Below is a list of activities the project team partners have been engaged in since the beginning of the project. Please note the list is not exhaustive,

Academic Impact and Dissemination
Collaborations with Artists
Industry Engagement
Engagement Activities

1) Academic Impact and Dissemination

The project partners have been delivering impact to academic beneficiaries in conventional ways, including papers in both journals and conferences, as well as in a more focussed manner in the form of special sessions, workshops and tutorials at selected important conferences including AES, ACM SIGGRAPH, CHI & Multimedia, and many others.

A substantial list of publications has already arisen as a result of the research being developed and presented at major conferences. The conference paper publications and journal publications can be seen on our Publications page.

2) Collaborations with Artists

Collaboration with the B3 Media TalentLab programme (Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham).

The Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) team work with a number of external entities, including artists, musicians and developers, to support their practice. These collaborative efforts offer symbiotic relationships, wherein both parties benefit from working with one another. They foresee a future where art and technology live side by side, in a space where one can augment the other. The external artist programme is supported by links that the department have with both academia and industry. The B3 Media partnership with Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham, is now in its third year. The Mixed Reality Lab provide residency opportunities for establishing artists and practitioners to develop and realise project ideas.

The annual B3 Media cohort for instance are each assigned a mentor at the beginning of the year who can work with them in enabling their ideas to be revealed through technology. These links may become more long term associations and a number of associated artists have returned to work with us on a variety of projects. The support the MRL provide is not just technical. In many cases, artists are technologists and require support in running user studies, evaluating technologies and working in a user-centred way. The diverse range of skills and experience in the lab enable us to monitor progress and offer contextually relevant support on projects as visions turn into reality.

Collaboration with Ron Herrema (iPad application with music and visuals) 

Collaboration with Richard Ramchurn (Albino Mosquito and #Scanners project)

Di Wilshire (Sentiment project)

The Nottingham team have collaborated with the artist Di Wilshire to create an interactive sound installation called Sentiment. This features a series of provocative audio interviews with people that are edited to be played over a circular array of speakers, with the mix being controlled by the listener’s movement in the space. Di also recorded galvanic skin response data from interviewees (a possible measure of stress) that was also played back to listeners using a wearable tactile device. Sentiment premiered at FACT in July 2015.

Collaboration with artist Caroline Locke

The Nottingham team have collaborated with artist Caroline Locke who has developed an artistic interface called sound fountains in which sound is visualised through the activation of water (see: http://www.weareprimary.org/people/caroline-locke/ ). Caroline exhibited a version of sound fountains connected to a live data stream at FACT.

Climb!: collaboration with Maria Kallionpää, composer and pianist, Hong Kong Baptist University

Climb! is a classical composition that uses a self-playing Disklavier piano duetting alongside the pianist. This is controlled by software (Muzicodes and MELD) connected to the piano, which responds to phrases that the pianist plays. Projected visuals and a mobile app give more clues about what is happening.  Composer and pianist Maria Kallionpää will perform Climb!.

The Nottingham team have worked with the Oxford team (David Weigl and Kevin Page, Oxford University, e-Research Centre) to integrate their MELD dynamic score system into the Muzicodes system. Maria Kallionpää has brought a specific skill set and established network (musical composition, performance and musicology research) that has enabled us to design, develop and deploy bespoke music performance software. The Oxford project partners David Weigl and Kevin Page have made developments to their MELD dynamic score system in order to integrate it into the Muzicodes system.

Collaboration with the recording artist and researcher Tracy Redhead (University of Newcastle, Australia) – Semantic Player Technology in Using Future Music Consumption Products

Recording artist and academic Tracy Redhead was invited in June 2015 for the first time at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, to describe her work on a flexible music format to a Queen Mary University of London FAST IMPACt meeting.

The results of the collaboration between Florian Thalmann (Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London) and Tracy Redhead were presented at the FAST Industry Day at Abbey Road Studios, 25 October 2018.

Florian Thalmann and Tracy Redhead have showcased two works that were created as part of a FAST artist residence and collaboration. The works utilises the semantic player technology to demonstrate the potential of using semantic web technologies in future music consumption products. In particular, the works are instances of dynamic music which includes music that changes with the listeners context, offers ways to interact, or is composed using generative and algorithmic material. The first work is influenced by the weather, time of day and location of the listener, whereas the second work will sound unique in all locations globally,

Collaboration with Jocelyn Spence, Visiting Researcher, Mixed Reality Lab & Rough Trade Records. Locative Audio Experiences: The Rough Mile & B076.

The FAST Nottingham team at the Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) supported Jocelyn Spence in designing and realising ‘The Rough Mile’ and B076 experiences. Specifically, this included the ongoing development and authoring of a bespoke software tool for interactive locative audio experiences entitled the DaoPlayer, which was used for ‘The Rough Mile’, and the collaboration with Florian Thalmann in extending the Semantic Player used for the B076 experience. The MRL provided complementary skills and experience in staging and studying the deployment of such experiences, alongside other resources and infrastructures required to support the process.
Jocelyn Spence led the design of ‘The Rough Mile’, a two-part locative experience for friends to engage with. The experience found participants undertaking an interactive audio narrative on the streets of Nottingham, which encouraged them to think about their friend and choose music for them to listen to in part two. Part two repeated the walk but re-authored around the music chosen in part one.

Rough Trade Records hosted The Rough Mile experience (the walk commenced and finished at Rough Trade shop in Nottingham). They supported the project with publicity and promotion, thus recruiting participants to undertake the experience.

Collaboration with Patrick Shaw, Nottinghamshire guitarist: Carolan Guitar.

This collaboration is part of the ongoing collection of usage of the Carolan Guitar. The Nottingham team worked with Patrick Shaw to design and then engrave bespoke Artcode patterns directly onto a guitar he owns. Patrick previously engaged with the Carolan Guitar, a guitar built around a set of Artcode patterns, and he was keen to stay in contact with this work and have his own version. The collaboration with Patrick Shaw finished in December 2016.

3) Industry Engagement

FAST Industry Day, Abbey Road Studios, 25 October, 2018

Showcasing the culmination of five years of digital music research, the FAST IMPACt project(Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption) led by Queen Mary University of London hosted an invite only industry day at Abbey Road Studios on Thursday 25 October, 2 – 8 pm.

Presented by Professor Mark Sandler, Director of the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary,the event showcased to artists, journalists and industry professionals the next generation technologies that will shape the music industry – from production to consumption.

More on the Industry Day can be found on our website pages here.

Abbey Road studios: Alan Blumlein, 1 April 2015

The FAST IMPACt project was presented by Mark Sandler to an audience of approximately 100 attendees on at Abbey Road Studios, marking the occasion of Blumlein’s centenary with a plaque dedicated by IEEE. FAST is now dedicated to the memory of Alan Dower Blumlein, the inventor of binaural and crossed-pair microphone recording techniques, as well as the stereo groove configuration in vinyl LP records.

The Innovation in Music Conference, 7-9 June 2015 (InMusic15, Cambridge)

The FAST project organized a panel session at this industry-focused conference. Panelists included Matt White (Director of User Experience, Omnifone), Jon Eades (Project Manager, Abbey Road Red), Gyorgy Fazekas (C4DM, QM), Peter Tolmie (MRL, Nottingham), Gary Bromham (composer, recording / mix engineer, producer) and Adrian Hazzard (MRL, Nottingham). The panel session explored and discussed the FAST project themes as an opportunity to reach out to a wider audience to both promote and foster future engagement with other related parties.

Linked Music Hackaton, 9th October 2015, Programming with Purcell, Hacking with Handel, Linking with Liszt, Goldsmiths University of London

Over 25 academics and developers gathered for a Linked Music Hackathon, organised by the members of the FAST IMPACt Oxford team (Kevin Page and David Weigl). Attendees were able to use data produced by FAST and more than 20 other Linked Data music sources to produce new mashups prototyped and presented on the same day. A variety of hacks were shown at the end of the event with the winning project “Geobrowsing using RISM” chosen by popular vote. A Radio 1 team were also in attendance to interview attendees for the BBC’s “Make It Digital” campaign. For further info see: http://semanticmedia.org.uk/?q=hackathon

Collaboration with Yamaha (ongoing)

Yamaha is working with c4dm in several ways already: hosting interns in Japan, a CASE student and a small industrial contract. CTO Richie Hasegawa visited in April 2015 and will again in April 2016. Their project on Software Defined Media is complementary to FAST.

Collaboration with SUSTRANS

Musically accompanied walking experiences to motivate behaviour change in commuters; Started in 2015. The proposed project is interdisciplinary in nature (HCI, music theory, music production);

Collaboration with Deezer

The collaboration between the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London and the company was established in March-May 17. The company is concerned with processing large scale audio resources and calculating lots of features to use in research. Agreements are in negotiation.

Collaboration with State51: ongoing.

Collaboration with Internet Archive: Exploration Tool for Grateful Dead Live Performances.

Expected outcomes: A Web application specifically developed for the exploration of Grateful Dead concerts will be the outcome. The project aims to demonstrate how Semantic Audio and Linked Data technologies can produce an improved user experience for browsing and exploring music collections.

4) Engagement Activities

Linked Music Hackathon, 9th October 2015, Programming with Purcell, Hacking with Handel, Linking with Liszt, Goldsmiths University of London.

Over 25 academics and developers gathered for a Linked Music Hackathon, organised by the members of the FAST IMPACt Oxford team (Kevin Page and David Weigl). Attendees were able to use data produced by FAST and more than 20 other Linked Data music sources to produce new mashups prototyped and presented on the same day. A variety of hacks was shown at the end of the event with the winning project “Geobrowsing using RISM” chosen by popular vote. A Radio 1 team were also in attendance to interview attendees for the BBC’s “Make It Digital” campaign. For further info see: http://semanticmedia.org.uk/?q=hackathon

The Able Orchestra project

The Able Orchestra project is the latest in a series of projects achieved through the partnership between Orchestras Live and Nottinghamshire Music Hub. The project has been co-produced by County Youth Arts with Orchestras Live and aims to bring world class orchestral work to under-served parts of the UK. During the project music was created by young people with disabilities from Fountaindale School and students from Outwood Academy Portland, along with members of the Halle Orchestra; all by the BBC’s ’Ten Pieces’ initiative. The event took place at the Palace Theatre Mansfield on 9 May 2015.  See our news item for more information.

Soundlincs

The Nottingham FAST team have established a collaboration with Soundlincs, a company that delivers musical outreach activities to disadvantaged communities around the midlands (http://www.soundlincs.org). Following an initial visit, they hosted a one day workshop to explore collaboration at which various opportunities for for future-joint projects were identified.

D-BOX workshops (as part of FACT and Being Human: Digital Festival of the Humanities)

Performers often find ways of playing musical instruments that differ from the designer’s original intent. A D-Box is a simple electronic instrument that has been purpose-designed to be as hackable as possible. Two “hackable instruments” sessions to explore creative and unexpected uses of digital instruments were organised as workshops in Liverpool (14thJuly 2015) and London (16thNovember 2015) and as part of two larger events in 2015, FACT andBeing Human: Digital Festival of the Humanities.

“Ada sketches” event (sponsored by the Transforming Musicology project and FAST IMPACt)

The event was organised by the FAST Oxford team. It was held on the 30 November, Mathematical Institute, Oxford. It opened with a performance of Ada sketches by four musicians from the Royal Northern College of Music, after which the work was explained musically and mathematically by its composer Emily Howard and mathematician Lasse Rempe-Gillen (from Liverpool), then it was performed a second time. After the break we went into  he “co-creation phase” where audience members turned “numbers into notes” and these were performed by the musicians.  We captured a live annotation of the first performance by Carolin, and the audience response to the work before and after explanation was collected via questionnaires designed in conjunction with Daniel and Iris from Goldsmiths.  The audience included several attendees of the IT as a Utility network “Internet of Audio Things event” which was held earlier that day.

Ada Lovelace Symposium (sponsored by the Transforming Musicology project and FAST IMPACt)

The Ada Lovelace Symposium was organised by the FAST Oxford team. It was held on the 10-11 December 2015. For a full description, see our news item here.

There was an additional musical event at the Wednesday evening reception in Blackwell Hall – world premières of “An algorithmic study on ADA” and “ADA”, composed by James Whitbourn, performed by Commotio (mixed-voice contemporary choir), Andrew Bernardi (violin), Anna Lapwood (harp), and conducted by Matthew Berry. I later spoke with James to discuss possible future collaborations.

All the digital content (slides, photos, recordings) has been uploaded to the following web page:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15772302/NumbersIntoNotes/index.html

Open Symphony: supporting audience-performer interaction (one of the six projects selected by Audience Labs)

Read more about this project and demonstrator in our news itemand the Demonstrators list.

The Moodplay Experience

The Center for Digital Music FAST team showcased the Moodplay Interactive experience at the Digital Shoreditch annual exhibition in 2015. Read more about this in our news items on the C4DM award for Moodbox.

Bela Workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam (F. Morreale, G. Moro, A. McPherson, A. Chamberlain).

The Bela Workshop took place on the 10th, 11th & 12th of August, 2016,  STEIM, Achtergracht 19, 1017WL, Amsterdam. Participants of the workshops (academics and artists) used Bela (http://bela.io), a new embedded audio / sensor platform based on the BeagleBone Black which provides submillisecond latency between action and sound, and which replaces the need for a laptop and external microcontroller boards such as Arduino to create digital musical instruments. A major goal of the workshop was to make the new instrument designs from the workshop sustainable by thoroughly documenting the process of building and using the instrument. In addition to the new artefacts created in the workshop, the FAST researchers released documentation that allowed others in the community to replicate and modify the instruments. In addition to technical help, the organising team helped the participants document their efforts as they went along, recording short interviews as part of a research study on digital musical instrument sustainability.

Participation at the Sonar D Festival, June 2016,  Barcelona, Spain. 

From 16-18 June 2016, the Centre for Digital Music (QMUL) including members from the FAST project presented a public exhibition of its research at the Sonar D festival, a high-profile annual event in Barcelona that caters to musicians, the music technology industry and the general public. C4DM was chosen by competitive application for a display booth (roughly 4m x 4m) on the exhibition floor, in a prime location near the entrance to the facility. Twelve (12) C4DM researchers, including PhD students, postdocs, early- and mid-career academics displayed their work. Thousands of people, mainly adults but also occasionally children attended the event. The booth had many visitors from both large and small businesses, including several different members of the music company Focusrite. Several musicians who were performing and speaking at Sonar also attended the booth, including the well-known composer Brian Enowho took an interest in several of the research projects. The event raised the public profile of C4DM and the individual projects within it.    MusicWeb was demonstrated to app developers who have taken interest in linked music data.

MUSIC OF PROOF, Royal Northern College of Music.

On Wednesday 4th October an evening performance by the composer Emily Howard and the mathematician Marcus de Sautoy took place at the Royal Northern College of Music. The performance took place at a launch event for PRiSM, the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music. It was preceded by a conversation between Emily Howard and Marcus de Sautoy about how music and maths are intertwined.

 International conference on New Interfaces for Musical expression 17, 14-17 May 2017.

The Oxford and Nottingham teams presented the Climb! technology to a mixed audience of researchers, music technologists and music performers. 14-19 May 20-17, International conference on New Interfaces for Musical expression 17. Attendance: 160.

Spotify: Lab Tour and Seminar, Queen Mary University of London, July 2017.

Topics: Showcase of C4DM research, MIR research at Spotify.

First public performance of “Climb!” for Disklavier and Electronics.

This was the first public concert performance of “Climb!” for Disklavier and Electronics (June 7th 2017, Djanogly Recital Hall, University of Nottingham). Forty eight (48) audience members. Reach: Local institution; public drawn from the immediate region (Nottinghamshire). Additionally, the audience questionnaires’ use of a developed audience app and one on one interviews captured a dataset for research purposes.

Digital Musicology workshop at Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, 2015, 2016, 2017.

The Oxford team convened and organised a one-week Digital Musicology summer school workshop (Kevin Page); they also ran sessions within a one-week workshop (David Weigl). Attendees: 19. International. For postgraduate students.

AES workshop – workshop led by George Fazekas and Thomas Wilmering. 

FAST IMPACt project members from the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) organised a workshop on the 20th October 2017 as part of AES New York 2017on Archiving & Restoration: AR08 – The Music Never Stopped: The Future of the Grateful Dead Experience in the Information Age. See FAST news item:
https://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk/news/fast-workshop-at-the-143rd-aes-new-york-18-20-october-2017/

David de Roure’s trip to Australia to promote FAST work (October 2017).