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 which caters to musicians, the music technology industry, and members of 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. 12 C4DM researchers, including PhD students, postdocs, early- and mid-career academics, attended to showcase their work.

The event was attended by thousands of people, mainly adults but also occasionally children. 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 Eno who took an interest in several of the research projects. The event raised the public profile of C4DM and the individual projects within it.

The projects shown directly related to FAST were:

•  Bela, an open-source platform for ultra-low-latency audio and sensor processing, which launched on Kickstarter in 2016. Bela attracted significant interest from Sonar attendees;
• Moodplay, a mobile phone-based system that allows users to collectively control music and lighting effects to express desired emotions;
• MixRights, a demo of how content reuse is enabled by emerging MPEG standards, such as IM AF format for interactive music apps and MVCO ontology for IP rights tracking, driving a shift of power in the music value chain.

Other C4DM projects shown were:

• Augmented Violin, a sensor-based extension of the traditional violin to give students constructive feedback on their playing
• Tape.pm, an interactive object which explores novel ways to record and share an improvisation that is created on a musical instrument;
• Aural Character of Places, an interactive online demo of soundwalks conducted around London;
• TouchKeys, a transformation of the piano-style keyboard into an expressive multi-touch control surface, launched on Kickstarter in 2013 and spun out into a company in 2016;
• Collidoscope, a collaborative audio-visual musical instrument which was a viral hit online with over 10M views;
• RTSFX (Real-Time Sound Effects), an online library of real-time synthesised (rather than sampled) sound effects for a variety of different objects and environmental sounds.

The Sonar+D exhibition generated substantial publicity for C4DM and the FAST project, with thousands of people attending the booth. The Sonar+D organisation also featured C4DM in its online media and videos, and we were interviewed for a broadcast on Spanish television. Finally, C4DM and FAST attendees at Sonar+D also had the opportunity to see other booths and talks at the event, generating new ideas and connections for future projects.

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