The Use of Virtual Instruments by Australian Screen Composers

Recent technological advancements, strong competition and targeted marketing strategies by virtual instrument merchants have established virtual instruments and digital instrument samples as essential components of a professional screen composer's toolset. The democratisation of these powerful tools has led to broad accessibility to virtual instruments and the digital sequencing software required to run them. Virtual instruments are portable, powerful, and affordable––they are no longer the exclusive domain of expensive recording studios. This thesis aims to quantify and qualify the parameters surrounding screen music composition in this digital age and introduce to the literature new empirical data together with the experiences of working screen music professionals. This is achieved by following a mixed methods sequential exploratory methodology starting with a survey of Australian screen composers (n=102) where they are asked to answer questions with a recent cue in mind. Informed by the results of the survey, semistructured interviews were conducted and recorded with working Australian screen composers (n=22). When combined the meta-inferences confirm that virtual instruments are vital for Australian screen composers to do their job, especially now that their tools are democratised. Screen composers are able to swiftly create cues that are finished products and not demos for their director and film-team. These changes have also shaped a new paradigm of film and television directors to expect final and completed versions of cues from Australian screen composers and not working drafts

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online

Este documento incluye los artículos y pósters presentados en el Music Encoding Conference 2021 realizado en Alicante entre el 19 y el 22 de julio de 2022.Funded by project Multiscore, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

Design and conversational evaluation of an information technology learning environment based on self-organised-learning

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 20/07/1996.From 1990 to 1993 I was engaged as the Information Technology (IT) Workshop manager at Mid-Cornwall College, St. Austell. My mission during this period was to develop a new kind of IT learning environment. The main purpose was - and continues to be - to provide for mixed 'open-access’ student targets wishing to pursue generic IT activities and gain commensurate vocational qualifications. This Open-Learning (OL) environment provides on-the-job curriculum development of IT learning support systems, through a Flexible Learning (FL) management policy. An action research approach based on S-O-L provides both the methodology and technology for implementing a learning organisation. A key objective was institutional change towards the learning management policy of IT, through appropriate deployment of staffing and courseware resources to enable the practice of student centred learning. Another aim was to integrate and mix all target groups of learners together in the same domain, i. e. school leavers with adult returners for the achievement of a cost-effective, well-co-ordinated and productive learning environment. My action research applied the Centre for the Study of Human Learning's (CSHL's) ideas and tools towards the development of the IT Workshop's learning policy. I have sought to make the connection between FL delivery of the generic IT curriculum and the SOL approach towards individual and organisational learning. This came about from the link between the FL philosophy of learner-centred activity and the SOL philosophy of empowering individuals via Learning Conversations. S-O-L'Systems-7' was adopted as a conversational tool for developing the educational roles and practices of the IT Workshop. This influenced my college to make essential environmental changes to the workshop in order to develop these activities. The project also used the Personal Learning Contract (PLC) to manage and enable the 'learning-to-learn' activities of individual IT learners. With the PLC as the central tool for implementing Learning Conversations, there evolved the idea of 'Group Learning Contracts' (GLCs). This led to the practical development of 'Learning Plans' (LPs), such that IT flexible modules could be transferred to the autonomy of the learner. Evaluations from this project included sample case-study evidences of Learning Conversations obtained from individual IT case-load students. Repertory grid feedback conversations of learning experienced by individual staff members taking part in the project were also obtained. Questionnaire results from IT learners was used as another method of feedback, and conversationally evaluated using factor analysis and 'talkback' records. All the action research qualitative evidences were finally analysed using conversational techniques, leading to the overall project 'findings'

A study of temporal visual composition

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-182).With the rapid growth of digital art, the temporal dimension is becoming a more and more important aspect of visual creations. This thesis is an effort to contribute to the construction of a disciplined basis for the composition of visual creations along the temporal dimension. It studies new perceptual phenomena and compositional issues introduced by temporal visual composition; it proposes and develops a set theory-based composition approach; it also presents the applications of this approach in compositional experiments at different levels of abstraction. As another aspect of contributing to the temporal visual composition research, this thesis designs and develops a temporal visual composition interface and a system for color generation and manipulation based on spectral information. This interface and system serve as an indispensable support for the composition experiments in this study. They also present to artists a new level of control over both graphical materials and the composition process. Furthermore, they suggest new creative potentials in temporal art.by Xiaohua Sun.Ph.D

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021. 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online. Edited by Stefan Münnich and David Rizo

Conference proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference 2021 with Foreword by Stefan Münnich and David Rizo

Unpredictable popular music : history, praxis, perception : cryptography, serialism, pseudorandom generation, chance, improvisation and infinite monkeys.

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Following the instruments and users: the mutual shaping of digital sampling technologies

The socio-musical practice of sampling is closely associated with the re-use of pre-existing sound recordings and the technological processes of looping. These practices, based on appropriation and repetition, have been particularly common within the genres of hip-hop and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Yet early digital sampling instruments such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) were not designed for these purposes. The technologists at Fairlight Instruments in Australia were primarily interested in the use of digital synthesis to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments; sampling was a secondary concern. In the first half of the thesis, I follow digital sampling instruments like the Fairlight CMI and the E-mu Emulator by drawing on interviews with their designers and users to trace how they were used to sample the sounds of everyday life, loop sequenced patterns of sampled sounds, and sample extracts from pre-existing sound recordings. The second half of the thesis consists of case studies that follow the users of digital sampling technologies across a range of socio-musical worlds to examine the diversity of contemporary sampling practices. Using concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this thesis focuses on the ‘user-technology nexus’ and continues a shift in the writing of histories of technologies from a focus on the designers of technologies towards the contexts of use and ‘the co-construction’ or ‘mutual shaping’ of technologies and their users. As an example of the ‘interpretative flexibility’ of music technologies, digital sampling technologies were used in ways unimagined by their designers and sampling became synonymous with re-appropriation. My argument is that a history of digital sampling technologies needs to be a history of both the designers and the users of digital sampling technologies