Ten-Hand Piano: A Networked Music Installation

This paper presents the latest developments of the Public Sound Objects (PSOs) system, an experimental framework to implement and test new concepts for Networked Music. The project of a Public interactive installation using the PSOs system was commissioned in 2007 by Casa da Musica, the main concert hall space in Porto. It resulted in a distributed musical structure with up to ten interactive performance terminals distributed along the Casa da Musica’s hallways, collectively controlling a shared acoustic piano. The installation allows the visitors to collaborate remotely with each other, within the building, using a software interface custom developed to facilitate collaborative music practices and with no requirements in terms previous knowledge of musical performance

Public Sound Objects : a shared environment for networked music practice on the Web

The Public Sound Objects (PSOs) project consists of the development of a networked musical system, which is an experimental framework to implement and test new concepts for online music communication. The PSOs project approaches the idea of collaborative musical performances over the Internet by aiming to go beyond the concept of using computer networks as a channel to connect performing spaces. This is achieved by exploring the internet’s shared nature in order to provide a public musical space where anonymous users can meet and be found performing in collective sonic art pieces. The system itself is an interface-decoupled musical instrument, in which a remote user interface and a sound processing engine reside with different hosts in an extreme scenario where a user can access the synthesizer from any place in the world using the World Wide Web. Specific software features were implemented in order to reduce the disruptive effects of network latency, such as dynamic adaptation of the musical tempo to communication latency measured in real time and consistent sound panning with the object’s behavior at the graphical user interface

Ritmo musical adaptável à latência de rede no sistema public sound objects

Quando estabelecidos sobre redes informáticas de longa distância os sistemas de criação musical colaborativos comportam um problema critico: a latência da rede, que é um impedimento à comunicação musical em tempo real. Num estudo recente, foi estabelecida a relação entre tolerância à latência e o ritmo musical. Este resultado emergiu de uma experiência levada a cabo pelos autores deste artigo, na qual foram aplicadas condições simuladas de latência de rede à performance de diferentes músicos enquanto tocavam temas clássicos de Jazz. O projecto Public Sound Objects – PSOs é um espaço musical partilhado na web, que tem constituído um paradigma experimental para implementação e teste de diferentes abordagens para a comunicação musical on-line. Este artigo descreve a implementação da última versão do sistema PSOs, incluindo uma componente para instrumentos de música em rede que incorpora a latência como uma funcionalidade de software, que adapta dinamicamente o seu ritmo à latência de comunicação medida em tempo real

Digitized Diasporic Memory: Leveraging User-Generated and Open Tools for Collective Audio Storytelling

“Digitized Diasporic Memory” explores the relationship, intersections, connections, and divergencies of experiences between Black diasporic people. With an understanding of diaspora as networked, rhizomatic, and tentacled, the project seeks to create a space for connection, in an environment where connection is not easily accessed or sustained across these communities of people. The thesis draws heavily from the idea of personal networked thinking and expands into collective thinking, or what Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes as mind-to-mind networks, wherein several individuals connect their ideas. The following document details the conception of open-source and open-access technologies which illustrate how our individual pasts weave in and out of each other. The first is a proof of concept for a relational database of crowd-sourced audio memories, and the second is a web application that maps and visualizes the connections between the submitted stories. The document also details the thesis study in which the technologies are put to the test by people of African descent residing on Turtle Island. “Digitized Diasporic Memory” is part database, part conversational archive, part open-access library, part collective memory bank, part digitized memory, and part chain of memories which bring to the fore the possible connections between Black diasporic experiences and narratives. It addresses the need for intra-diasporic validation, belonging, understanding across differences, and knowledge-sharing

Digitized Diasporic Memory: Leveraging User-Generated and Open Tools for Collective Audio Storytelling

“Digitized Diasporic Memory” explores the relationship, intersections, connections, and divergencies of experiences between Black diasporic people. With an understanding of diaspora as networked, rhizomatic, and tentacled, the project seeks to create a space for connection, in an environment where connection is not easily accessed or sustained across these communities of people. The thesis draws heavily from the idea of personal networked thinking and expands into collective thinking, or what Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes as mind-to-mind networks, wherein several individuals connect their ideas. The following document details the conception of open-source and open-access technologies which illustrate how our individual pasts weave in and out of each other. The first is a proof of concept for a relational database of crowd-sourced audio memories, and the second is a web application that maps and visualizes the connections between the submitted stories. The document also details the thesis study in which the technologies are put to the test by people of African descent residing on Turtle Island. “Digitized Diasporic Memory” is part database, part conversational archive, part open-access library, part collective memory bank, part digitized memory, and part chain of memories which bring to the fore the possible connections between Black diasporic experiences and narratives. It addresses the need for intra-diasporic validation, belonging, understanding across differences, and knowledge-sharing

Refractive Spatialisation: The Digital Picturesque, the Online-Reality Gap and Gentrification in Seoul

Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this research introduces the concept of refractive spatialisation in describing and articulating the deep interconnections between urbanisation, online space, social practices, and the relational (re)making of place-images as a result of technological innovations in information, communications and vehicles. The concept is coined in reference to the process through which symbolic space (online blog spaces) and physical space (the built environment) become co-dependent and co-generative in terms of rapid urban transformations driven by the touristification of previously mundane spaces. In relation to Seoul, South Korea these processes are shown to alter the built environment and drive processes of gentrification in tandem with state-led infrastructure projects: Airport Railroad Express (AREX) and Gyeongui Line Forest Park (GLFP). Focusing on Yeonnam- dong (total population of 15,769), a neighbourhood of Seoul, the research shows how urban regeneration, the consumption tastes of competitive young urbanites, and the representation and rearrangement of place-images online (led by online influencers) interact in the re- making of place. This involves a transformation in the place-image of Yeonnam-dong from an everyday “hidden”, working-class neighbourhood to an Instagrammable space produced and re-valued in relation to other places. The thesis analyses urban regeneration efforts in Yeonnam-dong from 2010-2018, online blog data (2,425 posts)) over the same period, and qualitative interviews with 42 interviewees from six categories: 1) 20-30s millennials; 2) Business owners and artists; 3) Property experts and local agencies; 4) Blog influencers; 5) Local residents; and 6) Seoul Metropolitan Government officials. The research articulates a new process of the uneven production of contemporary urban space influenced by the reconfiguration of spatial characteristics, property values, economic systems, social practices, and online imagery and preferences, based on the symbolic and information economy in post-industrial cities. In the new process of gentrifying Yeonnam-dong, refractive spatialisation functions as a key driver for interconnecting spatial change with new practices (aesthetic tourism and the digital picturesque), flows (selective online data of translocal representations), and logic (capitalist dynamics of aesthetic and hyper-realistic space triggered by the gap between online images and physical spaces – the online-reality gap)

How the internet is shaping the Chilean scientific community: globalization and dependency

The Internet has emerged as a catalyst for global knowledge production. This is supported by its positive impacts in the First World. A progressive assessment argues that the Internet will be the elixir that brings immediate visibility and relevance to scientific communities in the periphery. Yet, Internet diffusion is often framed by past technology failures that further widen global divides. This characterizes an affliction argument. The teething argument suggests that adoption within the Third World is tentative at best with benefits unfolding over time in some regions but not others. This dissertation is a qualitative and quantitative study that tests these three technology arguments (elixir, affliction, and, teething) in a Latin American region. It considers the relationship between scientific communication, collaboration, and productivity in Chilean science, focusing on the role of Internet practice. Results are presented through the qualitative analysis of 29 video taped interviews, followed by a quantitative analysis of a communication network survey administered to 337 Chilean researchers. Qualitative findings suggest that despite Chilean regional leadership in economic output, political disruptions and a paucity of local resources motivate many researchers to seek training abroad. This creates new, exterior contacts that are maintained through email communication. These cyber links, though, may also be creating technology dependencies. Quantitative results confirm that Chilean scientists are well connected when compared to past region studies. Yet, the Chilean scientific community reports an inverse relationship between domestic and foreign contacts, mirroring the disjointed network profile found in other developing regions. Other results suggest that Chilean scientists frequently publish in foreign journals. And in contrast to findings from other developing areas, collaboration is consistently related with increased domestic publications. Although Chileans seldom report problems, those they do report are associated with working with more collaborators and having geographically heterogeneous networks. Email shows no effect toward reducing research problems; and in some cases, email is associated with more intensive reports of problems. Taken as a whole, this author\u27s findings support a teething argument for Internet influence on professional networks and activities within the Chilean scientific community

Dynamic data placement and discovery in wide-area networks

The workloads of online services and applications such as social networks, sensor data platforms and web search engines have become increasingly global and dynamic, setting new challenges to providing users with low latency access to data. To achieve this, these services typically leverage a multi-site wide-area networked infrastructure. Data access latency in such an infrastructure depends on the network paths between users and data, which is determined by the data placement and discovery strategies. Current strategies are static, which offer low latencies upon deployment but worse performance under a dynamic workload. We propose dynamic data placement and discovery strategies for wide-area networked infrastructures, which adapt to the data access workload. We achieve this with data activity correlation (DAC), an application-agnostic approach for determining the correlations between data items based on access pattern similarities. By dynamically clustering data according to DAC, network traffic in clusters is kept local. We utilise DAC as a key component in reducing access latencies for two application scenarios, emphasising different aspects of the problem: The first scenario assumes the fixed placement of data at sites, and thus focusses on data discovery. This is the case for a global sensor discovery platform, which aims to provide low latency discovery of sensor metadata. We present a self-organising hierarchical infrastructure consisting of multiple DAC clusters, maintained with an online and distributed split-and-merge algorithm. This reduces the number of sites visited, and thus latency, during discovery for a variety of workloads. The second scenario focusses on data placement. This is the case for global online services that leverage a multi-data centre deployment to provide users with low latency access to data. We present a geo-dynamic partitioning middleware, which maintains DAC clusters with an online elastic partition algorithm. It supports the geo-aware placement of partitions across data centres according to the workload. This provides globally distributed users with low latency access to data for static and dynamic workloads.Open Acces