An Expressive Multidimensional Physical Modelling Percussion Instrument

This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a digital percussion instrument with multidimensional polyphonic control of a real-time physical modelling system. The system utilises modular parametric control of different physical models, excitations and couplings alongside continuous morphing and unique interaction capabilities to explore and enhance expressivity and gestural interaction for a percussion instrument. Details of the instrument and audio engine are provided together with an experiment that tested real-time capabilities of the system, and expressive qualities of the instrument. Testing showed that advances in sensor technology have the potential to enhance creativity in percussive instruments and extend gestural manipulation, but will require well designed and inherently complex mapping schemes

Expressive Musical Robots: Building, Evaluating, and Interfacing with an Ensemble of Mechatronic Instruments

An increase in the number of parameters of expression on musical robots can result in an increase in their expressivity as musical instruments. This thesis focuses on the design, construction, and implementation of four new robotic instruments, each designed to add more parametric control than is typical for the current state of the art of musical robotics. The principles followed in the building of the four new instruments are scalable and can be applied to musical robotics in general: the techniques exhibited in this thesis for the construction and use of musical robotics can be used by composers, musicians, and installation artists to add expressive depth to their own works with robotic instruments. Accompanying the increase in parametric depth applied to the musical robotics is an increase in difficulty in interfacing with them: robots with a greater number of actuators require more time to program. This document aims to address this problem in two ways: the use of closed-loop control for low-level adjustments of the robots and the use of a parametric encoding-equipped musical robot network to provide composers with intuitive musical commands for the robots. The musical robots introduced, described, and applied in this thesis were conceived of as musical instruments for performance and installation use by artists. This thesis closes with an exhibition of the performance and installation uses of these new robots and with a discussion of future research directions

Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life

This book and the series which builds on the philosophy examines the musical experiences that students find meaningful and ways in which teachers, parents and community music leaders might provide access to meaningful music education. This is particularly relevant today because school music often fails to provide sustainable access to music making for life, health and wellbeing beyond school. The book seeks to reframe the focus of music education within a pragmatist philosophy and provide a framework that is culturally and chronologically inclusive. The proposed book is aimed at current and pre-service music teachers, community music leaders and coaches and designed to be a useful professional development tool and reference resource for teacher/community arts workers. Secondary audiences for the book would include all general and trainee elementary school teachers and interested teachers in disciplines other than music particularly those from the community arts concerned with music, cultural health and wellbeing in community settings. Another secondary market would be private music teachers in the community and recreational music-making coaches who need strategies and techniques for the provision of culturally inclusive music experiences within complex multi cultural and cross cultural settings

Extending physical instruments using sampled acoustics

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-138).This thesis presents a system architecture for creating hybrid digital-acoustic percussion instruments by combining extensions of existing signal processing techniques with specially-designed semi-acoustic physical controllers. This work aims to provide greater realism to digital percussion, gaining much of the richness and understandability of acoustic instruments while preserving the flexibility of digital systems. For this thesis, I have collaborated with percussionists to develop a range of instruments, to refine and extend the algorithmic and physical designs, and to determine successful models of interaction. Conventional percussion controllers measure and discretize the intensity of strikes into discrete trigger messages, but they also ignore the timbre of the hits and fail to track more ambiguous input. In this work, the continuous acoustic output of a struck physical object is processed to add the resonance of a sampled instrument. This is achieved by employing existing low-latency convolution algorithms which have been extended to give the player control over features such as damping, spectral flattening, nonlinear effects, and pitch.(cont.) One of the advantages of this approach is that light taps, scrapes, rubs, or stirring with brushes all take on a hybrid timbre of the real and sampled sound that is surprisingly realistic and controllable. Since part of its behavior is inherently acoustic, a player's intuition about interacting with physical objects can be applied to controlling it. The ability to transform the apparent acoustic properties of objects also suggests applications to HCI and product design contexts.by Roberto Mario Aimi.Ph.D

A STUDY IN THE INFORMATION CONTENT, CONSISTENCY, AND EXPRESSIVE POWER OF FUNCTION STRUCTURES IN MECHANICAL DESIGN

In engineering design research, function structures are used to represent the intended functionality of technical artifacts. Function structures are graph-based representations where the nodes are functions, or actions, and the edges are flows, or objects of those actions. For the consistent description of artifact functionality, multiple controlled vocabularies have been developed in previous research. The Functional Basis is one such vocabulary that provides for a set of verbs and a set of nouns, organized in the three-level hierarchy. This vocabulary is extensively studied in design research. Two major application of this vocabulary are the Design Repository, which is a web-base archive of design information of consumer electro-mechanical products obtained through reverse engineering, and the functional decomposition grammar rules that synthesizes sub-functions or elementary actions of a product from the overall function or goal of the product. However, despite the Functional Basis\u27 popularity, the usefulness of its hierarchical structure has not been specifically tested. Additionally, although this vocabulary provides the verbs and nouns, no explicit guideline for using those terms in function structures has been proposed. Consequently, multiple representational inconsistencies can be found in the function structures within the Design Repository. The two research goals in this thesis are: (1) to investigate if the hierarchy in the Functional Basis is useful for constructing function structures and (2) to explore means to increase the consistency and expressive power of the Functional Basis vocabulary. To address the first goal, an information metric for function structures and function vocabularies is developed based on the principles of Information Theory. This metric is applied to three function structures from the Design Repository to demonstrate that the secondary level of the Functional Basis is the most informative of the three. This finding is validated by an external empirical study, which shows that the secondary level is used most frequently in the Design Repository, finally indicating that the hierarchy is not useful for constructing function structures. To address the second research goal, a new representation of functions, including rules the topological connections in a function structure, is presented. It is demonstrated through experiments that the new representation is more expressive than the text-based descriptions of functions used in the Functional Basis, as it formally describes which flows can be connected to which functions. It is also shown that the new representation reduces the uncertainty involved in the individual function structures

The digitally 'Hand Made' object

This article will outline the author’s investigations of types of computer interfaces in practical three-dimensional design practice. The paper contains a description of two main projects in glass and ceramic tableware design, using a Microscribe G2L digitising arm as an interface to record three-dimensional spatial\ud design input.\ud \ud The article will provide critical reflections on the results of the investigations and will argue that new approaches in digital design interfaces could have relevance in developing design methods which incorporate more physical ‘human’ expressions in a three-dimensional design practice. The research builds on concepts indentified in traditional craft practice as foundations for constructing new types of creative practices based on the use of digital technologies, as outlined by McCullough (1996)

Jazz as discourse : a contextualised account of contemporary jazz in post-apartheid Durban and Johannesburg.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.This study offers an ethnographically contextualised close reading of the music played by three 'jazz' groups in eight concerts held in Durban and Johannesburg between June 1994 and December 2003. These performances were videotaped and then analysed with reference to 1) the compositional and improvisational techniques employed in the creation of the performances; 2) the stage behaviour of the musicians; 3) audience behaviour, and 4) the physical contexts in which the performances occurred. The performances constitute the primary texts on which this study is based. Secondary texts, in the form of discourse produced because of the concerts, are also examined. These take the form of open-ended interviews with thirteen participant musicians and twelve audience members. The primary and secondary texts are then compared with each other and situated within their broader musical and social contexts. This exploration of the ways in which social processes inhere in musical processes draws on a notion of expressive discourse as 1) a multifaceted practice in which textuality, subjectivity, place, history, and power function as interdependent parts of a complex social ecology and 2) a dialogically-constituted system of utterances. The study then argues that musical details articulate social meanings - and thus function as utterances - because of their dual existence within 1) systems of intra- and intertextual relationships and 2) processes of dialectical interaction between texts and socio-historical contexts

Wǝ́xa Sxwuqwálustn: Pulling Together Identity, Community, and Cohesion in the Cowlitz Indian Tribe

In the last 30 years many changes have taken place within the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. These changes involve the tribe’s sovereignty and have greatly impacted the emic identity of the tribe. Previous identity research with the Cowlitz predates these changes and no longer accurately describe the Cowlitz. The question for this research was how have these changes affected the emic identity of the Cowlitz today as seen in their community and interactions? And how does their identity now compare with their identity in the times of pre-contact and initial contact with whites? This research uses Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to assess and compare the emic identity of the contemporary and historical tribe in terms of sovereignty, identity, and cultural rejuvenation. When the structure, relationships, activities, and purposes of the tribe and groups within the contemporary tribe were analyzed, there was a striking resemblance to the community system described in early settler journals and histories of the Cowlitz. The research was cross-sectional, including ethnographic study, interviews of tribal members, document analysis, and historical analysis. In an attempt to allow the Cowlitz people to speak for themselves rather than project ideas onto the tribe, each section of the research first allows tribal members to voice their opinions and then relies on Cowlitz voices to confirm the analysis. The final dissertation was then submitted to the tribe for comment

Listening Context and Listening Mode: Towards a Unified Approach for Examining the Connection between Music, Emotion, and Mood.

A comprehensive investigation into music and emotion/mood research models (Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2013)1 uncovered notable shortfalls in the selection of test instruments (primacy of classical recordings); limitations of testing conditions (clinical, theoretical, or self-reporting); opportunistic choice of test participants (selected out of convenience); and research practice following historical models (scientific or sociological methodologies). This paper sought to address these issues and presented a considered approach to sourcing music stimuli; identified a wider participant cross-section and testing options; and pinpointed the need for the application of a unified, interdisciplinary research method - a model that can integrate music’s disciplines, forms, and types of engagement (ie. systematic musicology)2 with a human’s neural, physiological, behavioural, and expressive elements (ie. psychophysiology):(Systematic) Musicology today covers all disciplinary approaches to the study of all music in all its manifestations and all its contexts, whether they be physical, acoustic, digital, multimedia, social, sociological, cultural, historical, geographical, ethnological, psychological, physiological, medicinal, pedagogical, therapeutic, or in relation to any other musically relevant discipline or context. (Parncutt, 2007. Ibid.).Scientific methodologies (biological/neurological) measure physiological responses at the expense of psychoacoustic responses - an assumption that clinical measurement techniques andalgorithmic solutions present an efficient model to classify or explain the relationship between music and emotion/mood. Sociological methodologies (psychological/theoretical) suppose thatsymbolic interactionism or structural functionalism in music drives an emotional response and affects mood - an assumption that music is a semiotic system, and its constructs are either reflections of the cultural genre around which that music grew or inherent personality traits - and are imbued with messages and meaning. Therefore, this paper proposed a mixed method analysis to measure the true effect of music manifestations on emotion/mood.Outlined in this document are four aspects central to performing a critical investigation into music vs emotion/mood: a) the need for clear principles and criteria in the curation of test instruments and test subjects, b) the importance of the listening context (profile, orientation, and acrophase) of respondents, c) the significance of the listening mode (cause-based, semantic-focus, or ambient-type) of respondents in the research process, and d) the recognitionof music-induced emotions and their physiological/psychological triggers on respondents is temporal, as music means different things to different people at different times.This paper annotated key musical stimuli (music elements/genres), examined listening contexts (situational macro-variables), and explored listening modes (cognition/appreciation factors) that impact upon listening experiences using a 5W+1Hi inquiry method for compilation. Selected historical cases of claimed music-induced emotional responses or behavioural modification, as well as consciously constructed works by composers to elicit emotionalresponses, were presented side-by-side with theoretical templates used to map emotion/mood.As music-listening experiences today integrate a substantial visual/interactive component in their consumption, via a proliferation of audio-visual device options (screen music, musicvideo, promotional/commercial contents), a diverse range of samples were also included in the paper’s discussion. The general recommendations and conclusions of this paper were that:i) in the development-stage of the music/emotion/mood research plan, it is paramount that a curated menu of test instruments, applicable across a representative spectrum of listeners, and measurable in varying listening environments, be created prior to undertaking research.ii) using test instruments without a qualifying listening context template, and using test procedures without distinguishing listening mode foci, will diminish research results. Participant-profiling will determine listening backgrounds/purposes and fine-tune testing.iii) via the lens of systematic musicology which encompasses all music disciplines, and an integrated quantitative/qualitative data collection and analysis or mixed method research model (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011)3, this will address shortcomings of prior research.1 Eerola, T., and Vuoskoski, J. (2013, February). A Review of Music and Emotion Studies: Approaches, Emotion Models, and Stimuli. In Music Perception. An interdisciplinary Journal. Volume 30. Issue 3. pp. 307-340.2 Parncutt, R. (2007, Spring). Systematic musicology and the history and future of western musical scholarship. In Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 1-32.3 Creswell, J. and Plano Clark, V. (2011). Designing and conducting mixed methods research. Sage