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FAST participates in 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 Monday 9th May 2015.

Amy Dickens, Associate PhD student from Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL), University of Nothingham, assisted the Fountaindale School students along with Si Tew (Music Producer), Ronnie Sampson (Electronic musician & singer-songwriter), John Sampson (Music Producer) and Bec Smith (Digital Artist) from Urban Projections. Amy helped the students to create sounds through movement using the Leap motion sensors and helped to facilitate other musical performance with iPads. The involvement with the project has enabled ethnographic study of HCI challenges in accessible and has contributed to the Amy’s research in gesture controlled musical interventions for users with limited movement.

Amy’s involvement in the project came about through a FAST IMPACt meeting with the MRL and potential partners at Nottingham County Youth Arts and the Nottinghamshire Music Hub, where the project was described and opened to researchers who might have some interest in being involved in the project.

Amy held a design workshop to discuss the ideas of gesture controlled sound in this setting. This lead to the development of a prototype and introduction of the sensor to the project and use in the project sessions – it is hoped that data from the project will provide key points from which to adapt the prototype and continue developing technology for a more tailored interaction.

Professor Steve Benford announces ‘Artcodes’

Our partner from Nottingham, Professor Steve Benford, Mixed Reality Lab, just announced Artcodes – “the greatly extended and rebranded Aestheticodes app”.

The Carol an guitar connects to its digital record through its decorative inlay. Specifically, the Celtic knotwork patterns spread around Carolan contain six different computer-readable codes hidden within them that the users can scan using a mobile device to connect to various webpages. The Artcodes app reads the codes in the patterns and then maps them onto particular webpages.

The extended Artcodes app enables the users to create and share their own interactive experiences that involve scanning decorated objects. First, they can learn to draw scannable patterns that contain codes. Then they can map these to webpages of their choosing. Alternatively the users can appropriate an existing experience, opening it up and editing its codes to point at different pages of their choosing as described in the following Carolan blog post. Finally, they can share their new experience with other Artcodes users. They can also update their experience later on, resetting its codes to point at new web pages.

The Carolan guitar team led by Professor Steve Benford are hoping that these features will empower all sorts of creative people become Artcode designers and users and that they can grow an active Artcodes community.

To find out more, visit Professor Steve Benford’s latest Carolan blog post.

FAST partners meet in Paris for their 2nd all-hands meeting

On the 15-16 February this year, FAST IMPACt partners met at the University of London Institute in Paris for their 2^nd all-hands meeting located in beautiful surroundings of the Invalides quarter, and in sunny Parisian weather. The meeting was a combination of keynote talks, ‘show and tell’ presentations, group discussions and break-out sessions. Forty-five (45) partners participated in the meeting activities.

The first day of the meeting began with an opening session by Professor Mark Sandler, FAST IMPACt Principal Investigator, Queen Mary University of London, with his overview of the latest project progress. The first keynote presentation of the day, “Creative Musical Expression with Human-Computer Partherships”, was delivered by Professor Wendy Mackay (Université Paris-Saclay). Mackay’s presentation described her and her colleague’s work with contemporary music composers at IRCAM, in Paris, which led to a series of interactive composition tools based on interactive paper: composers were given the possibility to express highly diverse musical ideas on paper and make their own associations with powerful composition tools, such as Open Music. The goal is to empower creative professionals through reciprocal human-computer partnerships, such that users and interactive systems each learn from and affect each others behaviour.

Then, the Co-Investigators, Prof Steve Benford (Nottingham), Professor Dave de Roure (Oxford), and Professor Geraint Wiggins (Queen Mary University of London), presented their progress reports on five (5) of the eight (8) project’s Work Threads – Inference, Workflow, Interface, Digital Musical Objects and Ethnography and Design. This was followed by the second keynote presentation by Jean-Julien Aucouturier (IRCAM) on “Musical Friends and Foes: Coordinated Musical Behaviour Can Communicate Social Intent”. He and his team tasked dyads of expert improvisers to use music to communicate a series of inter-personal attitudes, such as being domineering, disdainful or conciliatory, to one another and then asked external judges to attempt to decode the type of social intent communicated in the recordings of these duets, by relying dichotically on either both or only one audio channel. The results obtained establish that music can not only mediate, but also directly communicate both affiliatory and non-affiliatory social behaviours.

The first day ended with a show tell session in which the postdocs and PhD students presented their latest research related to the project demonstrators.

The morning session of the second day began with a group discussion of the project partners on the results presented so far facilitated by François Pachet, SONY CSL, followed by the third and last keynote presentation by Professor Ichiro Fujinaga (Mc Gill University), “Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis Project”. The goal of the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project (SIMSSA:http://simssa.ca), as explained Fujinaga, is to teach computers to recognize the musical symbols in these images and assemble the data on a single website, making it a comprehensive search and analysis system for online musical scores. Based on the optical music recognition (OMR) technology, they are creating an infra-structure and tools for processing music documents, transforming vast music collections into symbolic representations that can be searched, studied, analyzed, and performed.

Outcomes of the 2^nd all-hands meeting will be discussed among the project partners during the following months; they will reconvene in December for their 3^rd midterm all-hands meeting in the Cotswolds, 5^th-8^th December 2016.

For photos of the Paris meeting, click here:
https://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk/workshop-photos/?tag=54