The gift of the algorithm: beyond autonomy and control

This piece brings together, participation, algorithmic composition and augmentation (as a mechanism by which people can work together to augment and support a composer’s workflow). The performance is about understanding the ways in which composition and performance can be understood, socially, aesthetically and scientifically. This performance becomes a piece of research and design in its own right, a more experimental manifestation of HCI, but it also demonstrates and disrupts conventional production and performance by making the multiple layers of practice and provenance obvious. *See Program notes for a fuller description of the piece for public consumption. We also aim to discuss this further and demo at the Performance workshop that we have submitted. This is part the on going research of the FAST project and aims to engage the wider interdisciplinary Audio Mostly community. • Program notes This piece expands upon Chamberlain’s work into compositional practices that explore autonomy and control, and builds upon the Numbers into Notes system as developed by De Roure. The piece (which is an evolving work) uses the symbolism of the gift to frame parts of the interactions that have occurred in the development of the piece. Individuals are given the chance to create an algorithm. This is made into a physical entity (containing a sequence), which is then gifted to the composer; these together are combined and used to compose a piece. The piece is then performed and given back to the audience (live), of which some members have created the original algorithms. The performance creates a gift, a souvenir, a memento of the experience which some of the audience members can take away. The performance also acts as a way in which we can also understand the interplay between algorithms, art, performance, provenance and participation

Rethinking False Spring Risk

Temperate plants are at risk of being exposed to late spring freezes. These freeze events - often called false springs - are one of the strongest factors determining temperate plants species range limits and can impose high ecological and economic damage. As climate change may alter the prevalence and severity of false springs, our ability to forecast such events has become more critical, and it has led to a growing body of research. Many false spring studies largely simplify the myriad complexities involved in assessing false spring risks and damage. While these studies have helped advance the field and may provide useful estimates at large scales, studies at the individual to community levels must integrate more complexity for accurate predictions of plant damage from late spring freezes. Here we review current metrics of false spring, and how, when and where plants are most at risk of freeze damage. We highlight how life stage, functional group, species differences in morphology and phenology, and regional climatic differences contribute to the damage potential of false springs. More studies aimed at understanding relationships among species tolerance and avoidance strategies, climatic regimes, and the environmental cues that underlie spring phenology would improve predictions at all biological levels. An integrated approach to assessing past and future spring freeze damage would provide novel insights into fundamental plant biology, and offer more robust predictions as climate change progresses, which is essential for mitigating the adverse ecological and economic effects of false springs

An agent on my shoulder: AI, privacy and the application of human-like computing technologies to music creation

Human-Like Computing technologies are intelligent systems that interact with people in human-like way. By bringing together the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Ethnography and Interaction Design, and applying them in a real world context we are able to understand some of the ways that such technologies can be applied. This work in progress poster applies such technologies to the music creation and develops a design that is based on the notion of an ‘Intelligent’ Agent that is able to support in the music creation process

A network of noise: designing with a decade of data to sonify JANET

The existing sonification of networks mainly focuses on security. Our novel approach is framed by the ways in which network traffic changes over the national JANET network. Using a variety of sonification techniques, we examine the user context, how this sonification leads to system design considerations, and feeds back into the user experience. • Human Centred Computing → Interaction Techniques → Auditory Feedback; Network

Social music machine: crowdsourcing for composition & creativity

This poster describes a compositional technique that used crowd-sourced midi clips in order to develop a piece of music, which was later performed. This work in progress highlighted some of the issues facing the designers of systems that enable the ‘crowd’ to compose. INTRODUCTION Can the crowd get creative? And what sort of tools might be used to support this? These are the sorts of questions that we thought about when we initially started to think about these problems. Using software originally developed as part of an Experimental Digital Humanities [1] project, we started to wonder about how such software - “Numbers into Notes” [2] might work in the real world if multiple people used it in creative way, and what lessons might we learn from carrying out such an intervention

Interconnected alchemy: an apparatus for alchemical algorithms

The trope of the fraudulent or occult alchemist, prevalent since the mediaeval period of alchemy’s introduction into European thought, belies the endeavour of practitioners from ancient Egypt onwards. Alchemists used observation, experimentation, and drew conclusions to understand the world around them. Notions of interconnectedness, harmoniousness and codification pervade the alchemical pursuit—and alchemy interconnects literature, art, mathematics, and music....One of our tools is "numbers into notes", a web app for algorithmic composition based on early mathematics, in which the role of the human is to parameterize the algorithm and map number ranges to musical note

crisscrossing Science Episode 026: The Eclipse Is Coming, Baby!

In this episode, Chris Gaiser (professor of biology at Linfield College) and Mike Crosser (professor of physics at Linfield College) talk about solar and lunar eclipses: how they work, why they are infrequent, and why people should not look directly at the sun. This episode is all in preparation for the great solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, visible (at least in part) to most of North America. A special note from the Podcasters: Partial solar eclipses are amazing events. However, if you have the means to experience totality, you should take advantage of it. Anyone we have ever talked to who has experienced it became passionate about seeing another one

Interacting with robots as performers and producers of music

Is it really so strange to think about a robot as something, or perhaps someone that can produce music, as a performer or even as a composer? What happens when robots perform on stage to live audiences, and when they are perceived as intelligent? In this abstract we start to unpack and explicate some of the issues that emerge when the fields of music technology and robotics come together. The aim of this piece of writing is to prompt the Digital Music Research community to engage in debate, in order develop this emerging field of research