Introducing TaCEM and the TIAALS software.

This paper introduces the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), funded for 30 months by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, investigating the relationship between technological innovation and creative practice in electroacoustic music of the last 40 years (http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchcentres/tacem/). It is a collaborative project between the universities of Huddersfield and Durham in the UK and outputs from the project will include a book and freely available interactive software. This paper explains the context for the project and its goals, and discusses some of the generic software that is being developed as part of the project, intended not only for use in the project itself but also to be freely available for others to use in the study of any electroacoustic work as appropriate

Barry Truax Riverrun (1986/2004), a case study from the TaCEM project, exploring new approaches to techniques of analysis and re-synthesis in the study of concert electroacoustic works

At last year’s EMS in Lisbon we introduced the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), a 30-month project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and demonstrated the generic TIAALS software being produced as part of this project. This year we present an update on the project, focusing particularly on the first of our case studies, Barry Truax’s Riverrun. Eight works have been selected for the project, taking into account criteria such as historical context, the nature of the synthesis techniques employed, and the aesthetics that have underpinned their realisation. Key considerations have included the accessibility of the technical resources and composing materials used in their production, and opportunities to pursue particular lines of enquiry with the composer concerned. In selecting the eight works for detailed study, a further consideration has been the extent to which the composers explored techniques that were already available at the time in ways that are unique and distinctive, or alternatively developed entirely new methods of synthesis in pursuit of their creative goals. The pioneering work of Barry Truax in terms of developing techniques of granular synthesis assign his achievements almost exclusively to the latter classification, and the composition of Riverrun (1986/2004) is a landmark achievement in this regard. Truax’s composing environment evolved from the early study of interactive real-time synthesis techniques at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht 1971-73, exploring the possibilities of using Poisson-ordered distributions in the generation of microsound, to the emergence of entirely granular techniques at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia a decade later, culminating in the development of his program GSX designed specifically for waveform-based synthesis and first used to compose Riverrun, and its later extension, GSAMX, that extended these granular techniques to include the manipulation of previously sampled sound material. At the time of composition conventional minicomputers still lacked the capacity to generate multiple voices of granulated sound material in real time, but for Truax the acquisition in 1982 of a high speed bit slice array processor, the DMX-1000, provided the enhancedprocessing power necessary for achieving such a goal. The unique characteristics of its special hardware and associated programming environment, managed in turn via a host PDP 11/23 computer, both empowered his creative objectives and also materially shaped and influenced the ways in which they could be practically achieved. The significance of such causal relationships in the evolution of the electroacoustic music repertory has yet to be widely understood, and this study of Riverrun corroborates the importance of such a line of investigation. In this case it has been possible to carry out a detailed study of the original system, still maintained in working order by Truax, leading to a reconstruction of key elements of Riverrun using a Max-based simulation of GSX, the authenticity of the results being assessed both subjectively by means of a direct aural comparison and also measured objectively using software. Our presentation at this year’s EMS in Berlin included a demonstration of examples of the software we have developed to enable readers to engage with Riverrun interactively, both by analysing the original recordings and by using our emulation of the GSX system to be able to recreate passages of the work and manipulate the techniques employed in order to learn more about them. We also gave examples of other materials we have collected in relation to this case study, including videos of the composer himself working with the GSX system and discussing the composition of Riverrun

TIAALS: A New Generic Set of Tools for the Interactive Aural Analysis of Electroacoustic Music

TIAALS is a development from earlier Interactive Aural Analyses. As well as playing an important role in the TaCEM project, TIAALS provides a set of generic tools that can be used by any analyst seeking a means of working interactively with the sound of a piece in creating and presenting their analyses. IAA is not a method of automated analysis by computer (although we may build some automated options into later versions); it is primarily a set of tools for an analyst to use to help in their own interactive aural investigation of works and in the presentation of their findings. It is envisaged that TIAALS will be further refined and extended in response to our own needs in relation to the TaCEM project over the next two years and in response to feedback from other users

From Technological Investigation and Software Emulation to Music Analysis: An integrated approach to Barry Truax's Riverrun

This paper presents an approach to studying Barry Truax’s Riverrun as it is being carried out within the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), a collaboration between the Universities of Huddersfield and Durham funded for 30 months (2012-2015) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom. This approach aims at realising an Interactive Aural Analysis with which the user can explore the creative and technological environment used by the composer to build his oeuvre, as well as navigate aurally through the results of the musicological study. It involves an important technological investigation of Truax’s GSX program for digital granular synthesis, leading to the implementation, in the Max environment, of emulation software allowing for the live recreation of each of Riverrun’s sequences, along with further tools dedicated to the musical analysis of the piece. This paper presents the technological investigation and its issues, the pieces of software for the Interactive Aural Analysis of the work, and musicological observations drawn from such an approach

Phenomenological Theories of Crime

The distinctive aspect of phenomenological theories of crime is that they are based upon a stated epistemology: how things are known and a specific ontology—the nature of social reality. This specificity aligns itself with neo-Kantian concern with forms of knowing, interpretation, and meaning, as well as with 20th-century concern with perception, cognition, and the framing of events. While there are influences of phenomenological thinking on varieties of theorizing, such as symbolic interactionism, critical theory, queer theory, and gender-based theories of crime, these ideas are refractions and are inconsistent in their reference to and understanding of the foundational phenomenological works. A phenomenological theory assumes that the practices and associated meanings of actors and the responses of others can produce a valid explanation of crime. These cannot be grasped by counting responses to questionnaires or surveys, or positing the “natural attitude” or the “taken for granted” unless these are shown to be working in interaction. It is only by studying how these processes are revealed in and through routine interactions, especially those between the controllers and the controlled, that valid explanations for crime result. The elegance of an explanation is found in its ability to explicate and reproduce the actors’ perspective. This is not a “micro” view of interaction: social action is always collective, mutual, and intersubjective. Features of phenomenological theories of crime stand in some opposition to the ruling statistical inference and naive positivism that command social science. Phenomenological theories have at least five features. First, they focus on intentionality over the course of action. The question of interest is how orientation to and action toward objects produces such social objects. It is through gestures, postures, signs, and indicators that elicit a response that a social object is made meaningful. A robbery occurs as the robber first selects a place, targets a person, confronts the person-as-target, and creates the illusion of violence to get the preferred response, handing over money. The sequence produces a “working consensus,” a social object, a robbery. It is now a real, shared social fact. Second, they view the field of consciousness or awareness as replete with stimuli cues, empirical indices that are themselves merely appearances, not the relevancies that emerge intersubjectively. These cues must be reduced by means of bracketing to create forms, types, or typifications. These types, in turn, can be identified only through actors’ usage. Think in this regard about the meaning of different types of crime as they are experienced (e.g., homicide, rape, burglary, auto theft). Third, these observed gestures, negotiations, indicators, representations, and postures are made intersubjectively meaningful not by “reading minds,” but by behavior. And what is done is very often emotionally loaded and full of bodily sensations such as anger, passion, greed, or desire. These emotions are an integral aspect of crimes. Fourth, in the phenomenologically grounded versions of crime, even the objective attitude of the scientist must itself be questioned : How is it possible to create sense of actors’ behavior and studying it “objectively” (Heap and Roth 1973, p. 364; cited under Introductory Works)? The answer is to remain true to the observed collective actions and attributions associated with crime. Finally, phenomenological views of crime require an interrogation of action, not attributions of motives. The question is: How is order indicated, sustained, and/or changed in the context of studying things called “crime”? A constant debate is whether and to what extent the actor’s view of everyday life is captured, as opposed to a typification, ideal type, or conceptual scheme. This is one of the few areas of social science that acknowledges philosophical foundations during the course of research. Phenomenological theories of crime recognize the ongoing nature of what is deemed criminal, and keep this awareness in the forefront. Please keep this in mind as you conduct your research. The articles and books discussed here are directed toward academics, graduates, and advanced undergraduates

Introducing TaCEM and the TIAALS Software

This paper introduces the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), funded for 30 months by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, investigating the relationship between technological innovation and creative practice in electroacoustic music of the last 40 years (http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchcentres/tacem/). It is a collaborative project between the universities of Huddersfield and Durham in the UK and outputs from the project will include a book and freely available interactive software. This paper explains the context for the project and its goals, and discusses some of the generic software that is being developed as part of the project, intended not only for use in the project itself but also to be freely available for others to use in the study of any electroacoustic work as appropriate

Enabling Factor Analysis on Thousand-Subject Neuroimaging Datasets

The scale of functional magnetic resonance image data is rapidly increasing as large multi-subject datasets are becoming widely available and high-resolution scanners are adopted. The inherent low-dimensionality of the information in this data has led neuroscientists to consider factor analysis methods to extract and analyze the underlying brain activity. In this work, we consider two recent multi-subject factor analysis methods: the Shared Response Model and Hierarchical Topographic Factor Analysis. We perform analytical, algorithmic, and code optimization to enable multi-node parallel implementations to scale. Single-node improvements result in 99x and 1812x speedups on these two methods, and enables the processing of larger datasets. Our distributed implementations show strong scaling of 3.3x and 5.5x respectively with 20 nodes on real datasets. We also demonstrate weak scaling on a synthetic dataset with 1024 subjects, on up to 1024 nodes and 32,768 cores