Flexible Control of Composite Parameters in Max/MSP

Fundamental to the development of musical or artistic creative work is the ability to transform raw materials. This ability implies the facility to master many facets of the material, and to shape it with plasticity. Computer music environments typically provide points of control to manipulate material by supplying parameters with controllable values. This capability to control the values of parameters is inadequate for many artistic endeavors, and does not reflect the analogous tools and methods of artists working with physical materials. Rather than viewing parameters in computer-based systems as single points of control, the authors posit that parameters must become more multifaceted and dynamic in order to serve the needs of artists. The authors propose an expanded notion of how to work with parameters in computer-centric environments for time-based art. A proposed partial solution to this problem is to give parameters additional properties that define their behavior. An example implementation of these ideas is presented in Jamoma

Pre-recorded sound file versus human coach: Investigating auditory guidance effects on elite rowers

Presented at the 27th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2022) 24-27 June 2022, Virtual conference.We report on an experiment in which nine Norwegian national team rowers (one female) were tested on a rowing ergometer in a motion capture lab. After the warm-up, all participants rowed in a neutral condition for three minutes, without any instructions. Then they rowed in two conditions (three minutes each), with a counterbalanced order: (1) a coaching condition, during which they received oral instructions from a national team coach, and (2) a sound condition, during which they listened to a pre-recorded sound file that was produced to promote good rowing technique. Performance was measured in terms of distance traveled, and subjective responses were measured via a questionnaire inquiring participants about how useful the two interventions were for rowing efficiency. The results showed no significant difference between the two conditions of main interest–the pre-recorded sound file and traditional coaching–on any measure. Our study indicates that auditory guidance can be a cost-efficient supplement to athletes’ training, even at higher levels

Developing the Dance Jockey system for musical interaction with the Xsens MVN suit

In this paper we present the Dance Jockey System, a system developed for using a full body inertial motion capture suit (Xsens MVN) in music/dance performances. We present different strategies for extracting relevant postures and actions from the continuous data, and how these postures and actions can be used to control sonic and musical features. The system has been used in several public performances, and we believe it has great potential for further exploration. However, to overcome the current practical and technical challenges when working with the system, it is important to further refine tools and software in order to facilitate making of new performance pieces. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. University of Michigan Press 2012 ISBN 978-0-9855720-1-3

NordicSMC:A Nordic University Hub on Sound and Music Computing

Sound and music computing (SMC) is still an emerging field in many institutions, and the challenge is often to gain critical mass for developing study programs and undertake more ambitious research projects. We report on how a long-term collaboration between small and medium-sized SMC groups have led to an ambitious undertaking in the form of the Nordic Sound and Music Computing Network (NordicSMC), funded by the Nordic Research Council and institutions from all of the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). The constellation is unique in that it covers the field of sound and music from the “soft” to the “hard,” including the arts and humanities, the social and natural sciences, and engineering. This pa- per describes the goals, activities, and expected results of the network, with the aim of inspiring the creation of other joint efforts within the SMC community

Learning to Code Through Web Audio: A Team-Based Learning Approach

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities provided by teaching programming using web audio technologies and adopting a team-based learning (TBL) approach among a mix of co-located and remote students, mostly novices in programming. The course has been designed for cross-campus teaching and teamwork, in alignment with the two-city master's programme in which it has been delivered. We present the results and findings from: (1) students' feedback; (2) software complexity metrics; (3) students' blog posts; and (4) teacher's reflections. We found that the nature of web audio as a browser-based environment, coupled with the collaborative nature of the course, were suitable for improving the students' level of confidence about their ability in programming. This approach promoted the creation of group course projects of a certain level of complexity, based on the students' interests and programming levels. We discuss the challenges of this approach, such as supporting smooth cross-campus interactions and assuring students' pre-knowledge in web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) for an optimal experience. We conclude by envisioning the scalability of this course to other distributed and remote learning scenarios in academic and professional settings. This is in line with the foreseen future scenario of cross-site interaction mediated through code

Enabling Participants to Play Rhythmic Solos Within a Group via Auctions

The paper presents the interactive music system SoloJam, which allows a group of participants with little or no musical training to effectively play together in a ``band-like'' setting. It allows the participants to take turns playing solos made up of rhythmic pattern sequences. We specify the issue at hand for allowing such participation as being the requirement of decentralised coherent circulation of playing solos. This is to be realised by some form of intelligence within the devices used for participation. Here we take inspiration from the Economic Sciences, and propose this intelligence to take the form of making devices possessing the capability of evaluating their utility of playing the next solo, the capability of holding auctions, and of bidding within them. We show that holding auctions and bidding within them enables decentralisation of co-ordinating solo circulation, and a properly designed utility function enables coherence in the musical output. The approach helps achieve decentralised coherent circulation with artificial agents simulating human participants. The effectiveness of the approach is further supported when human users participate. As a result, the approach is shown to be effective at enabling participants with little or no musical training to play together in SoloJam

Steps towards a semantics of dance

As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g., to the syntax and semantics of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Schlenker 2017a; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this paper, we approach this goal by looking at narrative dance in the form of Bharatanatyam. We argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative proposed by Abusch (2013, 2014, 2021). A central conclusion is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative and music, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers (see, e.g., Schlenker 2020) in that it uses space to track individuals in a narrative and performatively portray the actions of those individuals. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions corroborate the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language (see Patel-Grosz et al. forthcoming) can yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it avails