Returned from ICMC 2007

[Tony Hardie-Bick]

Wow - dense with data! Fascinating :)

S?ren Knudsen wrote:
> This is my experience with ICMC 2007... It's also blogged at
> blog.audiomind.dk (with pictures)
> 
> - S??ren
> 
> ---
> 
> I have just returned to my office after attending ICMC 2007.
> 
> I attended ICMC 2007 as a student Volunteer which meant that I had to do some
> work during the conference. Mainly take care of any technical problems
> related to the auditoria???s and the technical aspects of recording some
> interviews (in collaboration with Thibaut de Ruyter and Erik Christensen) and
> panel discussions which will be published here in the near future. It was
> quite ok and I got to meet some interesting people too.
> 
> We did interviews with John Chowning, Perry Cook, Lars Graugaard, Kristoffer
> Jensen, Gary Kendall, Steve Mann, Barbara Tillmann, Nicola Bernardini, Roger
> Dannenberg, Henrik Frisk, Kia Ng, Jerome Thomas, Marg Anga, Norah Zuniga
> Shaw, Birgitte Alsted, Cynthia Grund and Fuzzi. All in all a very broad range
> of people with interesting perspectives on electronic music and more.
> 
> I had the pleasure of listening to John Chownings Stria in Musikteatret Plex
> (The Music Theatre Plex) which had been ???extended??? with some visualizations
> to celebrate its 30???th year anniversary. A great piece imho - the
> visualizations too, btw. The picture below shows the general idea of the
> visuals, with the horizontal axis being the frequency and the vertical being
> time, where the narrow line in the middle is current time, the orange/yellow
> area is what is to come and the green area what has already been played. John
> Chowning also gave one of the keynote speeches (the only one I had time to
> attend) at the conference in which he looked back at the previous fifty years
> of computer music - the fact that the speech came from one of the guys which
> has been in the field somewhat all the time gave a dimension to it, that were
> very inspiring.
> 
> I also had the chance to hear Roger Dannenberg talk about an idea of his,
> which basically extends the familiar idea of the spelling checker in ordinary
> word processing software into multitrack recording software - check the
> proceedings when (and if, I have no idea) they come online. Anyway, it was an
> interesting idea and not that hard to implement I think. Let???s see this in
> Ardour, please:) Can???t find the paper online btw. Title should be ???An
> Intelligent Multi-Track Audio Editor???.
> 
> The water concert in DGI-byen (a public indoor swimming pool and more) with
> Steve Mann among others, playing on their so-called Hydraulophones, which are
> acoustic instruments. But where ordinary acoustic instruments make their
> sound by modes (or resonances) in gaseous matter (normally air), these
> instruments make their sound in liquid matter (normally water). Apparently
> this not only changes the speed of the sound and thereby the modes which
> occur at a given length, but also gives rise to more turbulence in the
> liquid. According to my calculations, a pipe of 1 meter at 20 degrees Celsius
> (and closed in both ends) should (filled with air) have resonances at (344
> m/s) / 2 m = 172 / s = 172 Hz and multiples of that. The same pipe but filled
> with water should then have resonances at (1482 m/s) / 2 m = 741 / s = 741 Hz
> and multiples of that. How the pipe in the picture shown on the left can then
> produce sound at frequencies much lower than that, with a much shorter pipe
> is beyond me. That said, I think the instruments sounded very organic.
> Another aspect of these sorts of instruments is their applicability to public
> outdoor installations as they require a low amount of maintenance and clean
> themselves quite well. Audio examples of these instruments will be published
> as part of the audio interviews which is referred to in the beginning. They
> published a paper in the conference proceedings, but I cant find it anywhere
> on the net. The title is ???Inventing new instruments based on a computational
> ???hack??? to make a badly tuned or unpitched instrument play in perfect
> harmony???.
> 
> Ge Wang and Rebecca Fiebrink at Princeton gave a presentation of the new
> version of the Chuck language. They have made some pretty interesting
> extensions for working with Realtime Audio Analysis such as MIR (Music
> Information Retrieval). Get the paper here.
> 
> Matt Hoffman (also at Princeton) demo???ed FeatSynth which is a Framework that
> handles synthesizer settings by choosing parameters of the synthesizer which
> makes the synth sound close(st) to a soundfile you give as input to the
> system. Look here.
> 
> In the same area, Soundspotter, which is a realtime MIR program developed by
> Michael Casey at University of London, was demo???ed. The software makes it
> possible to retrieve video clips which has sound identical to what you feed
> into a sound input in realtime, allowing for a concept which was new to me,
> namely Concatinative Synthesis. You could for instance sing a melody into a
> microphone and have the system show movie clips which, when concatenated
> resulted in the same melody. Quite cool, I???d say! More here.
> 
> Other interesting ideas presented were RasterPiece, The Sliding Phase
> Vocoder, The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site, Int.Lib, ??? I really can???t
> remember it all right now:)
> 
> I also got to hear live performances by Andreas Weixler and Se-Lien Chuang,
> Christopher Penrose, Sten-Olof Hellstr??m and John Bowers (Live circuit
> bending) and finally Zach Layton. Many of the performers did some wonderful
> visuals as well as music of course.  
> 
> I talked to one of the aa-cell guys when he demo???ed Impromptu. Nice piece of
> software??? Now _why_ is it that I don???t own a Mac?
> 
> I also _almost_ got the name of a nice piece of vj???ing software - but then
> not quite. So; does anyone know of such a piece of software, as far as I
> remember the name of it started ???Mu??? and consisted of 6 letters. Also; John
> Chowning linked to a new FM tutorial authored by him during his keynote, and
> stupid as I was, thought that I would be able to find it in notime on the
> net. Turns out I could not???
> 
> I think that???s all for now. I have to look into the table setup now. More
> info/pics on that soon so stay tuned.
> 
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