Machine Learning Education for Artists, Musicians, and Other Creative Practitioners

This article aims to lay a foundation for the research and practice of machine learning education for creative practitioners. It begins by arguing that it is important to teach machine learning to creative practitioners and to conduct research about this teaching, drawing on related work in creative machine learning, creative computing education, and machine learning education. It then draws on research about design processes in engineering and creative practice to motivate a set of learning objectives for students who wish to design new creative artifacts with machine learning. The article then draws on education research and knowledge of creative computing practices to propose a set of teaching strategies that can be used to support creative computing students in achieving these objectives. Explanations of these strategies are accompanied by concrete descriptions of how they have been employed to develop new lectures and activities, and to design new experiential learning and scaffolding technologies, for teaching some of the first courses in the world focused on teaching machine learning to creative practitioners. The article subsequently draws on data collected from these courses—an online course as well as undergraduate and masters-level courses taught at a university—to begin to understand how this curriculum supported student learning, to understand learners’ challenges and mistakes, and to inform future teaching and research

Straddling the intersection

Music technology straddles the intersection between art and science and presents those who choose to work within its sphere with many practical challenges as well as creative possibilities. The paper focuses on four main areas: secondary education, higher education, practice and research and finally collaboration. The paper emphasises the importance of collaboration in tackling the challenges of interdisciplinarity and in influencing future technological developments

Bodily crises in skilled performance: Considering the need for artistic habits

Empirical evidence demonstrates that performing artists are confronted by a variety of ‘bodily crises’ (e.g., injury, attrition of habits induced by ageing) over the course of their careers (Wainwright, Williams, & Turner, 2005). Such crises may present a serious threat to the embodied subject. Unfortunately, many prominent theories of skill acquisition (e.g., Fitts & Posner, 1967) appear to evacuate the body from performance by suggesting that any form of conscious processing (i.e., paying conscious attention to one's action during motor skill execution) will disrupt habitual behaviour. As a result, few researchers have considered how performers might tackle bodily anomalies. In the current paper, we seek to address this issue by discussing a variety of the ‘crises’ that confront the performing body. We start by discussing a number of disciplinary practices that may contribute to these crises. Next, we argue that habitual movements must be open to ‘acts of creativity’ in order to maintain a productive relationship between the performing body and the environment. Then we consider what this ‘creative action’ might involve and discuss a number of approaches (e.g., mindfulness, somaesthetic awareness) that could maintain and improve one's movement proficiency. Here, our argument draws on Dewey's (1922) pragmatist philosophy and his belief that ‘intelligent habit’ was required to help people to improve their movement functioning. Finally, we consider the implications of our argument for current conceptualisations of ‘habitual’ movement and recommend that researchers explore the adaptive and flexible capacity of the performing body

Reflections on Eight Years of Instrument Creation with Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) has been used to create mappings for digital musical instruments for over twenty-five years, and numerous ML toolkits have been developed for the NIME community. However, little published work has studied how ML has been used in sustained instrument building and performance practices. This paper examines the experiences of instrument builder and performer Laetitia Sonami, who has been using ML to build and refine her Spring Spyre instrument since 2012. Using Sonami’s current practice as a case study, this paper explores the utility, opportunities, and challenges involved in using ML in practice over many years. This paper also reports the perspective of Rebecca Fiebrink, the creator of the Wekinator ML tool used by Sonami, revealing how her work with Sonami has led to changes to the software and to her teaching. This paper thus contributes a deeper understanding of the value of ML for NIME practitioners, and it can inform design considerations for future ML toolkits as well as NIME pedagogy. Further, it provides new perspectives on familiar NIME conversations about mapping strategies, expressivity, and control, informed by a dedicated practice over many years

Understanding Music Interaction, and Why It Matters

This is the introductory chapter of a book dedicated to new research in, and emerging new understandings of, music and human-computer interaction—known for short as music interaction. Music interaction research plays a key role in innovative approaches to diverse musical activities, including performance, composition, education, analysis, production and collaborative music making. Music interaction is pivotal in new research directions in a range of activities, including audience participation, interaction between music and dancers, tools for algorithmic music, music video games, audio games, turntablism and live coding. More generally, music provides a powerful source of challenges and new ideas for human-computer interaction (HCI). This introductory chapter reviews the relationship between music and human-computer interaction and outlines research themes and issues that emerge from the collected work of researchers and practitioners in this book

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson & Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma