Ever since I started my PhD project I have been struggling with the word gesture. Now as I am working on a theory chapter for my dissertation, I have had to really try and decide on some terminology, and this is my current approach: I use movement as the general term to describe the act of changing physical position of body parts related to music performance or perception. Action is used to denote goal-directed movements that form a separate unit....
I spent my flight to Montreal (which became much longer than I expected when I was rescheduled through Chicago) reading Trond Lossius’ report for the Fellowship in the arts program. He addresses a number of interesting topics: Commenting on the necessity for carrying out research for instead of on art, he discusses the concept of “art as code”: It is not only a question of developing tools. [..] Programming code becomes a meta-medium, and creating the program is creating the art work....
I came across Brad Garton’s blog via Tim. It starts: Last week I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a fairly bad cancer of the bone marrow. The good news is that I am relatively young to be diagnosed with this disease and it seems that it was detected early. The bad news is that, well, it’s a ‘bad’ cancer to have. I think I’m about to embark on yet another life adventure....
Georgia Tech has been hiring a young and interesting music tech faculty over the last years, and now they start a Master of Science program in music tech with a focus on the design and development of novel enabling music technologies. This is yet another truly interdisciplinary music tech program to appear over the last couple of years, and accepting students from a number of different backgrounds, including music, computing and engineering....
I wrote this blog entry several months ago, but never posted it because I thought I would have time to go back and evaluate the sounds more. Since I don’t see that happen any time before I finish my dissertation, I just go along and post it now: Microsoft has posted some info and examples of the Vista soundscape. The sounds are designed by Robert Fripp and will be some of the most well known sounds on the planet in not too long....
Derek Kverno and Jim Nolen have studied the vibration of circular, square and rectangular plates with unbound edges, and have posted som very nice images of radiation patterns of vibrating plates.
{#image361}If you ever wanted some nice, pink noise in the background while working on your computer, Noise is the tool! Apparently, lots of people use this to try and shut out more distractive sounds. While I would prefer a program doing noise-cancelling (which would probably be tricky using the built-in microphone since it would also detect your own sounds while typing on the keyboard), this actually works ok.
I am working on the theory chapter of my dissertation, and am trying to pin down some terminology. For a long time I have been using the concept of gesture-sound relationships to denote the intimate links between a physical movement and the resultant sound. However, since I am throwing away gesture for now, I also need to reconsider the rest of my vocabulary. Hodgins (2004) uses the term music-movement structural correspondences, which I find problematic since it places music first....
{#image349}I performed with the music troll yesterday. It has been resting in the lab for a couple of months, and was a bit “rusty” to start up. What caused the biggest headache was to get my performance patches to work on my new MacBook. Last month I found that PeRColate was released as UB, but I hadn’t tested them. First I had problems making Max finding them, which seemed to be because of the source-folder resting in the path (thanks to mzed for the tip)....
Yesterday, someone commented that improvisation is all about being able to play some random stuff, in realtime. My experience is really the opposite. Learning to improvise on a musical instrument is really all about learning scales, phrases, motifs, and getting experienced in putting them together in a structured way. In realtime. The same is true for improvised presentations and speeches. After holding a number of presentations on my research lately, I have been thinking about how similar the preparation process for a presentation is to a music performance....