Collaborative composition for musical robots

The goal of this research is to collaborate with a number of different artists to explore the capabilities of robotic musical instruments to cultivate new music. This paper describes the challenges faced in using musical robotics in rehearsals and on the performance stage. It also describes the design of custom software frameworks and tools for the variety of composers and performers interacting with the new instruments. Details of how laboratory experiments and rehearsals moved to the concert hall in a variety of diverse performance scenarios are described. Finally, a paradigm for how to teach musical robotics as a multimedia composition course is discussed

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Adaptive and learning-based formation control of swarm robots

Autonomous aerial and wheeled mobile robots play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, transportation, monitoring, and inspection. However, these operations are faced with a few open challenges including robust autonomy, and adaptive coordination based on the environment and operating conditions, particularly in swarm robots with limited communication and perception capabilities. Furthermore, the computational complexity increases exponentially with the number of robots in the swarm. This thesis examines two different aspects of the formation control problem. On the one hand, we investigate how formation could be performed by swarm robots with limited communication and perception (e.g., Crazyflie nano quadrotor). On the other hand, we explore human-swarm interaction (HSI) and different shared-control mechanisms between human and swarm robots (e.g., BristleBot) for artistic creation. In particular, we combine bio-inspired (i.e., flocking, foraging) techniques with learning-based control strategies (using artificial neural networks) for adaptive control of multi- robots. We first review how learning-based control and networked dynamical systems can be used to assign distributed and decentralized policies to individual robots such that the desired formation emerges from their collective behavior. We proceed by presenting a novel flocking control for UAV swarm using deep reinforcement learning. We formulate the flocking formation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and consider a leader-follower configuration, where consensus among all UAVs is used to train a shared control policy, and each UAV performs actions based on the local information it collects. In addition, to avoid collision among UAVs and guarantee flocking and navigation, a reward function is added with the global flocking maintenance, mutual reward, and a collision penalty. We adapt deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) with centralized training and decentralized execution to obtain the flocking control policy using actor-critic networks and a global state space matrix. In the context of swarm robotics in arts, we investigate how the formation paradigm can serve as an interaction modality for artists to aesthetically utilize swarms. In particular, we explore particle swarm optimization (PSO) and random walk to control the communication between a team of robots with swarming behavior for musical creation

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Live Coding

Open Access peer reviewed papers on live coding published at the 1st International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Leeds

Music, masculinity, and tradition: a musical ethnography of Dagbamba warriors in Tamale, Ghana

Chronic unemployment and decreased agricultural production over the last two decades have left an increasing number of men throughout Ghana’s historically under-developed North unable to meet the financial and moral expectations traditionally associated with masculinity. Paralleling the liberalization of Ghana’s political economy over this period, this “crisis of masculinity” has resulted in unprecedented transformations in traditional kinship structures, patriarchy, and channels for the transmission of traditional practices in Dagbamba communities. Driven by anxieties over these changes, Dagbamba “tradition” is being promoted as a prescription for problems stemming from poverty, environmental degradation, and political conflict, placing music and dance at the center of this discourse. Music, Masculinity, and Tradition, investigates the mobilization of traditional music as a site for the restoration of masculinity within the Dagbamba community of northern Ghana. Drawing on eleven months of participant-observation conducted with Dagbamba warriors in Ghana’s Northern Region, archival research, and ethnographic interviews, this dissertation explores the relationship between performances of traditional music, preservationist discourses, and the construction of masculinity in the first decades of the 21st century. Through analyses of the warriors’ ritual performances, including sounds, movements, and dramatized violence, I ask how traditional ideals and contemporary realities of Dagbamba masculinity are constructed, negotiated, and reinforced through performances of traditional music, suggesting links between the “iterative performativity” of the ritual and evolving constructions of gender. This dissertation offers insight into the musical construction of masculinity and the place of “tradition” in the 21st century. It also challenges over-determined notions of power/resistance through a critical evaluation of traditional musical performances as sites for the negotiation of ideas about gender, power, and history in contemporary Africa

Agent-Based Graphic Sound Synthesis and Acousmatic Composition

For almost a century composers and engineers have been attempting to create systems that allow drawings and imagery to behave as intuitive and efficient musical scores. Despite the intuitive interactions that these systems afford, they are somewhat underutilised by contemporary composers. The research presented here explores the concept of agency and artificial ecosystems as a means of creating and exploring new graphic sound synthesis algorithms. These algorithms are subsequently designed to investigate the creation of organic musical gesture and texture using granular synthesis. The output of this investigation consists of an original software artefact, The Agent Tool, alongside a suite of acousmatic musical works which the former was designed to facilitate. When designing new musical systems for creative exploration with vast parametric controls, careful constraints should be put in place to encourage focused development. In this instance, an evolutionary computing model is utilised as part of an iterative development cycle. Each iteration of the system’s development coincides with a composition presented in this portfolio. The features developed as part of this process subsequently serve the author’s compositional practice and inspiration. As the software package is designed to be flexible and open ended, each composition represents a refinement of features and controls for the creation of musical gesture and texture. This document subsequently discusses the creative inspirations behind each composition alongside the features and agents that were created. This research is contextualised through a review of established literature on graphic sound synthesis, evolutionary musical computing and ecosystemic approaches to sound synthesis and control

Creative Machine

Curators: William Latham, Atau Tanaka and Frederic Fol Leymarie A major exhibition exploring the twilight world of human/machine creativity, including installations, video and computer art, Artificial Intelligence, robotics and Apps by leading artists from Goldsmiths and international artists by invitation. The vision for organising the Creative Machine Exhibition is to show exciting works by key international artists, Goldsmiths staff and selected students who use original software and hardware development in the creative production of their work. The range of work on show, which could be broadly termed Computer Art, includes mechanical drawing devices, kinetic sculpture driven by fuzzy logic, images produced using machine learning, simulated cellular growth forms and the self-generating works using automated aesthetics, VR, 3D printing, and social telephony networks. Traditionally, Computer Art has held a maverick position on the edge of mainstream contemporary culture with its origins in Russian Constructivist Art, biological systems, “geeky” software conferences, rave / techno music and indie computer games. These artists have defined their own channels for exhibiting their work and organised conferences and at times been entrepreneurial at building collaborations with industry at both a corporate and startup level (with the early computer artists in the 1970s and 1980s needing to work with computer corporations to get access to computers). Alongside this, interactive media art drew upon McLuhan’s notion of technology as extensions of the human to create participatory, interactive artworks by making use of novel interface technology that has been developed since the 1980s. However, with new techniques such as 3D printing, the massive spread of sophisticated sensors in consumer devices like smartphones, and the use of robotics by artists, digital art would appear to have an opportunity to come more to the fore in public consciousness. This exhibition is timely in that it coincides with an apparent wider growth of public interest in digital art, as shown by the Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican, London and the recent emergence of commercial galleries such as Bitforms in New York and Carroll / Fletcher in London, which, acquire and show technology-based art. The Creative Machine exhibition is the first event to make use of Goldsmiths’ new Sonics Immersive Media Lab (SIML) Chamber. This advanced surround audiovisual projection space is a key part of the St James-Hatcham refurbishment. The facility was funded by capital funding from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Goldsmiths, as well as research funding from the European Research Council (ERC). This is connected respectively to the Intelligent Games/Game Intelligence (IGGI) Centre for Doctoral Training, and Atau Tanaka’s MetaGesture Music (MGM) ERC grant. The space was built by the SONICS, a cross-departmental research special interest group at Goldsmiths that brings together the departments of Computing, Music, Media & Communications, Sociology, Visual Cultures, and Cultural Studies. It was designed in consultation with the San Francisco-based curator, Naut Humon, to be compatible with the Cinechamber system there. During Creative Machines, we shall see, in the SIML space, multiscreen screenings of work by Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Naoko Tosa, and Vesna Petresin, as well as a new immersive media work by IGGI researcher Memo Akten

Cross-dressing to Backbeats: An Exploration of the Practices, Wo/men Producers, and History of Electroclash

This research-creation dissertation focuses on the emergence of electroclash as a dominant form of electronic dance music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Electroclash combines the extended pulsing sections of techno, house and other dance musics with the trashier energy of rock and new wave. The genre signals an attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony. Electroclash also emphasizes, rather than hides, the European, trashy elements of electronic dance music. This project addresses the following questions: what is distinct about the genre and its related practices, both in and out of the studio? Why do rock and electro come together at this point and in this way? Why is electroclash affectively powerful for musicians, audiences and listeners? And, what does the genre portend in terms of our understandings of the politics of electronic music? The coming together of rock and electro is examined vis-à-vis the ongoing changing sociality of music production/distribution and the changing role of the producer. Numerous women, whether as solo producers or in the context of collaborative groups, significantly contributed to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash, an anomaly in the history of popular music and electronic music where the role of the producer has typically been associated with men. These changes are discussed in relation to the way key electroclash producers often used a hybrid approach to production involving the integration of new(er) technologies, such as laptops containing various audio production software with older, inexpensive keyboards, microphones, samplers and drum machines to achieve the ironic backbeat laden hybrid electro-rock sound