Station wagon interior perspective (requiem for John Fahey)

This composition’s title refers to a photograph of the piece’s dedicatee, the late guitarist, composer, and sound-artist John Fahey. The piece does not include any specific reference to Fahey’s own repertoire; rather, the composition investigates a more conceptual preoccupation that ran through his extensive, varied work; that is, the authentic integration of ‘vernacular’ styles of American folk and popular music into extended, through-composed forms. Prioritizing interpretation as an inseparable component of vernacular musical language, this project explores how the expressive flexibility of solo folk music such as Fahey’s might be convincingly ‘mapped’ onto ensemble performance of notated music. Building upon ongoing practice-led research in solo multi-instrumental performance, this piece places the ‘one-man band’ of keyboard and foot-operated percussion within the context of an ensemble. The development of the music in rehearsal focused on how the physical gestures of the hands and feet of one-man band (both sound-producing and ancillary) could provide cues for the ensemble to negotiate, for example, non-metric tempo modulations (abrupt or gradual) and synchronized rhythmic nuance typical of both solo one-man band and Fahey’s guitar soli. By introducing such variety of rhythmic interpretation, synchronized across several musicians, the music seeks to maintain a sense of improvisation within the framework of through-composed music. This sense of ‘synchronized spontaneity’ was further enhanced in the production of the recording through double- and triple-tracking of performances (horns and percussion) based on the ‘template’ of an initial real-time recording of the work. In addition to creating the sense of expressive freedom within notated structures, certain sections of the score are also left more ‘open’, giving space for musicians to ‘ad-lib’ upon given musical material or instructions. This approach, in contrast to the extended, improvised ‘solo’ sections typical of jazz compositions, seeks to incorporate musical independence while avoiding stark distinctions between improvised and composed material

Machine's Song

Machine’s Song is a sound recording that explores the notion of autonomous musical creation. The album uses a ‘one-man band’ of piano and foot-operated percussion as the basis for large-scale, layered studio productions that incorporate a wide variety of overdubbed instrumental recordings. The project seeks to foreground the way in which the ‘ensemble of one’, whether performed as one-man band, or constructed through multi-track recording, can create a uniquely focused expression of musical identity. The music of Machine’s Song explores characteristics that arise when one creative will controls multiple musical forces, including elasticity of tempo, coordination of rhythmic nuance, and close synchronization of expression and dynamics. In these recordings, as in one-man band performance, these aspects of interpretation, mapped across multiple instruments, are inscribed as integrated aspects of the composition. To expose the composite nature of the multi-track process, each piece on Machine’s Song is presented in two versions: the ‘Song’, which uses overdub recordings to create a narrative composition, and the ‘Collage’, which fractures the same multi-track material into an abstract deconstruction of the composition, highlighting the studio’s compositional capacity to repurpose the same sonic material twice, with strikingly different results. The production utilizes a process of tracking directly to a cassette four-track recorder, and manually re-synching digital conversions of this audio in a software sequencer. This method seeks to engage more directly with the process of overdub-based composition. The subtle desynchronization that results from this approach functions to expose a studio process that is traditionally made transparent. The ‘lo-fi’ tape-hiss of the tape recordings seeks to underscore the materiality of the recorded form, and, when juxtaposed with more contemporary digital textures, disrupts the listener’s ability to sonically ‘date’ the work. Machine’s Song’s sleeve design is based upon a letterpress-printed, limited edition release of the CD, featuring text and imagery contextualizing the project

Leap of Death

‘Leap of Death’ is collaborative, multi-media project by composer Robert Stillman, artist Anna Fewster, and bookbinder Sarah Bryant. It seeks to interpret archival material for the ‘lost’ 1929 F.W. Murnau film ‘4 Devils’. The main output of the project is a limited edition of 50 bookwork/LP’s that use letterpress text, trace-monotype print images, and recorded music to construct an abstract, non-linear ‘impression’ of the film’s narrative. The project also included a ‘live’ version of this work using projections of the bookwork text and imagery, and performance of the music by the ensemble The Archaic Future Players. The wider research questions for this project include: • Can archival research be carried out and disseminated as contemporary artistic/creative work? What is distinctive about such an approach (compared, for example, to scholarly research). • How can creative content (i.e. narrative) in one form, like film, be translated into, or indeed extended by, other forms like still image, text, and music? • How can ‘traditional’ media like slideshows, live/recorded music, or books present narrative structure in an ‘open’ (i.e. non-linear way?) • How can a digital format (i.e. web) most effectively represent physical media (i.e. an artist’s bookwork)

One-man band

This website presents practice-based research related to solo simultaneous instrumental performance ('one-man band'). The site was conceived as a creative and widely accessible platform for music and ideas resulting from one-man band activates carried out between 2008 and 2013. Central to this project is an interest in how one-man band technique informs compositional process, including studio production. Through presentation and analysis of the author’s own creative practice, the site explores how factors related to one-man band such as limb coordination and instrument modification influence a musical result that is unique to this mode of musicianship. Examples of the author’s work (performance and composition) are examined to show how one-man band practice, like overdub-based recording, facilitates a unique synchronization of expressive nuances across multiple instrumental sounds, thus reinforcing the perception of these features as integrated aspects of a composition. The web content also considers the potential of one-man band in an ensemble context, and as a form of live accompaniment for silent film. The online dissemination of this work represents an additional research interest of the project. The employment of a webpage for the presentation of this content investigates how this dynamic format might be exploited as an effective means of analyzing and sharing creative, practice-based research. Employing a wide variety of resources (demonstration performances, recital-talk, concert, and practice-led research text) both facilitates a thorough documentation the multi-faceted research activity, and diversifies the way in which audiences, both academic and non-academic, might engage with it. To this end, the publication of the project as part of the artists’ webpage (www.robertstillman.com) seeks to position the content in the context of the artist’s other creative work, readily accessible to those worldwide who link to the page from online journals and research databases, reviews, blogs, label websites, and social media

Generative models of morphogenesis in developmental biology

Understanding the mechanism by which cells coordinate their differentiation and migration is critical to our understanding of many fundamental processes such as wound healing, disease progression, and developmental biology. Mathematical models have been an essential tool for testing and developing our understanding, such as models of cells as soft spherical particles, reaction-diffusion systems that couple cell movement to environmental factors, and multi-scale multi-physics simulations that combine bottom-up rule-based models with continuum laws. However, mathematical models can often be loosely related to data or have so many parameters that model behaviour is weakly constrained. Recent methods in machine learning introduce new means by which models can be derived and deployed. In this review, we discuss examples of mathematical models of aspects of developmental biology, such as cell migration, and how these models can be combined with these recent machine learning methods