Upcoming Seminars

Our seminar series is announced on the n-ISM diary page as details become available. Please consider subscribing to that page if you are interested (follow that link for details)

Past Seminars

The Anatomy of Listening Summer Seminar, June 2010

The second seminar in the CMT's Anatomy of Listening group.

Details available from the AnatomyOfListening2010 page.

Our guests will also include

The Anatomy of Listening Summer Seminar, June 2009

The second seminar in the CMT's Anatomy of Listening group was supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and The University of Glasgow. Speakers included:

The call for papers has been posted at http://www.n-ism.org/Papers/anatomy_of_listening_CFP.pdf. For details of venues, programme and papers, visit the AnatomyOfListening2009 page.

An interactive aural approach to musical analysis

Michael Clarke, University of Huddersfield, England

email Michael Clarke <j DOT m DOT clarke AT hud DOT ac DOT uk>

January 18th 2008, 5:15pm, LT-C (507), Boyd Orr Building, University of Glasgow

Prof Clarke will discuss the analytical strategy taken by the author in his study of Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (published in Mary Simoni (ed.) Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, Routledge, 2006). Like many electroacoustic works, this piece exits not as a score but only as a sound recording. This poses particular challenges for the analyst. In many cases analysts of such music make visual transcriptions as the basis of their analysis. This analysis took a novel ‘interactive aural’ approach, combining interactive software with written text, diagrams and musical transcriptions. Software was developed to enable the ‘reader’ to interact with the work as sound. The software both acts as a sophisticated CD player (no copyright is infringed) and also simulates the synthesis and processing techniques used by the composer in creating the work.

An aural paradigmatic analysis is provided to enable readers to orient themselves to the shape and structure of the work. Interactive aural exercises enable readers to engage with the processes used in the work and become familiar with the compositional choices faced by the composer and their musical significance. These use software to recreate the techniques employed by the composer. Reductive sketches, outlining the harmonic structure, are also provided in aural form and these can be directly compared (aurally) with passages in the original work. The interactive aural approach affects not only the presentation but also the substance of the analysis, actively involving the reader in the analytical process. The approach is now being developed further in the investigation of other works.

The presentation will demonstrate the interactive aural approach and discuss the significance of such an approach and its possible wider implication for other analyses of both electroacoustic and acoustic music.

Biography

Michael Clarke is Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield where he is Director of the Electroacoustic Studios and Director of Research for the School of Music, Humanities and Media. He is a composer and programmer of software for music. His works have been frequently performed in Britain and abroad and have won a number of awards. On three occasions he has won European Academic Software Awards.

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The discipline that never was. Betweening: the interviews.

Carola Böhm, Head of Music, Wolverhampton University
Associate Editor, Journal for Music, Technology and Education

The way a particular discipline — music technology — becomes established and how it evolves has as much to do with institutional and governmental politics, social constructs and pedagogical methodologies, as it does with the discipline itself. It seems that in the degrees of the interdisciplinary subject area of music technology, we see an example of interdisciplinary things to come. We see a collection of academic and professional communities evolving and sometimes clashing in the evolutionary and culturally ingrained tendency in academia to standardize methodology and terminology. We see the movements of sub-disciplines moving apart and regrouping and sometimes creating new single disciplines within new boundaries. And this movement is governed by different outside factors such as government policies, the Research Assessment Exercise, or the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992.

After having presented the results from the quantitative study of the Palatine (Higher Education Academy) funded project earlier this year, this presentation will discuss the most current results: findings from the qualitative information gathered by interviewing lecturers at higher education institutions involved in music technology education.

email Carola Böhm <carola AT n-ism DOT org>

January 21st 2008, 5:15pm, Room 506, Boyd Orr Building, University of Glasgow

"The best Musick in the World"

Tim Crawford, Senior Lecturer in Computational Musicology, Goldsmiths College, London
January 31st 2008, University of Glasgow

An eccentric enthusiast for the lute wrote these words in 1676, just at the time when the lute and its music — in England at least — was beginning a fairly rapid decline into obsolescence. What can this ancient instrument (which always had the reputation of being hard to learn, even harder to tune, and pretty hard to hear at the best of times) teach us now about how we should ask questions of music using computers? This talk will try to show that there is a surprising amount that is fundamental about music that needs to be tackled by a lute player and thus by anyone studying the instrument's repertory, whether they use just their ears or the most sophisticated machinery.

The eminent 17th-century mathematician and scientist, Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), claimed that the lute could be used to solve mathematical puzzles, such as that of 'squaring the circle' (of course, he failed to say how). There are plenty of puzzles for the enquiring mind about the lute's tuning, the notation of its music, and the way the music was originally played, since there is no continuous tradition of performance to fall back on for information. In fact the fragments of evidence that we find in early documents can tell us a good deal, but in the process we are sure to learn quite a lot about music in general — and much of this might be highly valuable in a computational approach.

email Tim Crawford <t DOT crawford DIDDLY gold DOT ac DOT uk>

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Songs from the Turkish: Measuring Rehearsal, Performance, Analysis and Interpretation

Graham Hair, Professor of Music, Glasgow University
Ingrid Pearson (Deputy Head of Graduate School, Royal College of Music)
Amanda Morrison (Freelance Soprano, BBC Singers, exaudi, SynergyVocals and Scottish Voices)

February 22nd 2008, University of Glasgow (exact venue to be announced)

Further information forthcoming.

email Graham Hair <graham BOINK n-ism DOT org> email Ingrid Pearson <ingrid BOINK n-ism DOT org> email Amanda Morrison <amanda BOINK amandamorrison DOT com>

Modeling Dynamic Performance Gestures

Monday 12 November at 5 p.m. in the Boyd Orr Lecture Room D, University of Glasgow

Prof Bruce Mahin: Director, Centre for Music Technology, Radford University

This seminar will present preliminary results from an ongoing study which examines the relationship between musical structures, written dynamics, and actual performance amplitudinal shape. Specifically, we are interested in the relationship between onset amplitude of notes and changes in the overall amplitude in dynamic phrase shaping. The study will explore:

We expect to find that articulation and overall dynamic shaping move somewhat independently of one another and hope to quantify this relationship in measurable ways.

Questions arising from the study include:

The preliminary results focus on Chopin's A major prelude, a piece that can be broken down into 2-bar hypermeasures. Various audio recordings of this piece are analysed, with particular interest in the use of dynamics and the onset amplitudes of certain notes. Computer-generated performances of the melody line varying volume and velocity of keystroke independently, provide an insight into listener perception of articulation and overall dynamics in this piece.

Listening to Music: Measurement, Analysis and Interpretation

A short series of recitals, talks and demonstrations with an interdisciplinary theme of how composed music is performed, measured, analysed, interpreted and understood by performers, theorists, scientists and the listening public

Session 1: Horn Trio Recital

Sunday 10th June 2007 @ 1830, The Concert Hall, The University of Glasgow

A recital of works for horn, violin and piano by Don Banks Johannes Brahms, Iain Matheson and Anthony Payne, performed by "Jane's Minstrels": Roger Montgomery (horn), Susanne Stanzeleit (violin) and Dominic Saunders (piano). The works by Matheson and Payne will form the basis of the discussion at the seminar session on Tuesday 12th June.

Session 2

Tuesday 12th June 2007: 1000-1300 and 1400-1700, The Concert Hall, The University of Glasgow

  1. JenniferMacRitchie Centre for Music Technology, Glasgow University
    Measuring Chopin: Applying Measurement Science to the B-flat minor Sonata
    An overview of the methodology behind measuring performance parameters in order to provide insight into the otherwise ambiguous structure of the B flat minor sonata finale. This includes a performance capture demo and more information on the project can be found on JenniferMacRitchie 's page.

  2. Composers Anthony Payne and http://www.scottishmusiccentre.com/iain_matheson Iain Matheson
    My Horn Trio: as composed, heard, analysed and interpreted
    Each composer will introduce his work, and there will follow a discussion between them and questions from the floor.

  3. Composer Prof Graham Hair and The Centre for Music Technology
    Listening and Singing Microtonally with the Rosegarden Codicil
    An account of a recent project funded by the AHRC of the UK, with soprano Amanda Morrison (BBC Singers, Exaudi, Synergyvocals, Steve Reich and Musicians and Scottish Voices), clarinettist Ingrid Pearson (Royal College of Music), composer Graham Hair (Glasgow University) and musicological advisor Richard Parncutt (Graz University, Austria).

    When Graham Hair wrote some pieces for soprano, clarinet and harmonium, which used 19 divisions of the octave ("19-ET"), the CMT's NickBailey and DouglasMcGilvray stepped in to provide an ear-training and performance analysis tool accurate enough for highly expert performers, and Project Microtonalism was born.

    On this occasion, there will be a live demonstration of the technology in action, and soprano Lisa Swayne will sing examples of music using the 19-ET scale.

Session 3

Wednesday 13th June 2007: 1000-1300 and 1400-1700, The Concert Hall, The University of Glasgow

  1. Dr Margaret McAllister, Boston College, Faculty of Music
    Musical Form and the Multimedia Artwork
    A focus on technical methods of creating musical narrative and how these interface with visual techniques in the composition of the multimedia artwork.

  2. Prof Bruce Mahin, Director of the Radford University Center for Music Technology
    Modeling Performance Gesture with Algorithms Written in the Max Programming Language
    This presentation will consider some aspects which make a human musical performance gesture interesting and effective. Specifically, it will examine the role of dynamics, tempo alteration and articulation in phrase shaping. Subsequently, this presentation will offer audible and graphic examples of algorithmic computer models which replicate these musical parameters. An explanation of the computer model programming will follow.

  3. NiallMoody Centre for Music Technology, Glasgow University
    Ashitaka: an audiovisual instrument
    A discussion of the Ashitaka audiovisual instrument developed to investigate the ways in which sound and visuals may be linked in a performance situation. Based on Michel Chion's notion of Synchresis in film, the instrument is designed around the proposition that sound and visuals may be linked through their related motions.

  4. Roundtable Glasgow Centre for Music Technology
    Following the talks by the three composers, there will be a round-table and questions from the floor on the topic of the relationship of the composition process to listening, measurement, analysis and interpretation.

  5. Recording Everything Glasgow Centre for Music Technology and Visiting Composers
    A demonstration of methods developed at the Centre. We hope that emerging technologies will enable us to formlise performance capture and analysis of practice. The engineer's job is to make these methods and tools available and accessible to all researchers interested in this field, and, indeed, the general public.

    Although information technology and the world-wide web has revolutionised the way we access text-based documents, there is no similar benefit to those who use music. In this demonstration, we will take a piano performance of a piece by Chopin and record many different aspects of it. The results will be placed in a database, and accessed according to a musically-relevant query. The results will be displayed in a format any musician can understand.

    Our aim is to develop an infrastructure which has the potential to do for music what the world-wide-web did for text.

This seminar is made possible through support from the Chancellor's Fund of the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Science Festival

The structure and performance of music: Insights from recent research in music psychology and computing

Wednesday 7th February 2007, Room 513 of the Boyd Orr building, The University of Glasgow

Musicology tends to favour the research methods and ways of thinking of the humanities. The same applies to the practically oriented disciplines of music performance and music theory/analysis. But recent years have also seen rapid growth in the amount, quality and musical relevance of scientific research on the structure and performance of music. This research enriches existing research in the humanities by addressing both basic and complex issues. Basic issues include the (categorical) perception of musical pitch, time and gesture, and the perceptual salience of individual musical events. This knowledge supports research into more complex issues. How can cultural artefacts such as performance traditions be appropriately and adequately described or represented - in all their structural detail and culturally embedded meanings? What specific information is communicated in a specific performance of a specific work? What form does this information take? How efficient is the communication? Does the audience receive the same message as the performer sends out? How is the sound of a musical work (as opposed to its notation) represented within a musical culture? From what cognitive representation does an expressive performance of a specific work diverge?

Richard Parncutt has been Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz since 1998. His research addresses the following areas of musicology: structure (pitch, consonance, harmony, tonality, melody, counterpoint, tension, rhythm, meter, accent), performance (psychology of performance, piano performance, applications in music education), modelling (psychoacoustic and cognitive theories and computer-assisted applications in music theory, musicianship, composition), origins (nature and origins of harmony, tonality, meter; role of prenatal conditioning in the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of music; evolutionary music psychology) and interdisciplinarity (interaction between musical humanities, sciences and practice).

Cordelia Hall, "BOGEN: An Augmented Bowing Notation"

n-ISM Seminar, May 3 2006, 10 University Gdns, Glasgow

String players do a lot of work that could be done better by computer. Suppose you are an orchestra musician. Would you know which direction to bow in, and what part of the bow to use, if the conductor picked an arbitrary bar to rehearse from? We believe that the bowing notation currently used imposes a heavy human computation cost that could be avoided with a little research and some programming, resulting in intelligent music software for use on the eStand project, or similar projects supporting computerised music stands.

Slides from this project can be downloaded as a PDF file from n-ISM site here: http://www.n-ism.org/Papers/Bogen/cordy_slides_with_music.pdf

Digital Music Research Network Conference

The CMT hosted the DMRN2005 conference at The University of Glasgow in July 2005. Proceedings are available from the DMRN's Summer Conference page.

Han-Wen Nienhuys: "LilyPond, a system for automated music typography"

12h00 to 13h00, 8th October 2003: R408, Rankine Bldg

Hand-engraved sheet music looks much better than what computer software produces today. LilyPond is a music engraving package that tries to bring that esthetic back in software: it format music notation automatically to provide high-quality layout.

Music notation is a complex system of presentation and its typography is a obscure, mostly undocumented art. I will talk about both problems, how we captured them in software, and how program design and music representation are connected with typography and notation.

Han-Wen Nienhuys studied applied mathematics, and recently obtained his PhD. in Computer Science. He has been involved with computerized music notation since 1996.

Resouces from this seminar can be found at http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/Papers/Lilypond/

Paul Davis: "Things You Might Not Have Thought About When Writing Audio Software"

12h00 to 13h00, 1st October 2003: R408, Rankine Bldg

On most platforms today, writing basic audio software is normally fairly simple. However, once the goals expand past simple playback of stereo 16bit/44.1kHz audio files and into areas such as digital audio workstations, realtime FX, and multichannel hard disk recording, writing good audio software gets much more challenging. I will talk about some general issues and a number of specific problems that I have encountered while developing Ardour, a full-featured DAW, and JACK (the JACK Audio Connection Kit), a realtime system that provides highly abstract audio I/O as well as inter-application audio routing.

Attendees won't leave ready to spend years working on a large monolithic application, but they will hopefully have a deeper appreciation for the difference between good and evil, as well as between the merely difficult and utterly machochistic aspects of programming.

Paul Davis is the founder of and lead programmer at Linux Audio Systems, which specializes in professional open-source audio and MIDI applications based on the Linux operating system

Slides from the talk are available at http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/Papers/PDTalk
An astonishingly low bandwidth but very, very small audio file (ogg/speex format) of the presentation is also available: http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/Papers/PDTalk/paul_davis_2003_10_01.spx (7MB) -- you can listen to this while watching the slides if you like.

John Williamson, Technical and social issues surrounding online collaboration for song-writing

Friday 13 September 2002
14 University Gardens
Dept of Music
(Boehm/Hair Office, 3rd Level,
We will possibly move into the Audiolab, 2nd Level)

The area of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) has tended to concentrate on more business-oriented practices, but only in recent years has there been a tendency to look more at CSCW and more creative processes, including music. Most research involving collaboration for music making and how it can be aided by computers have been concerned with network performance of music, either with a pre-arranged piece or through improvisation. Another aspect of computer-aided music that has been researched is that of remote collaboration for music production. These two aspects of music are at opposite ends of the 'scale' of music making, but one aspect that has received little attention sits right in the middle of this scale - song composition.

Studies have revealed that perfect synchronous performance is not possible over the Internet due to latencies, so the best solution is asynchronous collaboration when song-writing is considered. Even if suitable technology exists, will it actually be used? Song-writing with a fellow musician is a very social activity - face-to-face communication and body language play an important part in song-writing but these are missing when collaborating remotely over a network. This study aims to investigate the technical and social issues surrounding online collaboration for song-writing to see if it is actually possible and what would be the best solution for this.

People have been collaborating over the Internet on various projects for a number of years now. The Internet has broken down geographical barriers between co-workers, allowing work to be done far more efficiently, and this potential has been realised for more creative projects in recent years. A lot of research has been undertaken on networked collaboration for making music, concentrating on the performance aspect of making music. Very little attention has been paid to remote collaboration for song composition.

Song composition is very social in its nature. When musicians work together, there is a lot of body language and gestures involved, but how necessary is this? Is it possible for musicians to compose music from opposite ends of a network without having a physical presence, or is it vital for the musicians to be face-to-face for their creativities to knit?

Visiting Guest professor Judith Shatin

Judith Shatin is a composer and professor at the University of Virginia, where she also directs the Virginia Center for Computer Music. A good deal of her current work incorporates electronics in some way, and she has been recently working with RTCmix, which she is continuing to develop at the VCCM.

cmt_wiki: SeminarAbstracts (last edited 2010-06-21 14:23:52 by markov)