Effort in gestural interactions with imaginary objects in Hindustani Dhrupad vocal music

Physical effort has often been regarded as a key factor of expressivity in music performance. Nevertheless, systematic experimental approaches to the subject have been rare. In North Indian classical (Hindustani) vocal music, singers often engage with melodic ideas during improvisation by manipulating intangible, imaginary objects with their hands, such as through stretching, pulling, pushing, throwing etc. The above observation suggests that some patterns of change in acoustic features allude to interactions that real objects through their physical properties can afford. The present study reports on the exploration of the relationships between movement and sound by accounting for the physical effort that such interactions require in the Dhrupad genre of Hindustani vocal improvisation. The work follows a mixed methodological approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse interviews, audio-visual material and movement data. Findings indicate that despite the flexibility in the way a Dhrupad vocalist might use his/her hands while singing, there is a certain degree of consistency by which performers associate effort levels with melody and types of gestural interactions with imaginary objects. However, different schemes of cross-modal associations are revealed for the vocalists analysed, that depend on the pitch space organisation of each particular melodic mode (rāga), the mechanical requirements of voice production, the macro-structure of the ālāp improvisation and morphological cross-domain analogies. Results further suggest that a good part of the variance in both physical effort and gesture type can be explained through a small set of sound and movement features. Based on the findings, I argue that gesturing in Dhrupad singing is guided by: the know-how of humans in interacting with and exerting effort on real objects of the environment, the movement–sound relationships transmitted from teacher to student in the oral music training context and the mechanical demands of vocalisation

Whole-hand input

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992.Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-233).by David Joel Sturman.Ph.D

Musichildren: proceedings of the 1st International Conference Music for and by Children

The 1st International Conference: “Music for and by Children: Perspectives from Children, Composers, Performers and Educators” (musichildren) was hosted at the Department of Communication and Art of the University of Aveiro from October 19th to 21st 2017. musichildren’17 welcomed as keynote speakers two distinguished personalities in the academic and artistic fields - the composer Dai Fujikura (Royal College of Music) and the Distinguished Professor of Music Education Jackie Wiggins (Oakland University). The main goal of the musichildren’17 conference was to explore aspects of music for children and music that is created by children, thus contributing to the dissemination of knowledge in the fields of Music Composition, Performance and Music Education. The conference fostered several discussions in these areas, alongside the sharing and development of new ideas. The three-day event hosted participants from South America, North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania who presented their work in different formats such as communications, workshops, panels, lecture recitals and concerts.(...)A 1ª Conferência Internacional: “Music for and by Children: Perspectives from Children Composers, Performers and Educators” musichildren’17 foi realizada no Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro nos dias 19, 20 e 21 de Outubro de 2017. O musichildren’17 acolheu como oradores convidados duas personalidades distintas do meio académico e artístico internacional - o compositor Dai Fujikura (Royal College of Music) e a Professora doutora Jackie Wiggins (Oakland University). O objetivo principal da conferência musichildren’17 foi explorar diferentes aspetos da música para crianças e da música criada por crianças, contribuindo assim para a disseminação da investigação no campo da Composição Musical, Performance e Educação em Música. Durante a conferência foi possível observar diversas discussões na área e a partilha e o desenvolvimento de novas ideias. Este evento de três dias contou com participantes provenientes da América do Sul, América do Norte, Europa, Asia e Oceânia, que apresentaram os seus trabalhos em diferentes formatos tais como comunicações, performances, workshops e recital conferência. (...

The Space Between: Performance, the Body and Scholarship

The thesis is concerned with the interrelationships between the body, making sense of experience through performance, and the conceptual and scholarly understanding that people construct around experience. The lens through which these interrelationships are explored is phenomenology, both in terms of phenomenological theory per se and, more specifically, with theories related to performance and pedagogical process. The research question explores the relationship between the body, space/place and digital media through four cycles of participatory action research in which practice and theory are interrelated. The experience of (the body) in space and place is captured and re-created with digital media in the live performance space drawing attention to spatial and temporal anomalies that both de-stabilise and re-affirm what is it to be ‘now’ and ‘here.’ Ideas shift from the determined to the disintegrated, and the body moves between a critical engagement with experience and a pre-reflective and heightened consciousness of ‘being’ in performance – as maker, performer and viewer, and as learner, teacher and researcher. Answers to questions are replaced by gaps and spaces between – in which the known, the not known, and the imagined unfold and become exposed. Experiments shift from the body immersed in and subsumed by technology to the body, live (not mediatised) in performance, and again to the live as mediatised, exposing the phenomena that we encounter. Performance emerges as the body touched, sensed and multi-faceted in an in-between space of inter-relationships, inter-subjectivities and inter-medialities. The body is both fullness and void, coexistent and isolated – in suspense as it hovers and ‘is’ of all worlds. Investigations are devised and delivered, with students as co-researchers, through a teaching and learning model that guides and exposes, disrupts and transforms – creating a pedagogy of instability and discovery in order to reveal new and innovative performance

Choreographing the extended agent : performance graphics for dance theater

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 448-458).The marriage of dance and interactive image has been a persistent dream over the past decades, but reality has fallen far short of potential for both technical and conceptual reasons. This thesis proposes a new approach to the problem and lays out the theoretical, technical and aesthetic framework for the innovative art form of digitally augmented human movement. I will use as example works a series of installations, digital projections and compositions each of which contains a choreographic component - either through collaboration with a choreographer directly or by the creation of artworks that automatically organize and understand purely virtual movement. These works lead up to two unprecedented collaborations with two of the greatest choreographers working today; new pieces that combine dance and interactive projected light using real-time motion capture live on stage. The existing field of"dance technology" is one with many problems. This is a domain with many practitioners, few techniques and almost no theory; a field that is generating "experimental" productions with every passing week, has literally hundreds of citable pieces and no canonical works; a field that is oddly disconnected from modern dance's history, pulled between the practical realities of the body and those of computer art, and has no influence on the prevailing digital art paradigms that it consumes.(cont.) This thesis will seek to address each of these problems: by providing techniques and a basis for "practical theory"; by building artworks with resources and people that have never previously been brought together, in theaters and in front of audiences previously inaccessible to the field; and by proving through demonstration that a profitable and important dialogue between digital art and the pioneers of modern dance can in fact occur. The methodological perspective of this thesis is that of biologically inspired, agent-based artificial intelligence, taken to a high degree of technical depth. The representations, algorithms and techniques behind such agent architectures are extended and pushed into new territory for both interactive art and artificial intelligence. In particular, this thesis ill focus on the control structures and the rendering of the extended agents' bodies, the tools for creating complex agent-based artworks in intense collaborative situations, and the creation of agent structures that can span live image and interactive sound production. Each of these parts becomes an element of what it means to "choreograph" an extended agent for live performance.Marc Downie.Ph.D

Shifting Interfaces: art research at the intersections of live performance and technology

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/809 on 08.20.2017 by CS (TIS)This collection of published works is an outcome of my practice-led inter-disciplinary collaborative artistic research into deepening understanding of creative process in the field of contemporary dance. It comprises thirty written works published from 1999 to 2007 in various formats and platforms. This collection is framed by a methodological discussion that provides insight into how this research has intersected over time with diverse fields of practice including contemporary dance, digital and new media arts and non-art domains such as cognitive and social science. Fields are understood in the context of this research to be largely constituted out of the expert practices of individual collaborators. This research starts from an interest in the Impact of new media technologies on dance making/ choreography. The collection of works show evidence, established in the first two publications, of an evolving engagement with two concepts related to this interest: (1) the 'algorithm' as a process-level connection or bridge between dance composition and computation; (2) the empirical study of movement embedded as a 'knowledge base' in the practices of both computer animation and dance and thus forming a special correspondence between them. This collection provides evidence of this research through a period of community-building amongst artists using new media technologies in performance, and culminates in the identification of an emerging 'community of practice' coming together around the formation of a unique body of knowledge pertaining to dance. The late 1990s New Media Art movement provided a supportive context for Important peer-to-peer encounters with creators and users of software tools and platforms in the context of inter-disciplinary art-making. A growing interest in software programming as a creative practice opened up fresh perspectives on possible connections with dance making. It became clear that software's utility alone, including artistic uses of software, was a limited conception. This was the background thinking that informed the first major shift in the research towards the design of software that might augment the creative process of expert choreographers and dancers. This shift from software use to its design, framed by a focus on the development of tools to support dance creation, also provided strong rationale to deepen the research into dance making processes. In the second major phase of the research presented here, scientific study is brought collaboratively to bear on questions related to choreographic practice. This lead to a better understanding of ways in which dancers and choreographers, as 'thinking bodies', interact with their design tools and each other in the context of creation work. In addition to this collection, outcomes of this research are traceable to other published papers and art works it has given rise to. Less easily measureable, but just as valuable, are the sustained relations between individuals and groups behind the 'community of practice' now recognised for its development of unique formats for bringing choreographic ideas and processes into contact, now and in the future, with both general audiences and other specialist practices

Sponging the chair: diagramming affect through architecture and performance

This doctoral research, conducted through both practice-based and theoretical inquiry, is located within the field of psychophysical performance practice, informed by and intersected with philosophical and architectural approaches to diagramming. The aim of the research is to develop ways of understanding how affectivity works in a particularly diagrammatic manner within a performative event. This is considered through the experience of an individual person, between people as intersubjective and collective bodies, and within the built environments they occupy. The research begins with the problem of attaining a condition of ‘openness’, whereby performer(s) produce an affective, collectively held state of embodied presence. This may be recognized as moments in which we feel 'moved' by a performance, or when an inexplicable potential seems to emerge that transforms our habitual perceptions of time, space and subjectivity. This opening to affectivity is a double-edged sword. It radically de-centers the subject, but also allows a sense of shared constraint to act like an intangible glue, connecting individuals and even nonhuman or inanimate elements within the environment. This approach is very different to other performance practices such as Ballet or Contemporary Dance, especially in the way specific methods deal with sensation and movement, form and intention, memory and the image. A performer may often enact a sense of openness between selves and/or things when these qualities become tentative or indeterminate. Because of the importance of objects, artifacts, and built environments as ‘intermediaries’ within these performances, a comparison with theories of architectural diagramming and situated cognition provides a broader context for the research practice. In particular, I draw on a Deleuzian notion of ‘the diagram’ - an abstract or conceptual device for generating processes of transformation. In working through the experience of developing my own performance practice, alongside theories of diagramming and affect, I develop specific principles and procedures for generating openness. I draw on my training in Butoh dance and Grotowski physical theatre method to consider how bodies and selves are affected by the way they situate themselves within a given site. Objects, artifacts, and built environments are seen to stand in as intermediaries for holding open a tentative disposition and through which collective shifts in affectivity may occur. Using the conceptual figure of a ‘sponge-body’ I explore how this moves through many different openings in thinking, feeling and doing. In the project work, the constructed nature of this holding open becomes more overt by using chairs as physical performance apparatus. This culminates in the final project with the appearance of a gargoyle - a character who comes to stand in as an architectural figure for locating what may be at stake for resituating the role of the body within the built environment. The gargoyle presents a grotesque figure sitting on the very cusp of normal social interaction. In doing so, it reveals how the collective nature of affective openness - across diverse levels of experience, may have far-ranging implications for the future becoming of bodies and buildings, selves and environment

2017-2018 Course Catalog

2017-2018 Course Catalo

2018-2019 Course Catalog

2018-2019 Course Catalo