PARTICIPANTS

Instigators

  • PI: Alice Eldridge – Research Fellow in Digital Technologies, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex
  • Co-I: Paul Stapleton Senior Lecturer in Music, SARC, Queen’s University Belfast

Advisory Board

  • Kristina Anderson – Chief Digital Story teller, STEIM, Amsterdam
  • Fiona Courage – Special Collections Manager, The Keep, Sussex
  • Simon Goldhill – Director of CRASH, Kings College, Cambridge
  • Sarah Pink – Distinguished Professor and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University, Australia.
  • Mark Plumbley – Professor of Signal Processing, University of Surrey
  • Richard Ranft – Head of Sound & Vision at The British Library

Participants

  • Trevor Agus – Lecturer, SARC, Queen’s University Belfast
  • Marije Baalman - Artist
  • Conor Barry – Product Manager, Mogees Ltd
  • Theo Burt – Artist
  • John Bowers – Professor of Creative Digital Practice, University of Newcastle
  • Tristan Clutterbuck – PhD Student SARC, Queen’s University Belfast
  • Ron Chrisley – Reader in Philosophy, Informatics, Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Research Group, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Sussex
  • Palle Dahlstedt – Obel Professor of Art & Technology, Aalborg University

  • Tom Davis – Lecturer in Music and Audio Technology, University of Bournemouth
  • Simon Emmerson – Professor in Music, Technology & Innovation, De Montford University Leicester.
  • Beatrice Fazi – Research Fellow in Digital Humanities and Computational Culture, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex
  • Felix Gerloff – Junior researcher, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures. Humboldt-University, Berlin
  • Owen Green – Teaching Fellow Music & Sound Design, University of Edinburgh
  • Patrice Guyot – Research Fellow in Informatics, University of Toulouse, France
  • Tim Hitchcock – Professor Of Digital History, University of Sussex
  • David Kant – DMA Music Student, University of California
  • Anja Kanngieser – Political geographer and sound artist, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London
  • Chris Kiefer – Lecturer in Music Technology, University of Sussex
  • Cathy Lane – Professor of Sound Arts, University of the Arts London
  • Parag Mital – Director of machine intelligence, Kadenze
  • Shintaro Miyazaki – Senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures
  • Sally-Jane Norman – Professor of Performance Technologies, University of Sussex
  • Franziska Schroeder – Senior Lecturer, School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast
  • Hanns Holger Rutz – Research Fellow, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria
  • Diemo Schwarz – Researcher–Developer Real-Time Music Interaction team at Ircam–Centre Pompidou
  • Dan Stowell – Research Fellow in Machine Listening, Queen Mary University London
  • Nick Ward – Lecturer in Digital Media & Arts, University of Limerick
  • Simon Waters – Lecturer in Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast
  • Sharon Webb – Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex

Partners

  • Brighton Digital Festival
  • The Keep, University of Sussex

INSTIGATORS

Alice Eldridge (PI)

Research Fellow, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex

Alice Eldridge is a musician and interdisciplinary researcher. A background in music, psychology (BSc), evolutionary and adaptive systems (MSc) and informatics (PhD) informs wide-ranging creative, technological and scientific research in the composition and decomposition of sonic environments. She has published and presented at conferences internationally across music, computing and soundscape ecology. As a cellist she has performed internationally at the intersection of contemporary classical, improvised, folk and avant garde musics, including as one-quarter of award winning Collectress and is a vibrant member of Brighton and London free improv scenes. She has appeared on BBC radio 1 as a pop bassist, BBC radio 3 as a contemporary classical composer and free jazz cellist, BBC radio 4 and prime-time BBC 2 TV as a soundscape ecologist; her field recordings feature on Janek Schaefer’s foundsoundscape.com. Her work in all domains is driven by a simple joy in the absorbing powers of listening and an interest in technologies and techniques for broadening it’s scope.

Paul Stapleton (Co-I)

Senior Lecturer in Music, SARC, Queen’s University Belfast

Paul Stapleton is an improviser, sound artist and instrument inventor originally from Southern California. He designs and performs with a variety of modular metallic sound sculptures, custom made electronics, found objects and electric guitars in locations ranging from Echtzeitmusik venues in Berlin to remote beaches on Vancouver Island. Paul is currently based at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, where he teaches and supervises research in improvisation, performance technologies and site-specific art. He has received critical acclaim for several artistic projects, including his album FAUNA (2013, pfMENTUM) with saxophonist Simon Rose, and more recently for his sound design and composition work as part of the immersive audio theatre piece Reassembled, Slightly Askew (2015). Other ongoing collaborations include the distributed instrument project Ambiguous Devices with Tom Davis, improvisation duo SAP with Adam Pultz Melbye and the Translating Improvisation research group with Sara Ramshaw.


NETWORK PARTICIPANTS

Trevor Agus

Lecturer, SARC, Queen’s University Belfast

Trevor Agus is an auditory psychologist who just wanted control over sounds in a way that made sense to his ears. His research career started by investigating why specifically complex listening situations were particularly challenging for many older listeners. Zooming in, he showed that we use rather complex spectrotemporal cues even in simple, everyday listening tasks, such as recognising that a voice is a voice. Yet more fundamentally, he researches why different snippets of white noise generally sound the same by investigating the rare exceptions. He is currently interested in the psychoacoustics of mixing, with a view to adapting mixes for hearing-impaired listeners.

Marije Baalman

Artist

Marije Baalman is an artist and researcher/developer working in the field of interactive sound art. She worked as a hardware engineer at STEIM between 2011 and 2016. Since 2010 she works as a freelance artist and developer from Amsterdam. Her current research goes into the use of wireless networks for live performance, installations and interactive environments. In her artistic work she is interested in the realtime components of the work. To realise her works she mostly uses open source technology (software and hardware) and she is an active contributor to the open source community.


Theo Burt

Artist

Theo Burt produces sound, video and light works for live performance, installation, screenings and published media. Adopting a range of aesthetics, he works extensively with unpredictable and automatic processes to produce geometric and synthetic audio-visual performances, recorded music and transformations of existing music and media. By selecting processes that leave traces of both the source material and the process itself, the results are divorced of a single context, unplaceable, familiar and unfamiliar. His most recent album Gloss (Presto!?, 2015) used early digital hardware synthesisers to create looped music fragments. His current Remix performances and installations continue the work of his album Summer Mix (Entr'acte/Death of Rave, 2011/2015) transforming existing anthemic dance material into new forms. Recent work has focussed on large scale light and sound installations, including "The War Will Feed Itself" in the turbine hall at VAC's Geometry of Now project in Moscow, 2017. A new album in collaboration with Richard Sides will be released later this year.

John Bowers

Professor of Creative Digital Practice, Digital Cultures Research Group, Culture Lab and Fine Art, Newcastle University

John Bowers has a varied academic background having made contributions to research in psychology, sociology, computer science, and art and design. He is also a sound and inter-media artist who works with modular synthesisers, home-brew electronics, and reconstructions of antique image and sound-making devices, alongside contemporary digital technology. He makes performance environments which combine sound, image and gesture at a fundamental material level. He has performed at festivals including the collateral programme of the Venice Biennale, Piksel Bergen, Electropixel Nantes, AlgoMech Sheffield, BEAM Uxbridge and Spill Ipswich, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest. He contributed to the design of The Prayer Companion - a piece exhibited twice at the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and acquired for their permanent collection. Amongst many musical collaborations, he works with Sten-Olof Hellström, Tim Shaw and in the noise drone band Tonesucker. John Bowers works in Culture Lab and Fine Art, Newcastle University, where he helps coordinate the Digital Cultures Research Group.


Tristan Clutterbuck

PhD candidate at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, University of Belfast

Tristan's practice-based research draws from interests in complex musical instruments, machine agency, the history of music technology, improvisation, sociology of music, and actor-network theory.

Ron Chrisley

Reader in Philosophy, Informatics, Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Research Group, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Sussex

My academic connection with computers and sound started as an undergraduate at Stanford.  Each of my close friends from my freshman dorm has gone on to make a mark in computers and sound, whether it be inventing the Shazam algorithm, founding a key Hollywood audio editing firm (Audio Mechanics), patenting a sound spatialisation chip widely used in Soundblaster cards in the 80s and 90s, or leading one of the speech recognition teams behind Google Voice.  Like them, I studied computer music under John Chowning and digital signal processing under Julius Smith.  I also studied music theory and experimental forms of music composition.  After Stanford, I worked on neural networks for speech recognition with Teuvo Kohonen in Helsinki, and at ATR in Japan.  My current related interests include expectation-based models of sensory experience, including audition, and the aesthetic and engineering challenges of answering the question:  What would it be for a robot to sing?


Palle Dahlstedt

Obel Professor of Art & Technology, Aalborg University / Associate Professor of Computer-Aided Creativity, Dept. of Applied Information Technology, Gothenburg University

I'm a composer, improviser, researcher and programmer. My curiosity-driven work is mainly about two things: understanding the mechanisms of creativity, and developing new technologies for improvisation and composition. What is the artistic creative process like on the inside? Can we make computers behave in a similar way? How can we use new technology to create new ways to play and interact musically? Can mediated improvisation provide new qualities of musical interaction? I grew up in Stockholm, studied instrumental and electronic composition at the academies of Malmö and Gothenburg, and did a PhD in evolutionary computation for musical creativity at Chalmers University of Technology (2004). My music, ranging from piano solos over full orchestra to interactive software installations, has been performed on six continents, and been awarded several international prizes (e.g., Gaudeamus Prize 2001). In my research I develop new technologies for electronic improvisation and composition, and study computer models of artistic creativity. Trained as a classical pianist, I have toured extensively as an improviser on electronics and/or experimental keyboard instruments, primarily with my duo pantoMorf, but also in other constellations, e.g., together with Gino Robair, John Tilbury and the legendary AMM.

Tom Davis

Lecturer in Music and Audio Technology, University of Bournemouth

Davis is an improviser, instrument builder and sonic artist. His practice and theory based output involves the creation of technology-led environments for interaction. He has performed at many festivals and conferences in Europe and USA, including, NIME 2012,  NIME 2007, Renew 2012, In-Time 2012, ICMC 2008, Fix 2007, SAN Expo 2007 & Sonorities 2007.  He has exhibited work at such venues as Tate Britain London, NIME 2012, Aspex Gallery Portsmouth and OVADA Oxford. He currently is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bournemouth and holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from SARC, Queen’s University Belfast


Simon Emmerson

Professor in Music, Technology & Innovation, De Montford University Leicester.

Simon Emmerson is Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. Commissions include IMEB (Bourges), GRM (Paris) and Inventionen (Berlin) festivals; Darragh Morgan, Philip Mead, the Sond-Arte Ensemble (Lisbon). Recordings of his works are available from Sargasso. Writings include The Language of Electroacoustic Music (Macmillan, 1986), Music, Electronic Media and Culture (Ashgate, 2000), Living Electronic Music (Ashgate, 2007), and recently, editor and contributor with Leigh Landy, Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis (CUP 2016). He was founder Secretary of EMAS (The Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain) in 1979 and a Trustee of its successor organisation ‘Sound and Music’ 2008-2013. In 2009-2010 he was DAAD Edgar Varese Visiting Professor at the TU, Berlin. Keynote addresses: ACMC 2011 (Auckland), ICMC 2011 (Huddersfield), Music Science Technology 2012 (São Paulo), WOCMAT 2012 (Taiwan), Audiomostly 2014 (Aalborg), AHEM 2016 (London). Visiting Professor and Composer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Perth) in November 2016.

Beatrice Fazi

Research Fellow in Digital Humanities and Computational Culture, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex

Beatrice Fazi is Research Fellow in Digital Humanities & Computational Culture at the Sussex Humanities Lab (University of Sussex, United Kingdom). Her primary areas of expertise are the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and the new emerging field of media philosophy. Beatrice’s current work investigates the limits and potentialities of formal reasoning in relation to computation, and aims to offer a re-conceptualisation of contingency within formal axiomatic systems vis-à-vis technoscientific notions of incompleteness and incomputability. This research is part of a monograph that she is currently writing on how indeterminacy shapes the ontological foundation of computational aesthetics.


Felix Gerloff

Junior researcher, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures. Humboldt-University, Berlin

Felix Gerloff is junior researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures within the research project Machine Love? Creativity Cultures in Underground Electronic Music and Software Engineering and PhD candidate at the Humboldt-University Berlin. He graduated in 2013 as Magister Artium (M.A.) at the Humboldt-University’s Institut für Kulturwissenschaft (Institute for Cultural History & Theory). His PhD project focuses on the re-development of programming as a cultural technique and computational thinking. He strives to understand the ways in which media, epistemic practices, and the formation of culture constitute each other. His interests include sound studies with special regard to sonic modes of thinking and reasoning, games and ludic practices, and the history of grammatextuality and typography. Since 2011 he is organizing a public lecture series KlangDenken (sonic thinking) in collaboration with Sebastian Schwesinger and the Sound Studies Lab.

Owen Green

Teaching Fellow Music & Sound Design, University of Edinburgh

I enjoy making soundful systems that breathe and try, playfully, to adapt to their surroundings. Much of what I do involves making such system-compositions as a territory / provocation / instrument for improvising players (usually me, plus chums). I work at the University of Edinburgh teaching on a number of sound and theory based courses on the MSc Sound Design, as well as working as a freelance composer, sound designer and recording engineer. Check out http://owengreen.net for a selection of projects, sounds, videos and publications.


Patrice Guyot

Research Fellow in Informatics, University of Toulouse, France

Patrice Guyot is a researcher in sound analysis, a sound artist, and a musician. His academic works focuses on real-world audio recordings and includes audio event detection, sound perception, music information retrieval and soundscape ecology. His scientific contributions mainly focus on foregrounding acoustic approaches in machine listening, such as through physical modeling. Additionally, he has produced diverse interactive sound installations which lead participants to wonder about everyday sound perception in an entertaining way. Currently a conductor of a brass-band in Toulouse, he has played in various bands of world music and jazz as a saxophonist.

Tim Hitchcock

Professor Of Digital History, University of Sussex

Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Sussex Humanities Lab. A historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century London, Hitchcock has published widely on poverty, sexuality and crime. With Robert Shoemaker, he has also been responsible for half a dozen major web resources making searchable and re-usable some 35 billion words of historical text and several hundred thousand images.


David Kant

DMA Music Student, University of California

I am interested in the possibilities technology provides for music. My work is about the relationship between computation and its interpretation. I build systems from hypothetical assumptions, extrapolate models beyond their limits and set in motion possible understandings in order to learn about my own perception. I am currently finishing a solo french horn piece that explores the possibility of recovering past sounds from field recordings, starting a project to synthesize from the alphabet of Abrahamic religions the sounds of a universal language, and continuing work with dynamical systems. I attended school in Connecticut (Yale) and New Hampshire (Dartmouth), and I lived in New York City for a few years while working at S.E.M. Ensemble. I now live in San Francisco, and recently finished three and a half months of touring with Dream Team Ensemble, Happy Valley Band, and Gravies and the Main Dish Sauce.

Anja Kanngieser

Political geographer and sound artist, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Anja Kanngieser is a political geographer and sound artist. She uses creative strategies, including sound and listening methods, to explore political economy, social movements and environments. She is primarily interested in the ways in which communities collaborate to create the living and working conditions they desire. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research. She authored the book Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013) and has published in a wide variety of outlets including South Atlantic Quarterly, WIREs Climate Change, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning D, and Journal of Sonic Studies. Her research has been featured on the BBC World Service, and her sound work has been commissioned by ABC Radio National, Transmediale, Reina Sofia, and Live Art Development Agency. Her current projects use storytelling, field recording and data sonification to explore and document community responses to ecological violence and environmental change in the Pacific.


Chris Kiefer

Lecturer in Music Technology, University of Sussex

Chris Kiefer is a computer-musician and musical instrument designer, specialising in musician-computer interaction, physical computing, and machine learning. He performs with custom-made instruments including malleable foam interfaces, touch screen software, interactive sculptures and a modified self-resonating cello. Chris’ research often focuses on participatory design and development of interactive music systems in everyday settings, including digital instruments for children with disabilities, and development of the NETEM networked score system for musical ensembles. His work also concentrates on machine learning and signal processing for audio and interaction, with a particular emphasis on nonlinear and dynamical systems. He has developed and published games and instruments for mobile devices.

Cathy Lane

Professor of Sound Arts and University of the Arts London and co-director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), University of the Arts London.

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Her work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. She is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective. Aspects of her creative practice have developed out of these interests and include composition and installation-based work. She also writes and lectures on these and related subjects as well as collaborating with choreographers, film makers, visual artists and other musicians.


Parag Mital

Director of machine intelligence, Kadenze

Parag K. MITAL (US) is an artist and interdisciplinary researcher obsessed with the nature of information, representation, and attention. Using film, eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI recordings, he has worked on computational models of audiovisual perception from the perspective of both robots and humans, often revealing the disjunct between the two, through generative film experiences, augmented reality hallucinations, and expressive control of large audiovisual corpora. Through this process, he balances his scientific and arts practice, with both reflecting on each other: the science driving the theories, and the artwork re-defining the questions asked within the research. His work has been exhibited internationally including the Prix Ars Electronica, ACM Multimedia, Victoria & Albert Museum, London’s Science Museum, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and the British Film Institute, and featured in FastCompany, BBC, NYTimes, CreativeApplications.Net, and CreateDigitalMotion.

Shintaro Miyazaki

Senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures

Shintaro Miyazaki is a Berlin-born Swiss-Japanese media and design scholar and experimental media designer. He has been a Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab of the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Academy of Art and Design part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland in Basel since 2014 and since 2016 principle investigator there. Shintaro obtained a PhD in media theory at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin (2012). His current interests include cybernetics, design theory and research, non-visual modes of knowledge.


Sally-Jane Norman

Professor of Performance Technologies, University of Sussex

Sally-Jane Norman is Professor of Performance Technologies and Co-Director of Sussex Humanities Lab where she leads the ‘Digital Technologies, Digital Performance’ strand. She joined Sussex after serving as founding Director of Culture Lab at Newcastle University, Research Director at the Institut International de la Marionnette (Charleville-Mézières), and Artistic Co-Director of STEIM (co-organiser of the first Touch Festival with Michel Waisvisz and Joel Ryan). She is a dual citizen of Aotearoa/ New Zealand and France, trandisciplinary performance scholar (Doctorat d’état, Paris III) and sometime practitioner.  From July, Sally Jane will become Director of Te Koki - New Zealand School of Music, at Victoria University in Wellington, Aotearoa.

Hanns Holger Rutz

Research Fellow, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria

Hanns Holger Rutz is a sound artist, composer/performer, researcher and software developer in digital art. Since 2013, he works as researcher at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) in Graz, where he currently leads the FWF-funded artistic research project Algorithms that Matter (Almat). He holds a PhD in computer music from Plymouth University, UK. His work centres around sound and installation art, and extends to live improvisation and electroacoustic music, in all of which the development and research on software and algorithms plays an important role. The central theme in the recent works is the materiality of writing processes, and how compositional processes can be rendered perceivable in the display of art.


Franziska Schroeder

Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast

Franziska is a saxophonist, improviser and theorist, originally from Berlin/Germany. She trained as a contemporary saxophonist in Australia, and in 2006 completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, researching performance and theories of embodiment. Her research is published in diverse international journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound, Performance Research, Cambridge Publishing and Routledge. Franziska has published a book on performance and the threshold (VDM, 2009), an edited volume on user-generated content (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) as well as a volume on improvisation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). Franziska has performed with many international musicians including Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, Stelarc, the Avatar Orchestra, Carin Levine, Chris Brown and Evan Parker.

Diemo Schwarz

Researcher–Developer Real-Time Music Interaction team at Ircam–Centre Pompidou


Dan Stowell

Research Fellow in Machine Listening, Queen Mary University London

Dan Stowell is a researcher in machine listening - which means using computation to understand sound signals. He co-leads the Machine Listening Lab at Queen Mary University of London, based in the Centre for Digital Music. Dan has worked on voice, music and environmental soundscapes, and is currently leading a five-year EPSRC fellowship project researching the automatic analysis of bird sounds. His first degree was from Cambridge University, and his PhD from Queen Mary University of London.

Nick Ward

Lecturer in Digital Media & Arts, University of Limerick

Nicholas holds a PhD from the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queens University Belfast. His research explores notions of physicality and effort in the context of digital musical instrument performance. Specifically he is interested in movement quality, systems for movement description, and their utility within a design context.


Simon Waters

Lecturer in Sonic Arts, Queen's University Belfast

Sharon Webb

Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex

Sharon Webb is a Digital Humanities Lecturer in the Sussex Humanities Lab and the School of History, Art History and Philosophy. She is a historian of Irish associational culture and nationalism (eighteenth and nineteenth century) but has also studied computer science at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Her PhD in History, from Maynooth University (Ireland), can be described as a digital humanities project as it entailed software development as well as historical research, reflecting her background in history and computer science.