Collaborative computer music composition and the emergence of the computer music designer

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.This submission explores the development of collaborative computer music creation and the role of the Musical Assistant, or Computer Music Designer, or Live Electronics Designer, or RIM (Réalisateur en informatique musicale) and does so primarily through the consideration of a series of collaborations with composers over the last 18 years. The submission documents and evaluates a number of projects which exemplify my practice within collaborative computer music creation, whether in the form of live electronics, tape-based or fixed media work, as a live electronics performer, or working with composers and others to create original tools and music for artistic creations. A selection of works is presented to exemplify archetypes found within the relational structures of collaborative work. The relatively recent development of this activity as an independent metier is located within its historical context, a context in which my work has played a significant role. The submission evidences the innovative aspects of that work and, more generally, of the role of the Computer Music Designer through consideration of a number of Max patches and program examples especially created for the works under discussion. Finally, the validation of the role of the Computer Music Designer as a new entity within the world of music creation is explored in a range of contexts, demonstrating the ways in which Computer Music Designers not only collaborate in the creation of new work but also generate new resources for computer-based music and new creative paradigms

Final Research Report for Sound Design and Audio Player

This deliverable describes the work on Task 4.3 Algorithms for sound design and feature developments for audio player. The audio player runs on the in-store player (ISP) and takes care of rendering the music playlists via beat-synchronous automatic DJ mixing, taking advantage of the rich musical content description extracted in T4.2 (beat markers, structural segmentation into intro and outro, musical and sound content classification). The deliverable covers prototypes and final results on: (1) automatic beat-synchronous mixing by beat alignment and time stretching – we developed an algorithm for beat alignment and scheduling of time-stretched tracks; (2) compensation of play duration changes introduced by time stretching – in order to make the playlist generator independent of beat mixing, we chose to readjust the tempo of played tracks such that their stretched duration is the same as their original duration; (3) prospective research on the extraction of data from DJ mixes – to alleviate the lack of extensive ground truth databases of DJ mixing practices, we propose steps towards extracting this data from existing mixes by alignment and unmixing of the tracks in a mix. We also show how these methods can be evaluated even without labelled test data, and propose an open dataset for further research; (4) a description of the software player module, a GUI-less application to run on the ISP that performs streaming of tracks from disk and beat-synchronous mixing. The estimation of cue points where tracks should cross-fade is now described in D4.7 Final Research Report on Auto-Tagging of Music.EC/H2020/688122/EU/Artist-to-Business-to-Business-to-Consumer Audio Branding System/ABC D

IRCAM: Le Marteau sans Matière?

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Mimesis stories: composing new nature music for the shakuhachi

Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world

L'Octuor De Violoncelles, Tuesday, March 30, 1999

This is the concert program of the L'Octuor De Violoncelles performance on Tuesday, March 30, 1999 at 6:00 p.m., at the Boston University Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Totem by Georges Aperghis, Sonate a Huit by Betsy Jolas, Loop by Pascal Dusapin, Messagesquisse by Pierre Boulez, Korot by Luciano Berio, and Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

First Steps Towards an Organology Of Virtual Instruments In Computer Music

International audienceIn this paper, we will first take assess of 25 years of interactive real-time music, and introduce the problem of preservation of this music for the future generations, that is to say its ability to be re-performed, and not only to preserve the recordings. We present the state of the art in the field of active preservation of real-time works. We then give an overview of the solutions developed by IRCAM and its partners Grame, Armines ParisTech and CIEREC, in the framework of the ASTREE project, and explain the possibilities envisioned in a case study that is En Echo by Philippe Manoury