227 research outputs found

    Algorithmic authority in music creation : the beauty of losing control = De l’autoritĂ© algorithmique dans la crĂ©ation musicale : la beautĂ© de la perte de contrĂŽle

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    Type de dĂ©pĂŽt #5 (version complĂšte)De plus en plus de tĂąches humaines sont prises en charge par les algorithmes dans le domaine des arts. Avec les nouvelles techniques d’intelligence artificielle (IA) disponibles, qui reposent gĂ©nĂ©ralement sur le concept d’autoapprentissage, la frontiĂšre entre l’assistance informatique et la crĂ©ation algorithmique proprement dite s’estompe. À titre de mise en contexte, je prĂ©sente, Ă  l’aide d’exemples rĂ©cents, un aperçu de la maniĂšre dont les artistes utilisent des algorithmes sophistiquĂ©s dans leur travail - et comment cette nouvelle forme d’art pilotĂ© par l’IA pourrait diffĂ©rer des premiĂšres formes d’art gĂ©nĂ©rĂ©es par ordinateur. Ensuite, sur la base de thĂ©ories rĂ©centes issues d’une sociĂ©tĂ© post-humaniste et la montĂ©e de ce que certains auteurs appellent le dataisme, j’aborde des questions liĂ©es Ă  l’autonomie, Ă  la collaboration, aux droits d’auteur et au contrĂŽle de la composition sur la crĂ©ation sonore et musicale. D’un point de vue pratique, je prĂ©sente les logiciels libres et open source (FLOSS, de l’anglais Free/Libre and Open Source Software) qui ont pris une place constante dans mon processus de composition ; et je discute de la façon dont leur Ă©cosystĂšme, principalement dans le domaine de l’IA, a façonnĂ© mon travail au fil des ans, tant d’un point de vue esthĂ©tique que pratique. Une sĂ©rie de trois piĂšces mixtes produites dans le cadre de ce projet de recherche-crĂ©ation est ensuite analysĂ©e. Je prĂ©sente les diffĂ©rentes dimensions dans lesquelles le concept d’autoritĂ© algorithmique a pris part Ă  mon processus de composition, des approches techniques aux choix esthĂ©tiques. Enfin, je propose des stratĂ©gies de notation musicale, basĂ©es sur des standards ouverts, visant Ă  assurer la lisibilitĂ©, et donc la pĂ©rennitĂ© de mon travail.Algorithms have taken over an increasing number of human tasks in the realm of the arts. With newly available AI techniques, typically relying on the concept of self-learning, the line separating computer assistance from actual algorithmic creation is blurring. To contextualize, through recent illustrative examples I elaborate an overview of ways in which artists are making use of sophisticated algorithms in their work – and how this new form of AI-driven art might differ from early computer-generated art. Then, based on recent theories concerning a post-humanist society and the rise of what some authors call dataism, I discuss issues related to autonomy, collaboration, authorship and compositional control over the creation of sound and music. From a practical perspective, I present the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) that have been a consistent presence in my compositional process; and discuss how their ecosystem, mainly in the domain of AI, has shaped my work over the last decade from both aesthetic and practical standpoints. A series of three mixed pieces produced as part of this research-creation project is then analyzed. I present the different dimensions in which the concept of algorithmic authority took part in my composition process, from technical approaches to aesthetic choices. Finally, I propose some strategies for music notation, based on open standards, aiming to assure the readability, and therefore the perpetuity of my work

    Intertidal No. 1

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    For the first year ever, Intertidal has surfaced to showcase the art of Cal Poly\u27s students and faculty. An \u27intertidal zone\u27 is an area where the ocean meets the land--hidden during the high tide and exposed during the low. Our journal embodies the moment where the tide recedes, revealing stories previously hidden

    Rethinking auto-colourisation of natural Images in the context of deep learning

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    Auto-colourisation is the ill-posed problem of creating a plausible full-colour image from a grey-scale prior. The current state of the art utilises image-to-image Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The standard method for training colourisation is reformulating RGB images into a luminance prior and two-channel chrominance supervisory signal. However, progress in auto-colourisation is inherently limited by multiple prerequisite dilemmas, where unsolved problems are mutual prerequisites. This thesis advances the field of colourisation on three fronts: architecture, measures, and data. Changes are recommended to common GAN colourisation architectures. Firstly, removing batch normalisation from the discriminator to allow the discriminator to learn the primary statistics of plausible colour images. Secondly, eliminating the direct L1 loss on the generator as L1 will limit the discovery of the plausible colour manifold. The lack of an objective measure of plausible colourisation necessitates resource-intensive human evaluation and repurposed objective measures from other fields. There is no consensus on the best objective measure due to a knowledge gap regarding how well objective measures model the mean human opinion of plausible colourisation. An extensible data set of human-evaluated colourisations, the Human Evaluated Colourisation Dataset (HECD) is presented. The results from this dataset are compared to the commonly-used objective measures and uncover a poor correlation between the objective measures and mean human opinion. The HECD can assess the future appropriateness of proposed objective measures. An interactive tool supplied with the HECD allows for a first exploration of the space of plausible colourisation. Finally, it will be shown that the luminance channel is not representative of the legacy black-and-white images that will be presented to models when deployed; This leads to out-of-distribution errors in all three channels of the final colour image. A novel technique is proposed to simulate priors that match any black-and-white media for which the spectral response is known

    Guitars with Ambisonic Spatial Performance (GASP): An immersive guitar system

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    The GASP project investigates the design and realisation of an Immersive Guitar System. It brings together a range of sound processing and spatialising technologies and applies them to a specific musical instrument ‒ the Electric Guitar. GASP is an ongoing innovative audio project, fusing the musical with the technical, combining the processing of each stringÊŒs output (which we called timbralisation) with spatial sound. It is also an artistic musical project, where space becomes a performance parameter, providing new experimental immersive sound production techniques for the guitarist and music producer. Several ways of reimagining the electric guitar as an immersive sounding instrument have been considered, the primary method using Ambisonics. However, additionally, some complementary performance and production techniques have emerged from the use of divided pickups, supporting both immersive live performance and studio post-production. GASP Live offers performers and audiences new real-time sonic-spatial perspectives, where the guitarist or a Live GASP producer can have real-time control of timbral, spatial, and other performance features, such as: timbral crossfading, switching of split-timbres across strings, spatial movement where Spatial Patterns may be selected and modulated, control of Spatial Tempo, and real-time performance re-tuning. For GASP recording and post-production, individual string note patterns may be visualised in Reaper DAW,2 from which, analyses and judgements can be made to inform post-production decisions for timbralisation and spatialisation. An appreciation of auditory grouping and perceptual streaming (Bregman, 1994) has informed GASP production ideas. For performance monitoring or recorded playback, the immersive audio would typically be heard over a circular array of loudspeakers, or over headphones with head-tracked binaural reproduction. This paper discusses the design of the system and its elements, investigates other applications of divided pickups, namely GASPÊŒs Guitarpeggiator, and reflects on productions made so far

    Games and Time

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    Video games are a medium uniquely immersed in time. While the topic of time and games has been broached by many in the field of game studies, its centrality to both how games function and the experience of playing games remains underexamined. Reading games as literary texts, this holistic study uses queer and social theories to survey the myriad of ways games play with time. I argue games are time machines, each idiosyncratically allows players to experience time differently from traditional linear time. Beyond games with literal time machines, this dissertation examines games which structure themselves around labyrinthine and existential loops. It also considers real-time, or games competitively organized around time and those which change over time, in a sense, aging. Regardless of the subject, this dissertation seeks to illuminate the complexities of games and time, and argues that, despite their many conflicting messages about the topic, they all have something meaningful to say about the human experience of time

    Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022

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    Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022 is a creative-commons ebook that provides a unique 360 degrees overview of quantum technologies from science and technology to geopolitical and societal issues. It covers quantum physics history, quantum physics 101, gate-based quantum computing, quantum computing engineering (including quantum error corrections and quantum computing energetics), quantum computing hardware (all qubit types, including quantum annealing and quantum simulation paradigms, history, science, research, implementation and vendors), quantum enabling technologies (cryogenics, control electronics, photonics, components fabs, raw materials), quantum computing algorithms, software development tools and use cases, unconventional computing (potential alternatives to quantum and classical computing), quantum telecommunications and cryptography, quantum sensing, quantum technologies around the world, quantum technologies societal impact and even quantum fake sciences. The main audience are computer science engineers, developers and IT specialists as well as quantum scientists and students who want to acquire a global view of how quantum technologies work, and particularly quantum computing. This version is an extensive update to the 2021 edition published in October 2021.Comment: 1132 pages, 920 figures, Letter forma

    Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

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    This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

    Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots

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    In this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research, focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies, are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical, and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations. Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research, robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human. The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries. In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body. In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the ‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as ‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised, historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between people and objects. In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries. Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational and embodied. This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation, Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested. The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy. Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the human in anthropology without dissolving it all together
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