Category: research

PhD for Paulina Sundin

Congratulations to Swedish composer Paulina Sundin, who has recently finished her doctoral dissertation, Re-inventing harmony in electroacoustic music : a commentary on my recent music! Here is the abstract:

Re-inventing Harmony in Electroacoustic Music reflects on research regarding structuring pitch-based material in my music written between 1999 and 2010. The selected works illustrates the process leading up to my research based on psychoacoustic consonance and dissonance and my strategies to create a new kind of harmony – a harmony based on concrete sounds with inharmonic spectra.

The discussion will refer to pieces by composers who have worked with harmony based on the analysis of sound spectra; instrumental and mixed works by spectralist composers such as Grisey, Murail and Saariaho and electroacoustic works by Harvey and others.

I will address the importance of research in the psychoacoustic field, in particular, research by William A. Sethares regarding inharmonic spectra and scales and how it has affected my works.

(One can download the dissertation via the link above, although it’s painfully slow, at least right now, and sometimes the download is aborted.)

Various stuff

Soundscape studies, (urban) sound design and the like seem to be rather popular in Sweden these days. I’m attending the conference Man & Sound Environment 2010 in Lund this week, a conference immediately followed by another one in Stockholm, Designing Soundscape for Sustainable Urban Development, on September, 30-October, 1.

Another recent conference held in Sweden was the 5th Audio Mostly Conference : A Conference on Interaction with Sound, September, 15-17, which took place in Piteå in Northern Sweden. Proceedings are avalible online.

For our Swedish readers
Ljudplanering is a new web portal on urban soundscapes, developed in collaboration between Movium and landscape architect Gunnar Cerwén.

There’s been a recent exchange in Svenska Dagbladet on the research project “Acoustic design artifacts and methods for urban soundscapes” and its companion sound installation at Mariatorget, Stockholm:

New proceedings online

7th Sound and Music Computing Conference
The papers presented at the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference that took place at the UPF from the 21st to the 24th on July 2010 are now online at http://smcnetwork.org/resources/smc2010. The papers have been published on the smcnetwork.org website under a Creative Commons license.

Interactive Sonification workshop – ISon 2010
The proceedings of the Interactive Sonification workshop – ISon 2010 are now available on-line at http://www.interactive-sonification.org/ISon2010/proceedings/. The proceedings are licensed as an Open Access publication.

SUM – symposium and concert in Stockholm

SUM symposium and concert in Stockholm, Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Systematic Understanding of Music
Today, digitally informed music has reached a point where it has become feasible to detect emotion content in the musical audio stream (sound). When this is applied in real-time to aspects of its response, a new context for the creation, performance and listening to music is established where man and machine can interact in much more meaningful ways than previously. This provides for new and more engaged expressions, giving new horizons for musical artwork.

The purpose of the SUM project is to develop such tools by building on existing work by internationally outstanding scholars in the Nordic countries in digital signal processing, music cognition, emotion expression, and interaction software development. For additional information about the SUM project: http://re-new.org/research/sum/

SUM symposium
Onsdagen den 17 februari 2010 kl 10.00-17.00
A330 (Kompositionsseminariet), Kungliga Musikhögskolan, Valhallavägen 105, Stockholm (T-Bana Stadion)
Lars Graugaard (DK), Anders Friberg (KTH), Marcus Wrangö (KMH)

10.00 Introduktion till SUM / Lars Graugaard
11.00 Känslor i musik / Anders Friberg
12.00 Probabilistic melody maker / Anders Friberg & Lars Graugaard
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Kreativa möjligheter
Systematiskt bruk av känslor i musik / Lars Graugaard
15.00 Demo: Gestiska sensorer / Marcus Wrangö
16.00 Tillämpningar och presentationer
(re-new digital arts festival) / Lars Graugaard
17.00 Slut

Konsert
Onsdag 17 februari, kl 20.00. Fylkingen, Torkel Knutssongatan 2, Stockholm (T-Bana Mariatorget)

Symposiet är gratis, konserten kostar 80 kr (student 60 kr).

Call for Papers: COMPROVISATIONS – Improvisation Systems in Performing Arts and Technologies

INTERSYMP 2010
22nd International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics And Cybernetics
August, 2­-6, 2010
Markgraf-­Ludwig Gymnasium, Hardstrasse 2, Baden-­Baden, Germany

Special Focus Symposion (August 5, 2010) on COMPROVISATIONS – Improvisation Systems in Performing Arts and Technologies

Submission details are available as a PDF.

“Sound is Motion” symposium and doctoral thesis defence

KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, February 11-12

A symposium entitled “Sound is Motion” will be held on February 11, in connection to Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen’s doctoral thesis defence on February 12. Both events take place at the Department for Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, in Stockholm, http://www.speech.kth.se/info/location.html and are open for all, and if you happen to be around Stockholm at the time, you are very welcome to participate.

“Sound is Motion” symposium, February 11, 14:00
Sound is usually the result of actions, such as body gestures or mechanical movements. Therefore sound is closely related to motion. Humans are very sensitive to variations of the acoustical signal in the time-frequency plane, making it possible to discriminate between body gestures even in sound.

In recent years, significant advances have been made in the study and development of techniques for musical motion data analysis and motion capture. In general, body gestures allow expressive control in sound production, and interpretation of gestures enables the extraction of the expressive content in human continuous actions.

In the “Sound is Motion” symposium, six experts will tackle the field of Sound and Motion from different perspectives. The symposium starts at 14:00. Place: Room Fantum, Department for Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, in Stockholm.

“The acoustics and performance of DJ scratching” PhD defence, February 12, 10:00
Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen will defend his thesis “The acoustics and performance of DJ scratching. Analysis and modeling”. This thesis focuses on the analysis and modeling of scratching, in other words, the DJ (disk jockey) practice of using the turntable as a musical instrument. Scratching has developed to become a skillful instrument-playing practice with complex musical output. The impact on popular music culture has been significant, and for many, the DJ set-up of turntables and a mixer is now a natural instrument choice for undertaking a creative music activity. Six papers are included in the thesis, where the first three approach the acoustics and performance of scratching, and the second three approach scratch modeling and the DJ interface.

The defense starts at 10:00. Place: Room F2, Lindstedtsvägen 26, KTH, Stockholm

Via Roberto Bresin

Some upcoming conferences 2010

The second International symposium on ambisonics and spherical acoustics will be held on May 6-7, 2010, at IRCAM, Paris. Read the call for participation for information on how to submit papers and demos. The previous conference was held in Austria 2009. Proceedings are available online.

The 7th Electroacoustic music studies conference will take place in Shanghai, June 21-24, 2010. This year’s theme is “Teaching electroacoustic music”. Read the call for papers for more information. Proceedings from previous conferences are available.

The 7th Sound and music computing conference, Barcelona, July 21-24, 2010, is open for both paper and music contributions. The concert hall has an octophonic system. Earlier proceedings are searchable online.

The 13th International conference on digital audio effects will be held in Graz, Austria, September 6-10, 2010. For more info, see call for papers; links to previous conferences/proceedings are at the main DAFx web site.

Updated December 6, 2009; originally posted November 23, 2009.

Soundscape: support to health

I’ve previously mentioned two Swedish research initiatives on soundscapes and acoustic ecology, Urban Sound Institute and The Sound Environment Centre at Lund University.

There is also another somewhat similiar research programme, Soundscape: support to health (Ljudlanskap för bättre hälsa), which has an associated website with an introduction to acoustics, measurement and perception of noise, focused on health aspects. The introduction is in Swedish only, except for a course in engineering acoustics. An interesting twist is that the text is available in three versions: for curious people (nyfikna), for users (användare), i.e. architects, civil servants etc., and for specialists.

EAM in DDM-online

One can find quite a few dissertations on electroacoustic music at Doctoral dissertations in musicology-online. The index is searchable by keyword or classification. It is possible to use * as a wildcard, though only at the end of strings. A search for “electro*” yields 53 items, most of them relevant, while a search for items classified as “71ek*”, i.e. twentieth century (7) – historical musicology (1) – electronic music (ek), lists 36 dissertations. ISBN:s are given for published works, and dissertations in progress are listed and asterisked. There are also instructions for submission of your own dissertation or topic.