Web Audio Conference 2019: concert and panel

The international Web Audio Conference 2019 was hosted by NTNU in Trondheim, and the Music Technology Group played a central role in organizing it, with my colleague Anna Xamb as conference chair (and IES colleague Sara Martin by her side). My own role in the organization was demo and poster chair. The conference presented a combination of talks, posters, demos, artworks and performances, and had over 100 participants from all over the world. I also contributed to the conference by participating in a performance and hosting a panel.

Performance

The performance was with T-EMP (Trondheim Electroacoustic Music Performance), consisting of yvind Brandtsegg, Trond Engum, Anna Xamb and Carl Haakon Waadeland. Here is the description of the performance from the proceedings of the conference:

The ensemble Trondheim Electroacoustic Music Performance (EMP) investigates new modes of communication in an ensemble when new technology is introduced as part of the ensemble repertoire. In the recent three years, the focus has been on cross-adaptive processing as a musical intervention in the interplay. More info on the cross-adaptive project can be seen at the project blog and also the album Poke It With A Stick / Joining The Bots released in 2019. For this performance we work with a web-based repository of sounds, explored via a live-coding interface. This allows access to a massive archive of sounds from Freesound.org, and the selection of sounds is done via sound descriptors. The integration of this instrument in an ensemble setting is interesting, as traditional and nontraditional modes of musical interaction are activated in dialogue. Using web-based access to the repository allows a generality of instrument design, and this is combined with a strategic mode of performance in this instrument. With?strategic? we mean here, that most sounds are not performed directly by physical action, but cued up in patterns via live-coding. These sounds are then live processed by other members of the ensemble, responding more directly with physical and gestural instrumental action on the signal coming from the web instrument. The signal is also live processed in a cross-adaptive fashion, so that audio features extracted from other performers? actions will modulate the parameters of processing for the web audio instrument. The ensemble also utilize gesturally based interfaces from interactive dance, here used to control elements of audio synthesis and processing.

Here is a video of the performance:

Panel

I was asked to host a panel with the topic "accessibility in web audio". I invited three people who I though would be able to address relevant issues of this topic, although none of them were directly engaged with web-audio. David Br ggermann was a former Music Technology student who wrote his bachelor thesis on developing workflows for music production with VoiceOver and LogigPro for a vision impaired user. Monica Ruud is a first-year student at the Bachelor programme in Music Technology NTNU who is blind. Lastly, Miranda Moen is currently currently writing a master's thesis in Equality and Diversity at the NTNU institute of interdisciplinary culture studies. Moreover, she works as a project responsible at AKKS Trondheim and with the KOSO collective. In the panel the participants were first asked to explain how they understand the concept of accessibility.

The two visusually impared students were asked how their engagement with computer-based music technology as a user with vision impairments and if they had examples of functionality in computer-based music applications which are very much accessible, and others which are not, and if so, in what ways.

The panel was rounded off with questions that was partly addressed by the panelist, and partly by the audience. For instance, how one can raise awareness for issues of accessibility in web audio applications and if there were any concrete suggestions for making web audio applications more accessible. Here is a video of the panel discussion:

VIBRA workshop: 'Constructing Realities' with Johannes Birringer

"Constructed Realities" was a two-day workshop led by Johannes Birringer, as a part of the VIBRA workshop series (www.vibra.no) that I organize. Birringer is an independent media choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co, and also works as a professor at Brunel University, where he is director of the DAP-Lab and headed the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance.

The workshop was organized by me, and sponsored by NTNU ARTEC. VR equipment and expertise was provided by IMTEL lab NTNU. Footage by workshop participants and video editing by Andreas Schille.

At the workshop, fifteen participants with diverse backgrounds, from fine arts, to music technology and dance, worked together to create an immersive environment, including two VR stations, multichannel audio, live visuals affected by audio and video. In addition to organizing and facilitating the workshop, which took up most of my attention, I made a "discoball poem player", using a broken disko ball fittet with a wireless NGIMU-sensor, a recording of a poem read by Dumama, and piece of coding I did in Csound. It can be seen in the video below. The final performance/environment was presented for an audience in Verkstedhallen, Trondheim, October 2019. Workshop participants: P l Lersveen, Dag Olav Kolltveit, Naomi Chan, Ada Hoel, Samrridhi Kukreja, Emily Aalde, August Norhtug, Gugulethu Duma, Andreas Schille, Mina Paasche, Christopher Logan, Anna Thu Schmidt, Dylan Green, Aleksandar Isailovic, Per Erik Walslag and Ingunn Schumann Mosand.

Here is a video, edited by Andreas Schille, showing some of the different parts of the workshop, including the performance itself:

#MTF: Humans in Da Loop at Örebro University

Music Tech Fest is an arts festival which presents "technological innovations and artistic experimentation, performance, new inventions, commercial applications, and academic research". It is also a network a network of amazing people working in different branches of music technology. At least once a year they organize #MTFLabs, where they invite "some of the most brilliant and original minds to reinvent the way we interact, collaborate, create and communicate with each other". After particpating in Stockholm in the fall 2018, I hooked up to a small team of fantastic people (Kirsi Mustalahti, Joseph Wilk and Lilian Jap), and together we formed a group called Accents in Motion, or alternatively, Dance AI, building our work around connections between a database of speech accents, motion tracking of dance movement and live coding.

In October 2019 our group was invited to the AI Impact Lab at the University of Örebro as a part of MTF's Humans in da Loop together with a number of people from the MTF community. At the gathering, MTF were "bringing select experts from the global MTF community to address strategic applications of AI" led by their high-profiled professor Amy Loutfi, newly appointed pro-vice-chancellor for AI. The Accents in Motion team were very lucky to be allowed to work in The Cognitive Robotic Systems Laboratory, lead by professor Alessandro Safiotti. Although we were not allowed to play with the industrial robots in the space, we got access to their system for counting people and getting their position in the space. Although the system was more difficult to work with than anticipated, we were able to connect it to our computers and make sound with it.

The functionalities and failures of this system inspired our ideas of the performance - it addressed the way in which technology is often presented to us as black boxes that don't reveal anything about their construction or inner workings, and how we should strive to make technology more transparent and open to users. The failure of the tracking system to locate a person within a 2x2 meter square in the middle of the lab then became our "Black Box", where we then placed our laptops, mixers and "technologist" performers (Joseph and Andreas). The dramaturgy of the performance was then how two of the performers (Kirsi and Lilian) intruded into the Black Box and took over the control of it - which was the conclusion of the performance. Thus, the piece became one of empowerment through knowledge.



As at the Stockholm MTF we got our songs from an audio database of considerable size, namely DAMP, containing voice-only recordings of karaoke singing. The material in the database was challenging in that it already contained musical form and expression, and to reshape and reinterpret this was not at all easy and required considerable experimentation to get an aesthetically satisfactory result.

And as before, we also had two approaches to our sound database - both movement sensing and live-coding. Even though this piece came together the "hackathon" way - extremely compressed in terms of creation and implementation time, we still think we got to develop our concept and repertoire further. Especially, it was intriguing to play with our roles as "technologists" versus "dancers", and hopefully contribute to a productive dialogue on technology, embodiment, gender stereotypes and empowerment.

Conference presentation: Digitale kulturer

The project Crossadaptive processing as musical intervention (2016-18), firmly rooted in the Music Technology programme at NTNU, was invited to do a presentation at Arts Council Norway's conference "Digital kultur, estetiske praksiser" (Digital culture, aesthetic practices" at Dokkhuset in Trondheim. In the absence of project leader yvind Brandtsegg, we were three colleagues from this programme doing the presentation entitled " gripe inn i en annens lyd: kryssadaptive modulasjoner" (To interfere with the other's sound: crossadaptive modulations); myself, Trond Engum and Carl Haakon Waadeland. The presentation had two parts; first I gave a brief talk about the central concepts, methods and results of the project, then, Trond and Carl Haakon improvised using the tools from the project.



Carl Haakon Waadeland, Trond Engum and myself at Dokkhuset

Paper at the Sound and Music Computing Conference

Together with Sigurd Saue and Pekka Stokke I wrote a paper about VIBRA for the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Malaga.

Abstract:

The paper presents the interactive dance project VIBRA, based on two workshops taking place in 2018. The paper presents the technical solutions applied and discusses artis- tic and expressive experiences. Central to the discussion is how the technical equipment, implementation and map- pings to different media has affected the expressive and experiential reactions of the dancers.

The paper can be found here: http://folk.ntnu.no/andbe/Content/VIBRA_paper.pdf

NRK P3 Interview

The NRK P3 show "Urørt" made a short feature about instrumental music February 2019, and I was interviewed to contribute to the feature. The feature with the interview is available here.

PhD supervision course

I attended a two-day course for PhD supervisors at NTNU January 2019 led by Kari Smith, professor at the Department for Teacher Education at NTNU, and leader of the National Research School for Teacher Education. The course qualified me as a "certified supervisor", which from the new regulations of the PhD programme at NTNU is required for at least one of the team of supervisors at a PhD (alternatively, the supervisor has to have supervised earlier).





The course covered many issues relevant for PhD supervision, among them regulations and framework, building relations, gender issues, ethics, co-authorship, submission and what to do in the case of rejection. We also got to discuss some interesting cases, including the typical "burn out" that many experience in the last phase of their PhD period. The course also highlighted the culture differences at NTNU, especially between hard and soft sciences, article based and monograph theses, and small and big departments.