I like the abstract, I can see how it grew out of list discussions.
Reading about the Scottish pipers I had a flash of the audience
chanting code snippets in response to a livecoder - "DRAW-CUBE! METRO
22!" We definitely need to incorporate chanting into our livecoding
sets.
I just put up a few (very few, it was dark and dank and smoky) photos
from last night:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/madpixelist/
cheers
evan
On Oct 2, 2009, at 9:42 AM, alex 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/
Evan Raskob
ML Studio
4-8 Arcola Street
London E8 2DJ
United Kingdom
http://mlstudio.co.uk
http://pixelist.info
Received on Fri Oct 02 2009 - 10:02:09 BST