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

Sensing and mapping for interactive performance

This paper describes a trans-domain mapping (TDM) framework for translating meaningful activities from one creative domain onto another. The multi-disciplinary framework is designed to facilitate an intuitive and non-intrusive interactive multimedia performance interface that offers the users or performers real-time control of multimedia events using their physical movements. It is intended to be a highly dynamic real-time performance tool, sensing and tracking activities and changes, in order to provide interactive multimedia performances. From a straightforward definition of the TDM framework, this paper reports several implementations and multi-disciplinary collaborative projects using the proposed framework, including a motion and colour-sensitive system, a sensor-based system for triggering musical events, and a distributed multimedia server for audio mapping of a real-time face tracker, and discusses different aspects of mapping strategies in their context. Plausible future directions, developments and exploration with the proposed framework, including stage augmenta tion, virtual and augmented reality, which involve sensing and mapping of physical and non-physical changes onto multimedia control events, are discussed

International Field Trips - the Tourism and Entertainment Management Field Trip to The Gambia, West Africa

Since 2008 students from the Tourism & Entertainment Management Subject Group at Leeds Metropolitan University have been offered the opportunity to spend seven nights in The Gambia, West Africa on an educational field visit. The purpose of the field visit is to investigate how tourism and entertainment can contribute to economic and social development in one of the poorest countries in the world. The field trip is extra-curricular and as such is an optional experience for the students. While the study experience is not assessed, it is hoped that the students will use the learning they gain from their time in The Gambia in the assignments and projects on their course. To date three field trips have been organised and each year the number of students selecting this study abroad opportunity has increased. Thirty-two students (6% of our total student population in Tourism and Entertainment Management) joined the field trip in February 2010, with the majority of students being from our BA (Hons) International Tourism Management degree (primarily at Level 4) and the second largest cohort being from BA (Hons) Entertainment Management (Level 6). The students fund the cost of the field trip themselves

Learning to Tango: Sustainable development and the multidisciplinary dream

It is widely accepted that the creation of a sustainable future will require considerable collaboration between a range of academic and professional disciplines. This need is usually expressed in calls for the formation of multidisciplinary teams that are designed to explore the issues and develop our understanding of the problem space. However, there would appear to be few attempts to understand how such teams operate and how they should be managed. This paper explores collective music making as a useful metaphor for understanding the role of specialist skills, of generalist, management and support skills and the way they could be harnessed so that each is able to provide the right contribution at the right time ensuring that all contributions intertwine to create a powerful song. In unpacking the multidisciplinary bag, the paper draws on the author’s experience and observations in both collective music making and the development of regulatory structures and technologies for sustainable housing. It provides a reflective reassessment of the nature of multidisciplinary working and how, with a much deeper understanding of the difficulties involved, multidisciplinary approaches can be enabled so as to deliver the solutions required for a more sustainable world

DiSCmap : digitisation of special collections mapping, assessment, prioritisation. Final project report

Traditionally, digitisation has been led by supply rather than demand. While end users are seen as a priority they are not directly consulted about which collections they would like to have made available digitally or why. This can be seen in a wide range of policy documents throughout the cultural heritage sector, where users are positioned as central but where their preferences are assumed rather than solicited. Post-digitisation consultation with end users isequally rare. How are we to know that digitisation is serving the needs of the Higher Education community and is sustainable in the long-term? The 'Digitisation in Special Collections: mapping, assessment and prioritisation' (DiSCmap) project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Information Network (RIN), aimed to:- Identify priority collections for potential digitisation housed within UK Higher Education's libraries, archives and museums as well as faculties and departments.- Assess users' needs and demand for Special Collections to be digitised across all disciplines.- Produce a synthesis of available knowledge about users' needs with regard to usability and format of digitised resources.- Provide recommendations for a strategic approach to digitisation within the wider context and activity of leading players both in the public and commercial sector.The project was carried out jointly by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) and the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) and has taken a collaborative approach to the creation of a user-driven digitisation prioritisation framework, encouraging participation and collective engagement between communities.Between September 2008 and March 2009 the DiSCmap project team asked over 1,000 users, including intermediaries (vocational users who take care of collections) and end users (university teachers, researchers and students) a variety of questions about which physical and digital Special Collections they make use of and what criteria they feel must be considered when selecting materials for digitisation. This was achieved through workshops, interviews and two online questionnaires. Although the data gathered from these activities has the limitation of reflecting only a partial view on priorities for digitisation - the view expressed by those institutions who volunteered to take part in the study - DiSCmap was able to develop:- a 'long list' of 945 collections nominated for digitisation both by intermediaries andend-users from 70 HE institutions (see p. 21);- a framework of user-driven prioritisation criteria which could be used to inform current and future digitisation priorities; (see p. 45)- a set of 'short lists' of collections which exemplify the application of user-driven criteria from the prioritisation framework to the long list (see Appendix X):o Collections nominated more than once by various groups of users.o Collections related to a specific policy framework, eg HEFCE's strategically important and vulnerable subjects for Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics.o Collections on specific thematic clusters.o Collections with highest number of reasons for digitisation