Dealing with Complexity in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: The Importance of Interactions

Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) SETI (TIN2009-07366)Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Junta de Andalucía TIC-590

The Quartet’s Death: Embodiment, Performativity, and Physicality in Heinz Holliger’s 1973 String Quartet

Throughout the twentieth century and continuing today, many composers have explored and expanded the ways in which performers are asked to interact with their musical instruments. Often referred to as “extended techniques,” these modes of playing frequently produce sounds of indefinite pitch, or which fall outside equal temperament, and the works that employ them rely on the physicality of these techniques in order to create additional layers of meaning. The concrete parameters involved in making use of such resources can sometimes take precedence over or drive other more abstract compositional materials such as precise pitch and rhythm, but their influence over the musical fabric is not immediately apparent from the score alone. In fact, music that makes extensive use of these techniques can only be fully appreciated in performance, where the embodied nature of such alternative ways of interacting with musical instruments is brought to the foreground together with the unusual sounds they produce. Our traditional analytical tools, however, evolved to explain that which goes on in musical scores, reliable documents from which verifiable knowledge can be extracted. They rely on abstract systems of organization of precise parameters such as pitch and rhythm and are often insufficient to make sense of the concrete, sometimes imprecise musical structures that can be found in many recent works. Numerous authors, such as Judy Lochhead, Carolyn Abbate, and Nicholas Cook, have both called attention to these shortcomings and suggested avenues for the investigation of musical works that do not lend themselves to traditional analysis. The present dissertation seeks to contribute to this discussion with an analysis of Heinz Holliger’s 1973 String Quartet. It is, in essence, a score analysis, but one that puts the physicality of performance front and center. Holliger’s Quartet is fundamentally about physical transformations and interactions: progressions of bow position, changes in finger pressure, different degrees of bow pressure, imitation between players, sounds obtained from the wooden body of the instruments, and, especially, changing the instruments’ physical state by repeatedly tuning down their strings, to the point of depleting their string tension almost entirely. As this precious potential energy is drained out of the instruments, the physical demands on the players themselves also take their toll, and, at the end of the work, Holliger combines the airy noise of bowing on tensionless strings with the performers’ own exhausted breathing to stage the death of the string quartet. My analysis investigates Holliger’s String Quartet as a work to be played by people of flesh and bone with instruments made of wood and metal. It discusses how the composer understands the instruments as physical objects and turns their physicality into compositional material to be manipulated, it describes the transformations of playing technique that gradually break apart the traditional manner of performing on string instruments, it observes how Holliger leverages the individuality of the performers as creative collaborators who can interact in different ways, and it demonstrates how he brings together the physicality and physiology of the performing forces to stage a dying organism

L’influence de l'anticipation sur les modulations de puissance dans la bande de fréquence bêta durant la préparation du mouvement et L'effet de la variance dans les rétroactions sensorielles sur la rétention à court terme

La production du mouvement est un aspect primordial de la vie qui permet aux organismes vivants d'interagir avec l'environnement. En ce sens, pour être efficaces, tous les mouvements doivent être planifiés et mis à jour en fonction de la complexité et de la variabilité de l'environnement. Des chercheurs du domaine du contrôle moteur ont étudié de manière approfondie les processus de planification et d’adaptation motrice. Puisque les processus de planification et d'adaptation motrice sont influencés par la variabilité de l'environnement, le présent mémoire cherche à fournir une compréhension plus profonde de ces deux processus moteurs à cet égard. La première contribution scientifique présentée ici tire parti du fait que les temps de réaction (TR) sont réduits lorsqu'il est possible d'anticiper l’objectif moteur, afin de déterminer si les modulations de TR associées à l'anticipation spatiale et temporelle sont sous-tendues par une activité préparatoire similaire. Cela a été fait en utilisant l'électroencéphalographie (EEG) de surface pour analyser l'activité oscillatoire dans la bande de fréquence bêta (13 - 30 Hz) au cours de la période de planification du mouvement. Les résultats ont révélé que l'anticipation temporelle était associée à la désynchronisation de la bande bêta au-dessus des régions sensorimotrices controlatérales à la main effectrice, en particulier autour du moment prévu de l'apparition de la cible. L’ampleur de ces modulations était corrélée aux modulations de TR à travers les participants. En revanche, l'anticipation spatiale a augmenté de manière sélective la puissance de la bande bêta au-dessus des régions pariéto-occipitales bilatérales pendant toute la période de planification. Ces résultats suggèrent des états de préparation distinct en fonction de l’anticipation temporelle et spatiale. D’un autre côté, le deuxième projet traite de la façon dont la variabilité de la rétroaction sensorielle interfère avec la rétention à court terme dans l’étude de l’adaptation motrice. Plus précisément, une tâche d'adaptation visuomotrice a été utilisée au cours de laquelle la variance des rotations a été manipulée de manière paramétrique à travers trois groupes, et ce, tout au long de la période d’acquisition. Par la suite, la rétention de cette nouvelle relation visuomotrice a été évaluée. Les résultats ont révélé que, même si le processus d'adaptation était robuste à la manipulation de la variance, la rétention à court terme était altérée par des plus hauts niveaux de variance. Finalement, la discussion a d'abord cherché à intégrer ces deux contributions en revisitant l'interprétation des résultats sous un angle centré sur l'incertitude et en fournissant un aperçu des potentielles représentations internes de l'incertitude susceptibles de sous-tendre les résultats expérimentaux observés. Par la suite, une partie de la discussion a été réservée à la manière dont le champ du contrôle moteur migre de plus en plus vers l’utilisation de tâches et d’approches expérimentales plus complexes, mais écologiques aux dépends des tâches simples, mais quelque peu dénaturées que l’on retrouve dans les laboratoires du domaine. La discussion a été couronnée par une brève proposition allant dans ce sens.Abstract: Motor behavior is a paramount aspect of life that enables the living to interact with the environment through the production of movement. In order to be efficient, movements need to be planned and updated according to the complexity and the ever-changing nature of the environment. Motor control experts have extensively investigated the planning and adaptation processes. Since both motor planning and motor adaptation processes are influenced by variability in the environment, the present thesis seeks to provide a deeper understanding of both these motor processes in this regard. More specifically, the first scientific contribution presented herein leverages the fact that reaction times (RTs) are reduced when the anticipation of the motor goal is possible to elucidate whether the RT modulations associated with temporal and spatial anticipation are subtended by similar preparatory activity. This was done by using scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to analyze the oscillatory activity in the beta frequency band (13 – 30 Hz) during the planning period. Results revealed that temporal anticipation was associated with beta-band desynchronization over contralateral sensorimotor regions, specifically around the expected moment of target onset, the magnitude of which was correlated with RT modulations across participants. In contrast, spatial anticipation selectively increased beta-band power over bilateral parieto-occipital regions during the entire planning period, suggesting that distinct states of preparation are incurred by temporal and spatial anticipation. Additionally, the second project addressed how variance in the sensory feedback interferes with short-term retention of motor adaptation. Specifically, a visuomotor adaptation task was used during which the variance of exposed rotation was parametrically manipulated across three groups, and retention of the adapted visuomotor relationship was assessed. Results revealed that, although the adaptation process was robust to the manipulation of variance, the short-term retention was impaired. The discussion first sought to integrate these two projects by revisiting the interpretation of both projects under the scope of uncertainty and by providing an overview of the internal representation of uncertainty that might subtend the experimental results. Subsequently, a part of the discussion was reserved to allude how the motor control field is transitioning from laboratory-based tasks to more naturalistic paradigms by using approaches to move motor control research toward real-world conditions. The discussion culminates with a brief scientific proposal along those lines

From global choreographies to verifiable efficient distributed implementations

International audienc

Conceptual design for INTIMAL: a physical/virtual embodied system for Relational Listening

This paper describes the preliminary design of INTIMAL: a physical-virtual embodied interactive system for relational listening in the context of human migration, within the artistic practice of improvisatory telematic sonic performance. Informed by the Deep Listening experiences of nine Colombian migrant women in Europe, INTIMAL departs from their sensorial experience in dreams, virtual and physical spaces, for a holistic understanding of the body as interface that keeps memory of place. In counterpart with an oral archive of other women’s testimonies from the Colombian civil war, body movements, voice and spoken words act as resonances opening paths for healing experiences of loss

"Release Hitting": An Analytical Study Commemorating the Artistry of the South Korean Shaman Musician Kim Yongt'aek

Within the world of South Korean traditional music, the percussion-based ritual music performed by hereditary shaman troupes in the East Coast region is justly famed for the diversity and complexity of its rhythmic structures and the virtuosic patterning that the ritualists often produce. This article presents a detailed rhythmic analysis of a multi-sectional structure called “tchoshigae,” which is frequently reckoned by the ritualists to be the most difficult item to perform in their repertoire, primarily because of its passages of ever-shifting polyrhythmic interplay, its lengthy metrical frameworks characterized by irregular and flexible internal organization, and its rapid tempi. In addition, because tchoshigae is performed at a critical juncture in a post-death ritual (Ogu Kut), the ritualists are keenly aware its effective performance is crucial to ensuring a successful ritual. Specifically, this analysis focuses on a single ritual performance of tchoshigae recorded by the author in April 2000, led by the celebrated ritual musician Kim Yongt’aek, playing the changgo drum, and his wife the shaman Kim Yŏngsuk, singing of the challenges posed by death, with other essential parts provided on kkwaenggwari hand-gongs and ching gong. The aim here is to present a thorough and wide-reaching examination of the selected performance, elucidating the music’s metrical frameworks, identifying how the ritualists organize their patterning within those frameworks, and clarifying the links between musical attributes, song text, belief system, and ritual objectives. Kim Yongt’aek, who passed away in February 2018, was the most highly esteemed and widely emulated instrumentalist within the tradition; this analysis shines a light on the impressive musical artistry that he cultivated together with Kim Yŏngsuk

Dynamical independence: discovering emergent macroscopic processes in complex dynamical systems

We introduce a notion of emergence for coarse-grained macroscopic variables associated with highly-multivariate microscopic dynamical processes, in the context of a coupled dynamical environment. Dynamical independence instantiates the intuition of an emergent macroscopic process as one possessing the characteristics of a dynamical system "in its own right", with its own dynamical laws distinct from those of the underlying microscopic dynamics. We quantify (departure from) dynamical independence by a transformation-invariant Shannon information-based measure of dynamical dependence. We emphasise the data-driven discovery of dynamically-independent macroscopic variables, and introduce the idea of a multiscale "emergence portrait" for complex systems. We show how dynamical dependence may be computed explicitly for linear systems via state-space modelling, in both time and frequency domains, facilitating discovery of emergent phenomena at all spatiotemporal scales. We discuss application of the state-space operationalisation to inference of the emergence portrait for neural systems from neurophysiological time-series data. We also examine dynamical independence for discrete- and continuous-time deterministic dynamics, with potential application to Hamiltonian mechanics and classical complex systems such as flocking and cellular automata.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figure