Re: [livecode] computation

From: Scott Hewitt <wittlist_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 11:02:09 +0100

hi,

I had a paper rejected as well :(

Would Huddersfield be to far north as I fairly confident that it would
be possible to do here?

Fancy a trip to West Yorkshire?

Scott



On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 9:42 AM, alex <alex_at_lurk.org> wrote:
> Here's an abstract I submitted to a conference on "practice,
> participation and method in live electronic music".
>
>  If our understanding of music is grounded in the body, then what
>  hope is there for those who write software to generate music?  This
>  problem is particularly true of live coders, who write dynamically
>  interpreted source code to make music while an audience listens and
>  watches \citep{Collins03a}.  When we are engrossed in computation,
>  the manipulation of discrete symbols, are we too far from bodily
>  movements to make music?  Some creators of tangible interfaces to
>  computer music might think so, instead working tirelessly to hide
>  their computation backstage, bringing the human body to the fore
>  once again.
>
>  But lets not forget, symbols are part of musical understanding too.
>  Scottish pipers chant the Gaellic syllables of Canntaireachd to
>  relate articulation of their instruments \citep{Chambers80}.  Indian
>  drummers represent movements of the hands over the tabla drums with
>  a vocabulary of onomatopoeic bol syllables \citep{Patel03b}.  Indeed
>  symbols themselves are represented relative to movements of our
>  vocal tract \citep{Ladefoged90}, and we understand our instruments
>  in terms of those same movements \citep{Traube05}.
>
>  A great hope for live coding then is in helping us understand the
>  relationship between symbolic and perceptual/conceptual
>  representations of music through experimental artistic practice.  We
>  can think of symbols as waymarkers in our perceptually grounded
>  conceptual understanding of movement, and music as a dance between
>  human computation and perceptual understanding.  Live coders have
>  the opportunity to lay this dance bare.
>
>  In this paper some possibilities of reframing live coding as a
>  symbolic interaction with spatial representations are outlined,
>  including the notion of \emph{vocable synthesis}, using the
>  typewritten word as a sequence of articulations of an instrument.
>
> The paper was rejected because the focus was too computational.  This
> sounds like sour grapes (and probably is) but my point was that the
> field wasn't computational enough, considering this music is usually
> made using computers, music tradition is full of symbolic
> representations, and human symbols and articulations are inextricably
> entwined.
>
> I think we need another conference on live coding.  Who'd be up for hosting it?
>
>
> alex
>
> --
> http://yaxu.org/
>
Received on Fri Oct 02 2009 - 10:02:34 BST

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