Reimagining the Computer Keyboard as a Musical Interface

This paper discusses the use of typed text as a real-time input for interactive performance systems. A brief review of the literature discusses text-based generative systems, links between typing and playing percussion instruments and the use of typing gestures in contemporary performance practice. The paper then documents the author’s audio-visual system that is driven by the typing of text/lyrics in real-time. It is argued that the system promotes the sensation of liveness through clear, perceptible links between the performer’s gestures, the system’s audio outputs and the its visual outputs. The system also provides a novel approach to the use of generative techniques in the composition and live performance of songs. Future developments would include the use of dynamic text effects linked to sound generation and greater interaction between human performer and the visual

The Polygong: A Polyhedronic Digital Instrument

The polygong is a new kind of conceptual instrument that maps familiar theoretical harmonic and melodic structures to a geometrically intuitive physical interface.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1054/thumbnail.jp

Interaction and the Art of User-Centered Digital Musical Instrument Design

This thesis documents the formulation of a research-based practice in multimedia art, technology and digital musical instrument design. The primary goal of my research was to investigate the principles and methodologies involved in the structural design of new interactive digital musical instruments aimed at performance by members of the general public, and to identify ways that the design process could be optimized to increase user adoption of these new instruments. The research was performed over three years and moved between studies at the University of Maine, internships in New York, and specialized research at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory at McGill University. My work is presented in two sections. The first covers early studies in user interaction and exploratory works in web and visual design, sound art, installation, and music performance. While not specifically tied to the research topic of user adoption of digital musical instruments, this work serves as the conceptual and technical background for the dedicated work to follow. The second section is dedicated to focused research on digital musical instrument design through two major projects carried out as a Graduate Research Trainee at McGill University. The first was the design and prototype of the Noisebox, a new digital musical instrument. The purpose of this project was to learn the various stages of instrument design through practical application. A working prototype has been presented and tested, and a second version is currently being built. The second project was a user study that surveyed musicians about digital musical instrument use. It asked questions about background, instrument choice, music styles played, and experiences with and attitudes towards new digital musical instruments. Based on the results of the two research projects, a model of digital musical instrument design is proposed that adopts a user-centered focus, soliciting user input and feedback throughout the design process from conception to final testing. This approach aims to narrow the gap between conceptual design of new instruments and technologies and the actual musicians who would use them

Networks of Liveness in Singer-Songwriting: A practice-based enquiry into developing audio-visual interactive systems and creative strategies for composition and performance.

This enquiry explores the creation and use of computer-based, real-time interactive audio-visual systems for the composition and performance of popular music by solo artists. Using a practice-based methodology, research questions are identified that relate to the impact of incorporating interactive systems into the songwriting process and the liveness of the performances with them. Four approaches to the creation of interactive systems are identified: creating explorative-generative tools, multiple tools for guitar/vocal pieces, typing systems and audio-visual metaphors. A portfolio of ten pieces that use these approaches was developed for live performance. A model of the songwriting process is presented that incorporates system-building and strategies are identified for reconciling the indeterminate, electronic audio output of the system with composed popular music features and instrumental/vocal output. The four system approaches and ten pieces are compared in terms of four aspects of liveness, derived from current theories. It was found that, in terms of overall liveness, a unity to system design facilitated both technological and aesthetic connections between the composition, the system processes and the audio and visual outputs. However, there was considerable variation between the four system approaches in terms of the different aspects of liveness. The enquiry concludes by identifying strategies for maximising liveness in the different system approaches and discussing the connections between liveness and the songwriting process

Inclusive improvisation: exploring the line between listening and playing music

The field of Accessible Digital Musical Instruments (ADMIs) is growing rapidly, with instrument designers recognising that adaptations to existing Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) can foster inclusive music making. ADMIs offer opportunities to engage with a wider range of sounds than acoustic instruments. Furthermore, gestural ADMIs free the music maker from relying on screen, keyboard, and mouse-based interfaces for engaging with these sounds. This brings greater opportunities for exploration, improvisation, empowerment, and flow through music making for people with disability and the communities of practice they are part of. This article argues that developing ADMIs from existing DMIs can speed up the process and allow for more immediate access for those with diverse needs. It presents three case studies of a gestural DMI, originally designed by the first author for his own creative practice, played by people with disability in diverse contexts. The article shows that system-based considerations that enabled an expert percussionist to achieve virtuoso performances with the instrument required minimal hardware and software changes to facilitate greater inclusivity. Understanding the needs of players and customising the system-based movement to sound mappings was of far greater importance in making the instrument accessible

The Techne of YouTube Performance: Musical Structure, Extended Techniques, and Custom Instruments in Solo Pop Covers

They begin with a note, a chord, the tap of a button, or the triggering of a loop: through progressively layered textures, samples, and extended performance techniques, solo cover songs on YouTube often construct themselves piece by piece before the viewer’s eyes and ears. Combining virtuosity and novelty in a package ready-made for viral online popularity, this recent and rapidly growing internet phenomenon draws together traditions old and new, from the “one man band” of the nineteenth century, to the experimental live looping of 1980s performance art, to contemporary electronic music. Building on a number of recent studies that examine the affordances and restrictions of writing and performing music on various instruments, the case studies in this article explore how these YouTube performers use theoretical and instrumental expertise to convey complex textures through a minimal collection of musical materials. In each case, the instruments themselves are arranged, modified, or even created in order to make these performances possible. These videos often incorporate looped or layered elements, arranged to take advantage of a song’s harmonic or rhythmic structures; and they frequently feature customized, self-created, or otherwise unconventional instrumentation. Through their sparse, economic construction, these intricate arrangements are each the end product of a careful analysis of each song, and they have much to teach us about the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structures of popular music

Chakram & Runthika Creative Collective: Bridging Cinema and Alternative Pop Audiences

This project aimed to diversify the stylistic output of the artistic moniker Chakram under his burgeoning umbrella production company Runthika Creative Collective. Previously, this moniker focused on composing abstract and experimental music for the films also released under this moniker. Moving forward, this portfolio will grow to incorporate produced music from a lyrically driven EP to expand the range of audiences this moniker’s work appeals to, examples from the upcoming film, In Search of Sumitra, entitled ‘Mirror Image Neurons’ and ‘Elevator to the Dream Plane,’ a vocal single ‘Turtles,’ as well as a commissioned production ‘Evolution’ for Emily Shek, MPTI 2020. While this portfolio will retain the textural emphasis associated with previous work, its focus is to bridge the worlds of experimentalism and pop and join these often disparately categorized genres and divided audiences. Furthermore, at the crossroads of this unification, there will be a liminal space for cinephile audiences to explore the fringes of pop, while simultaneously introducing casual music listeners to accessible, yet uncanny reimaginations of lyrically driven content. Innovation occurs at the interdisciplinary confluence of two seemingly unrelated concepts, marrying pop with experimentalism is essential for the growth of both genres. This juxtaposition softens formulaic songwriting structures while utilizing the framework of established structures to allow for the diaspora of alternative music to new audiences. Ultimately, this portfolio contains a range of pieces that expand this producer’s musical skills and repertoire to unexplored territories with the challenge to package challenging and fringe artistic visions within an invitation to potential new audiences.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1230/thumbnail.jp

Befriending through online gaming

Peer reviewe

Reimagining the Collective: Black Popular Music and Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed representations, as separate layered events were cut to multitrack tape. When mixed together, these overdubbed tracks presented the listener with the impression of collective, interactive performances. Features central to the ethos of R&B music making – vocals in call and response, instruments in apparent rhythmic dialogues, and funky syncopation usually resulting from interactive group dynamism – were increasingly the product of the technologically mediated process of overdubbing, and performed often by one musician singing all of the parts or layering several instruments. By 1990, in part due to the popularity of newly developed drum machines, MIDI sequencers, samplers, and digital synthesizers, to record collectively in R&B-based black popular music was the exception rather than the norm. This study considers new practices of record production that developed in this era of multitrack recording and electronic experimentation through an examination of four case studies: Stevie Wonder’s recordings in the early 1970s; Prince’s recordings from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s; Michael Jackson’s composition and recording process from this same period; and the mid-to-late 1980s sampling and sequencing processes of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production collective. The producers of these recordings, well aware of the collective ethos of earlier black music styles, conceived imaginative ways to imbue overdubbed recordings with the vibrancy of multiple performative voices. One-man band practices employed by Stevie Wonder and Prince, the recording studio experimentation and vocal composition of Michael Jackson, and the layered sampling of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad represented different innovative techniques that developed in the recording studio. These methods considered and staged features of collectivity in different ways, and in doing so, used recording studio technologies such as overdubbing and synthesizer programming to reimagine collective performance. Although the historical narrative of black popular music often focuses on large funk ensembles and interactive performance styles during the l970s, the period represents a shift for many musicians from a social, interactive means of music making to a personal, introspective, often isolated process of sonic experimentation. This process transformed and reinvented the collective interaction and improvisation common in many African American music styles into a technologically mediated process of constructing recordings through layering. Although these musicians continued to perform in traditional collectives in live concerts during this period, the recording studio and the live concert increasingly represented distinct sites of music making, as the studio became a locus for introspection and experimentation. The tradition of group performance became the muse for increasingly un-collective methods in the recording studio, while producers developed different technological and performative methods to reimagine the collective