable and transparent, thus enabling us to perform sound editing flexibly.Comment: CVPR 2023. Project page: https://sukun1045.github.io/video-physics-sound-diffusion

Limits of Abstraction in Electroacoustic Music

In this thesis the relationship between abstract and representational aspects of electroacoustic music will be discussed. Such an exploration exposes the limits of abstraction in electroacoustic music, as the interaction between musical form and the world outside the immanent context of the work is revealed. In Chapter 1 an examination of the complex system of relationships between sounds within a musical structure and the representational nature of many of the sounds themselves, referring to their origins in the real world, suggests analogies with poetic texts and early twentieth century painting. In Chapter 2 there follows a discussion of ideas contained in Simon Emmerson’s article The Relation of Language to Materials (Emmerson, 1985). Emmerson’s ideas are examined and expanded, with particular regard to the relationship of syntax and discourse. In Chapter 3 the compositional methodology of sound manipulation is discussed, contrasting analytical and synthetic approaches to sound transformation and Ten Hoopen’s model of the specific / surrogate continuum (Ten Hoopen 1994) is discussed and developed. An analogy between structures based on dissonance / resolution and ambiguous / specific source recognition is developed with particular reference to the work Grand Junction. In Chapter 4 a new model, the associative field model, is proposed to examine more closely the nature of ambiguous source recognition with particular reference to the cycle of Seasons. The rôle of ambiguity in aesthetic appreciation is discussed. Finally, in Chapter 5, the interaction of the work with its wider context is discussed. The influence of literary accompaniments to the work, such as the title and programme note is considered as is collaboration in the form of music specifically created for contemporary dance, as exemplified in The Killing Floor. The interaction of the work and the performance space is considered in the site-specific installations Boomtown and Living Steam

Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital

Theatre Noise Conference

Three days of Performances, Installations, Residencies, Round Table Discussions, Presentations and Workshops More than an academic conference, Theatre Noise is a diverse collection of events exploring the sound of theatre from performance to the spaces inbetween. Featuring keynote presentations, artists in residence, electroacoustic, percussive and digital performances, industry workshops and installations, Theatre Noise is an immersive journey into sound

Losing by Expanding: Corralling the Runaway Object

At the time of publication C. Spinuzzi was at the University of Texas at Austin.Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linchpin of analysis in the empirical case. Yet the notion of object has expanded methodologically and theoretically over time, making it difficult to reliably bound an empirical case. In response, this article outlines the expansion of the object, diagnoses this expansion, and proposes an alternate approach that constrains the object for case-study research in writing studies.Writin

Perceptually Driven Interactive Sound Propagation for Virtual Environments

Sound simulation and rendering can significantly augment a user‘s sense of presence in virtual environments. Many techniques for sound propagation have been proposed that predict the behavior of sound as it interacts with the environment and is received by the user. At a broad level, the propagation algorithms can be classified into reverberation filters, geometric methods, and wave-based methods. In practice, heuristic methods based on reverberation filters are simple to implement and have a low computational overhead, while wave-based algorithms are limited to static scenes and involve extensive precomputation. However, relatively little work has been done on the psychoacoustic characterization of different propagation algorithms, and evaluating the relationship between scientific accuracy and perceptual benefits.In this dissertation, we present perceptual evaluations of sound propagation methods and their ability to model complex acoustic effects for virtual environments. Our results indicate that scientifically accurate methods for reverberation and diffraction do result in increased perceptual differentiation. Based on these evaluations, we present two novel hybrid sound propagation methods that combine the accuracy of wave-based methods with the speed of geometric methods for interactive sound propagation in dynamic scenes.Our first algorithm couples modal sound synthesis with geometric sound propagation using wave-based sound radiation to perform mode-aware sound propagation. We introduce diffraction kernels of rigid objects,which encapsulate the sound diffraction behaviors of individual objects in the free space and are then used to simulate plausible diffraction effects using an interactive path tracing algorithm. Finally, we present a novel perceptual driven metric that can be used to accelerate the computation of late reverberation to enable plausible simulation of reverberation with a low runtime overhead. We highlight the benefits of our novel propagation algorithms in different scenarios.Doctor of Philosoph