Icmc

A colleague of mine recently asked if I could help her find the bibligraphic details of the ICMC 2006 proceedings. Apparently this information is not easily available online, and she had spent a great deal of research time trying to find the information. I was lucky enough to participate in this wonderful event at Tulane University, and still have the paper version of the proceedings in my office. So here is the relevant information, in case anyone else also wonders about these details: ...

As mentioned previously, Kristian Nymoen and I presented a paper at ICMC, and I found a great picture from our presentation over in the ICMC2008 group at Flickr. Thanks to Peter D. Bennett for sharing this. When I put in the arrows the night before the presentation I had no idea that I was going to be so close…

Last week I was in Belfast for the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2008). The conference was hosted by SARC, and it was great to finally be able to see (and hear!) the sonic lab which they have installed in their new building. I was involved in two papers, the first one being a Jamoma-related paper called “Flexible Control of Composite Parameters in Max/MSP” (PDF) written by Tim Place, Trond Lossius, Nils Peters and myself. Below is a picture of Trond giving the presentation. The main point of the paper is that we suggest that parameters should have properties and methods. This is both a general suggestion, and a specific one which we have started implementing in Jamoma using OSC. ...

The preliminary web page for ICMC 2007 is up. The conference will take place in Copenhagen from 27 to 31 August 2007. The submission deadline is 31 March. The official ICMC 2007 call for participation will encourage submissions that address the conference theme, Immersed Music. This theme might be addressed by compositions and papers that involve immersed performance interfaces, immersed perception, aesthetic and music. Immersed Music also opens up to participations that address the mind, in particular cognitive aspect of music and musical sound perception. ...

Interesting things from ICMC 2006 day 6: Matt Wright (CNMAT) talked about CNMAT’s work on augmented guitar and 6-string cello, based on a hexaphonic setup of piezo elements on each string. Mark Zadel (McGill) had an interesting survey of laptop performance. He commented that this type of music is often very dense and with complex soundscapes. Most commercial “live software” are made so that musical elements can be laid out tightly beforehand, and everything is quantized so much that it is impossible to make any big mistakes during the performance. He called this “piloting” systems, where the performer navigates through patches were only a few parameters are open for performance control. ...

I was curious to see some demographic figures for this year’s ICMC, so I looked up the number of times various countries are mentioned in the PDF program booklet: USA: 232 Canada: 47 Mexico: 40 Korea: 38 Germany: 37 UK: 31 France: 31 Japan: 31 Italy: 30 Netherlands: 14 Ireland: 14 Brazil: 12 China: 11 Spain: 11 Switzerland: 11 Portugal: 10 Singapore: 8 Russia: 8 Hong Kong: 7 Sweden: 7 Norway: 7 Estonia: 6 Turkey: 6 Greece: 5 Denmark: 5 Poland: 4 Hungary: 4 Belgium: 3 Lithuania: 2 Finland: 1 ...

Challenge Traditional keyframe displays of videos are not particularly useful when studying single-shot studio recordings of music-related movements, since they mainly show static postural information and no motion. Using motion images of various kinds helps in visualizing what is going on in the image. Below can be seen (from left): motion image, with noise reduction, with edge detection, with “trails” and added to the original image. ...

Some notes from ICMC, Barcelona, Spain 4-10 September 2005. Sunday 4 September I attended a workshop on audio mosaicing, which was more like a set of presentations by different people, but still interesting. Jason Freeman, PhD from Columbia, now at Georgia Tech, talked about a java applet creating a 5 second “thumbnail song” of your iTunes collection. Opening concert Chris Brown had composed a piece for the Reactable interactive table made at UPF. The table is very nice, and is responding quickly, but I felt there was a missing link when it comes to the relationships between the gestures made, objects presented and sonic output. Jose Manuel Berenguer played sounds and visuals. I liked the beginning a lot, with a nice combination of granulated sounds and visual particle sworms. Ali Momeni’s installation “un titled” is using the new moother object which makes it possible to acces the Freesound database from within Max/MSP and PD. Ali used it to query for similar files and organizing them in 2-dimensional “sound spaces”. A large mechanical construction is controlling the parameters via Wacom tablets. Nice concept and I like the idea of getting things bigger and more heavy to use, but I had some problems with the mappings and the concept of having to press the large sticks down in the ground to get new sounds. Monday 5 September Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, CCRMA, Stanford, talked about Planet CCRMA and future issues. On a question on free software, he said something like “to me, free software is definitely not free”. Norbert Schnell from IRCAM presented FTM, a nice collection of Max-objects for more advanced data handling in Max/MSP. Rosemary Mountain, Concordia / Hexagram, showed a setup for testing how people can organize visual and auditory stimuli. She used a wireless barcode reader. Ge Wang, Soundlab, Princeton, showed his Chuck programming language, a text-based music language, with some nice graphical add-ons. I’m very sorry I missed his “text-battle” with Nick Collins at the Off-ICMC. Tuesday 6 September Vegard Sandvold, NOTAM, presented some promising results on the use of semantic descriptors of musical intensity. I tried the experiment when it was up and running, and have some problems with the concept of forcing stimuli into predetermined categories. It would be interesting to do a set of similar experiments using a continuous scale instead. His system is currently used by NRK in the radio-intentiometer. Douglas Geers, Minnesota, presented a nice piece in the evening concert, with a violinist wearing glowing thread which he processed with Jitter. Wednesday 7 September Thursday 8 September Rui Pedro Paiva, University of Coimbra, Portugal, presented a way of melody extraction from a polyphonic signal. Based on auditory filtering, and with no attempt to make it fast, they obtained an average performance of about 82% on a varied set of music. Geoffery Peeters, IRCAM, presented a method for rhythm detection which seems to be very promising. Nick Collins, Cambridge, presented an overview of different segmentation algorithms. Xavier Serra, UPF, presented a nice overview of current music technology research, and called for a roadmap for future research. Friday 9 September Eduardo Reck Miranda, Future Music Lab, Plymouth, showed some of his work using EEG to control music. They still have a long way to go, since the signals are weak and noisy, but they had managed to get people to control simple playback of sequences. Carlos Guedes, NYU / Porto, presented his m-tools, a small package of Max-objects developed for controlling musical rhythm from dance movements. and Perry Cook, Princeton, showed tools Jasch and played a nice set at the Off-ICMC.