This blog is moving

I'm in the process of moving and updating this blog.

One of the reasons I started it was to report new acquisitions in the Elektronmusikstudion library. At that time, the catalogue was a simple FileMaker database. But EMS's library is now fully searchable in the catalogue of the Music- and theatre library of Sweden. Select Elektronmusikstudion EMS under Collection, for a list of all the books and records available: EMS library. Almost all of the items are available for interlibrary loan in Sweden and internationally.

Another reason was to keep myself updated. However, my interest in blogging have waned lately, mainly because it's time consuming, so I'm not sure what will happen to "The EAM librarian" at its new location.

Two interviews with Barry Vercoe

The Music at MIT Oral History Collection has two video interviews with Barry Vercoe of Csound fame dated August 19, 2011 and April 24, 2012. They are also available as PDF transcriptions.

Hz #19

In the latest issue of Fylkingen's journal Hz you will find an article of mine, Electronic music archives in the collection of The Swedish Performing Arts Agency. It is a translation from the Swedish original (which contains a few more pictures) from Dokumenterat no. 45. This text supersedes my earlier post on Swedish EAM archives, although the latter has some additional info.

Thanks to Sachiko Hayashi, the editor of Hz, who also contributes an article to this issue, A brief historical overview of Fylkingen's journals. Thanks also to Isabel Thomson, who checked the translation.

The other articles in Hz #19 are:

• Martyn Hudson: What, am i hearing light? Listening through Jean-Luc Nancy
• Florian Cramer: What is 'post-digital'?
• Michael Betancourt: Critical glitches and glitch art
• Edward Picot: Mixing it: 12 remixes by Michael Szpakowski
• Laura Plana Gracia: Landscapes {soundscapes: Dronestrikes on Saturn
• Ben Grosser: How the technological design of Facebook homogenizes identity and limits personal representation
• Aymeric Mansoux: My lawyer is an artist: Free culture licenses as art manifesto
• Robert Spahr: Cruft: art from digital leftovers
• Alan Sondheim: Outline for a talk on blank that can't be given
• Kevin Logan: Rolling stones gets me no satisfaction
• Gx Jupitter-Larsen: Ordinarily nowhere

Journals

Electronic Music Review, published in 1967-1968 and edited by Reynold Weidenaar and Robert Moog, is freely available at UbuWeb. The entire issue 2-3 consists of Hugh Davies' Repertoire International des Musiques Electroacoustiques/International Electronic Music Catalog.

Brazilian electroacoustic music journal Linda has released its first bilingual edition. Amongst other articles, it contains an interview with Swedish composers Jens Hedman and Eva Sidén.

The Samson Box and other stuff

The latest issue of Computer Music Journal is devoted to CCRMA's Samson Box real-time digital synthesizer, which was used in over 100 works from the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of them was the soundtrack to NASA's Mars in 3D film, which has been restored and released on Blu-ray recently. The score was composed by Michael McNabb and Bill Schottstaedt. There's an article on the restoration process, and the emulator used to recreate the Samson Box for the project is on GitHub. The film is available on Youtube.

I've written an article in Swedish on the archives related to EAM available at Statens musikverk (Music Development and Heritage Sweden). One can find it in Dokumenterat, no. 45. (There's also an older related blog post in English.)

Swedish composer Ragnar Grippe talks about his music from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and the 2010s.

Another Sten Hanson obituary by Kristoffer Westin (in Swedish).

The proceedings of SMC2013 (The Sound and Music Computing Conference, Stockholm 2013).

A 380-page report from the EU project COST (Cooperation of Science and Technical Research) Action TD0804 Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes. The COST Soundscape project involves cultural, social and psychological as well as scientific aspects. In the report's abstract, the researchers conclude:

Reducing sound level, the focus of EU environmental noise policy, does not necessarily lead to improved quality of life in urban/rural areas, and a new multidisciplinary approach is essential. Soundscape research represents this paradigm shift as it involves not only physical measurements but also the cooperation of human/social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, architecture, anthropology, medicine), to account for the diversity of soundscapes across countries and cultures; and it considers environmental sounds as a 'resource' rather than a 'waste'.

Musicainformatica, a computer music blog by Alex Di Nunzio.

The Big MAT Book by Steve Travis Pope, courseware for multimedia engineering and audio software and hardware.

A tutorial in deep learning in music informatics.

Some links

R.I.P. Sten Hanson (1946-2013), composer, performance artist and poet. Ulf Stenberg remembers Sten in Tidningen Kulturen (Swedish only).

Flossmanuals has online manuals for Ardour, Audacity, Chuck, Csound, Fluxus, and Pure Data.

Musica/Tecnologia's latest issue is dedicated to the phase vocoder.

An International Archive of Sound Art.

The Montréal Sound Map.

Sound and wave animations from Music Science at UNSW.

The Musical Acoustics Research Library (MARL) contains digitised archive documents in musical acoustics. There are early papers and correspondence by James Beauchamp, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, e.g. some documents pertaining to Rissets research on trumpet tones.

Various stuff

The new issue of Fylkingen's Hz journal (#18) contains several articles on sound art and electroacoustic music.

Uncollectable - April 2013 issue of ArteEeast journal covers Middle Eastern sound art.

Data Garden "is a journal, record label and events producer encouraging the discovery of electronic music through the windows of history, science and community."

Kunstradio - a Zürich sound art radio station.

Le Perce-oreilles - French sound art archive and web portal.

MIR

George Tzanetakis has uploaded a 30 minute presentation with an overview of music information retrieval (MIR). It contains a good introduction to Fourier analysis and STFT. (On the same site, there is also a 18 minute tutorial by Meinard Mueller on chroma features.)

Tzanetakis' presentation spawned a small discussion on the MUSIC-IR list about the origins of the term MIR. The earliest use seems to have been at Princeton in the 1960s for a software package used in research on Josquin by Michael Kassler et al. (See Kassler, 1966, "Toward musical information retrieval", Perspectives of new music, vol. 4 (1966), no. 2, p. 59-67).

Before ISMIR started in 2000, some of the work on MIR was published in Computer music journal and the International Computer Music Conference proceedings (a search for retrieval results in about 370 matching papers from 1975 onward).

Some online journals etc.

The Experimental Music Yearbook "is a repository for composers, performers, and the public to glean the methods and styles of various artists working in the experimental music tradition".

Surround journal.

Ars Acustica – Audio Art – Klangkunst. Issue 4 (October 2012) of Act. Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance.

Electroacoustic Music and Selected Concepts of Radio Art. Free e-book by Michal Rataj.

Call for papers: Journal of New Music Research - Special Issue on Music and Machine Learning

Machine learning has permeated nearly every area of music informatics, driven by a renewed interest in computational musicology, vast sources of music in digital audio formats, the steady increase in size and availability of symbolic corpora, and advances in semantic annotation of large audio collections.

To provide a collection of the highest quality contemporary work in machine learning and music, the Journal of New Music Research will host its second Special Issue on Music and Machine Learning.

Guest Editors: Darrell Conklin, José Manuel Iñesta, Rafel Ramirez

The manuscript submission deadline is July 1, 2013. Full details of the Call for Papers can be found at the following web page:

http://www.ehu.es/cs-ikerbasque/conklin/jnmr14.html