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.

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.

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

Sound art in Kunstjournalen B-post

The latest issue of Kunstjournalen B-post, a Norwegian magazine on contemporary art, is devoted to sound and sound art. Most of the texts are available both in scandinavian languages and english.

The contributors are Anne Marthe Dyvi, Espen Sommer Eide, Mahlet Ogbe Habte, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Brandon LaBelle, Jørgen Larsson, Sissel Lillebostad, Trond Lossius, Nicholas Møllerhaug, Anne Hilde Neset, María Andueza Olmedo, Finnbogi Petursson, Carsten Seiffarth, Karen Skog, Roar Sletteland, Maia Urstad and Jana Winderen.

Call for Submissions - CMJ Special Issue: “Advances in the Design of Mapping for Computer Music”

Guest Editors: Marcelo M. Wanderley and Joseph Malloch
 

When we use digital tools for making music, the properties and parameters of both sound synthesizers and human interfaces have an abstract representation. One consequence of the digital nature of these signals and states is that gesture and action are completely separable from sound production, and must be artificially associated by the system designer in a process commonly called mapping.

The importance of mapping in digital musical instruments has been studied since the early 1990s, with several works discussing the role of mapping and many related concepts. Since roughly the mid-2000s, several tools have been proposed to facilitate the implementation of mappings, drastically reducing the necessary technical knowledge and allowing a large community to easily implement their ideas. Coupled with the availability of inexpensive sensors and hardware, as well as the emergence of a strong Do-It-Yourself community, the time seems right to discuss the main directions for research on mapping in digital musical instruments and interactive systems.

This call for submissions for a special issue of the Computer Music Journal focuses on recent developments and future prospects of mapping.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Mapping in instrument/installation/interaction design
• Mapping concepts and approaches
• Mapping tools
• Evaluation methodologies
• Mapping in/as composition
• Mapping for media other than, or in addition to, sound

Deadline for paper submission is March 15, 2013. The issue will appear in 2014.

Submissions should follow all CMJ author guidelines (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/sub/comj).

Submissions and queries should be addressed to marcelo.wanderley(a)mcgill.ca, with the subject starting with [CMJ Mapping]

eOREMA journal call

"The eOREMA journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly arm of the OREMA (Online Repository for Electroacoustic Music Analysis) project (www.orema.dmu.ac.uk) that focuses on the analysis of electroacoustic music. The eOREMA journal will be an open access publication platform that accepts both articles that discuss analytical methodologies and analyses of electroacoustic music compositions in the broadest sense (which can range from acousmatic music to installations and electronica). We encourage both new and established researchers to contribute."

Deadline for paper submissions: Friday 4th of January 2013. More info

European Sound Studies Organisation founded

ESSA, the European Sound Studies Organisation, was founded on Friday, July 14 2012. The aim is to provide an international, interdisciplinary and interprofessional organization for promoting the study of sound by providing a forum for knowledge exchange, for conferences, for research encouragement and development of projects, and for information. Membership is currently free, but an annual fee will be charged eventually.

There are three open access journals affiliated with ESSA: Soundeffects, Journal of sonic studies, and Interference, which I've mentioned before.

Female sound art in Terz Magazin

Terz Magazin has some articles on women in sound art and electroacoustic music: Lauren Redhead on British artists Caroline Lucas, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Claire M. Singer, and Karen Lauke, Michaela Graf on sexuality and sound art, Sabrina Peña Young on Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, Alice Shields, Adina Izarra, Brenda Hutchinson, Annea Lockwood and Elainie Lillios, and finally Julia Gerlach on Maryanne Amacher, Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Christina Kubisch, Kaffe Matthews and Hanna Hartmann. There are also features on Mia Zabelka and Katharina Klement.

New issue of Hz, #17

DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE OF NATURE: AUGMENTING ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA AND ARCHITECTURAL INFORMATICS
by BRIAN W. BRUSH, YONG JU LEE & NOA YOUNSE
Dynamic Performance of Nature is a permanent architectural media installation in the Leonardo Museum located in Salt Lake City, Utah. It intends to augment environmental perception in museum visitors by communicating global environmental information through a dynamic and interactive interface, facilitated by social media, and embedded in the material of a high-tech media wall.

FEELTRACE AND THE EMOTIONS (AFTER CHARLES DARWIN)
by DEBRA SWACK
The Emotions is a multi-channel photographic, possibly interactive, video done in collaboration with the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland about the universality of emotions on a biological level and the potential for futuristic misuse through genetic and or technological modification. Genetically emotionally or otherwise enhanced individuals could become the fashionable norm; synthetic biology could replace plastic surgery, with the further complication of not knowing where those genetic modifications might take them as individuals or us as a species.

FROM PLAINTEXT PLAYERS TO AVATAR ACTORS: A SHORT SURVEY OF ONLINE GAMING PERFORMANCE
by MATHIAS JANSSON
Online performance started in the early text based systems as MOO, MUD and chat rooms and have followed the technology development into 3D online worlds. Joseph Delappe, Eva and Franco Mattes, Rainey Straus and Katherine Isbister are some examples of artists who are today making performance in these new digitals worlds.

EMERGENCE IN THE SOCIAL WEB
by LIAT BERDUGO
With emergence theory - in ant colonies, cities, and brains - the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Something new is happening online, where a collective consciousness seems to emerge from the social web, giving rise to emergent phenomena like memes, the Occupy Movement, and the hacker collective Anonymous.

A STEP BACKWARDS FOR A LEAP FORWARD: THE OFF LABEL FESTIVAL / DIGITAL ART WEEKS 2011
by ART CLAY
The OFF Label Festival is the brainchild of the Digital Arts International Network group in collaboration with host institutes around the world. Wary of the present New Media movement in the arts and the academic environment upon which many "New Media Art Festivals" and "Science and Art" fusion events depend, the DAW moved this year's edition into more diverse and eclectic waters and targeted a more general audience by focusing on analogue arts, mixed-media art forms, and by introducing the element of spirituality.

THE BOOK OF STAMPS: TRAVEL GUIDE FOR SONIC LANDSCAPING FROM CITIES TO URBAN CULTURES
by ART CLAY
The Book of Stamps is a travel guide between sonic landscapes from cities to urban cultures. The sheets of the book provide a "recording surface" and the ink stamps with their various patterns provide the ability to place sounds into the book. Together they act as an interactive tangible interface for a variety of time based musical tasks that form a collaborative composition by its users.

THEMUSICOFTHEFUTUREISNTMUSIC
by HENRY GWIAZDA
"What is music today anyway? Is it still organized sound? Or is it evolving into something else? Perhaps music is not only sound. Perhaps artists choose a medium to work in because it enables them to present their ideas reflecting how they view time?" Video artist and composer Henry Gwiazda discusses his artistic progression from music/sound to what he describes as "multimedia digital choreography" and questions what the music of the future might look/sound like.

VISUAL RHYTHMS
by SIMON LONGO & MAX SCHLESER
Visual Rhythms is a collaborative project between Simon Longo and Max Schleser. The article explores the transversal synergy between sound and video, placing the Bergsonian concept of intuition at the basis of the creative discovery in the live performance, which materialises into a temporal AV experience during this artistic intervention.

CLICK FOR DETAILS, A SOUND AND LIGHT INSTALLATION
by ALESSANDRO PERINI
The core of the sound and light installation Click for Details is a looped 4- channels electronic music track, entirely produced using a single impulse (mathematically a Dirac delta, also called "click" or "glitch") as the only source for the whole piece. Departing from the the traditional dualism of sound and visuals as a combination of two different levels of perception, the work intends to provide the audience with an experience of sound and light as two aspects of a sole entity, related to the same source.

VERTIGO OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME
by VITO CAMPANELLI
This essay of Campanelli explores a deeper reflection on Abstract Journeys, the most recent artwork by the Italian artist Marco Cadioli. Abstract Journeys consists of a series of screencapture video and images from Google Earth whose different surfaces and forms have been transformed by human activities in an abstract geometric compositions.

Random stuff

Synapse magazine - electronic music from the 70s.

WYBCS - Swedish Internet radio.

Musica/Tecnologia

Musica/Tecnologia is a free electroacoustic music journal, published by Firenze University Press, with articles mostly in Italian, but also in French and English.

Two online journals

Dancecult : journal of electronic dance music culture. "Dancecult is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC)."

Jems : journal of experimental music studies. "Jems is an online peer-reviewed journal devoted to experimental, systems, minimal, post-minimal, ‘new’ tonal and postmodern music." The same web site also hosts The experimental music catalogue and its article archive.

I've updated the meta-bibliography. All links to Music & Dance Reference should now work.

EAM and music perception

There is an interesting discussion in the online journal Empirical musicology review (EMR) concerning the use of electroacoustic music (EAM) for the study of music perception. In "Time series analysis as a method to examine acoustical influences on real-time perception of music" (EMR, vol. 5, no. 4 (October, 2010)), Roger T. Dean and Freya Bailes use an extract from Trevor Wishart's Red bird to analyse correlations between the acoustic properties intensity and spectral flatness, and listener arousal (perceptions of change) and valence (expressed affect). They argue that

"[p]revious studies of listeners’ real-time perceptions of affect in music have attempted to map response through time to acoustic properties of the piece [...]. Missing are substantial attempts to assess which acoustic properties also drive listeners’ perceptions of the structure of the same music. Structure in this instance need not be a music-theoretic analysis of large-scale form [...], but refers to the low-level assessment by a listener of change and continuity in the music. [... M]usical forms that do not rely on hierarchical structures such as tonality or meter might exhibit quite a close relationship between acoustic properties of the work, listener perceptions of structure (change in sound), and listener perceptions of affect. EAM is one such form, and the subject of the current paper."

Dean and Bailes find that

"intensity influences perceptions of change and expressed arousal substantially. Spectral flatness influences valence, while animate sounds influence the valence response and its variance."

Marcus T. Pearce, in "Time-series analysis of Music: Perceptual and Information Dynamics" (EMR, vol. 6, no. 2 (April, 2011)), comments that Dean and Bailes

"[...] give two reasons for using EAM in their study: first, to demonstrate that their methods generalise beyond Western tonal music which is more often used in empirical work on music perception; and second, Red Bird provides an opportunity to test their methods on idiosyncratic temporally-localised timbral features in addition to the continuous features which generalise to other musical genres (see, e.g., Dean, Bailes & Schubert, 2011). Interestingly, their timbre feature of choice is spectral flatness, which they view as a more global indicator of timbre than spectral centroid, which is more commonly used in research on music perception (though this is not true of research on audio signal processing and music information retrieval where spectral flatness is one of the standard descriptors used in the MPEG 7 standard)."

Spectral flatness is the geometric mean of the power spectrum divided by the arithmetic mean. Noisy spectra have high flatness, peaky spectra low flatness. Spectral flatness is also related to the information content of the sound. The spectral centroid, i.e. the mean, barycenter or "mass center" of a spectrum, is correlated with brightness. Both flatness and centroid are included in the MPEG 7 standard. For descriptions of these and other timbre measures, see Geoffroy Peeters, A large set of audio features for sound description, 2004.

In addition, Pearce remarks that

"Dean and Bailes also argue that EAM can be algorithmically generated in such a way that the acoustic and algorithmic parameters of interest are systematically varied in creating stimuli for research on music perception. In other work, for example, Dean et al. (2011) extend their approach to the effects of intensity on arousal in two pieces written by Roger Dean, one of which is composed in the minimalist style. We might legitimately ask what advantage such algorithmically generated music has over the stimuli often constructed artificially to create experimental conditions in empirical research on music perception. The most obvious advantage is that the results gain in ecological validity from using stimuli created by composers, using stylistically legitimate methods, with an artistic purpose. These results should generalise to the experience of similar music outside the laboratory, while results obtained with artificially created or altered musical stimuli are not guaranteed to do so. The advantage of computer-generated music over other musical styles is that it can be produced so as to conserve experimental control."

Dean and Bailes respond to Pearce in another paper, "Modelling perception of structure and affect in music: spectral centroid and Wishart’s Red Bird" (EMR, vol. 6, no. 2 (April, 2011)) where they analyse the Red Bird extract using spectral centroid and find that

"[...] it is fairly clear that spectral centroid and spectral flatness bear a quite distant relationship to atomic perceptual processes, and it is still unclear how they may influence cognition. But acoustic intensity, on the other hand, is an immediate determinant of an important perceptual response, loudness, and this relationship is much better understood. Again, most studies use short tones, often synthetic, but it is clear that even with longer musical extracts, intensity is a close determinant of continuously perceived loudness."

Even more calls

Please note that this page is no longer updated.

This is a list of conference calls for 2013. Please note that, though I only list deadlines for paper submissions, many of these conferences also accept music and performances. Links to past conferences are at http://delicious.com/eamlibrarian/conferences.

CMMR 2013. 10th International Symposium on Computer Music Modelling and Retrieval/Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research 2013, "Sound, Music & Motion", October 15th – 18th 2013, CNRS - Laboratoire de Mécanique et d’Acoustique, Marseille, France. Paper submission deadline: June 15th 2013

ISMIR 2013. 14th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 4th - 8th of November 2013, Curitiba, Brazil (organized by PUCPR). Paper submission deadline: 10 May 2013

NIME 2014. 14th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), June 30 - July 3, 2014, Goldsmiths University of London, London, UK. Paper draft submission (mandatory): January 31, 2014

New issue of Hz, #16

Quantum Improvisation: The Cybernetic Presence
by Pauline Oliveros
"It's already evident that computers and human intelligence are merging. What would I want on a musician chip if I were to receive the benefit of neural implant technology? What kind of a 21st Century musician could I be?" Composer/musician and one of the key figures of electronic music Pauline Oliveros' essay from 1999 centres around the question by revisiting 100 years of music history since the first magnetic recording in 1899.

Moistmedia, Technoetics and the Three VRs
by Roy Ascott
One of the most influential theoreticians/artists in the field of telematics Roy Ascott's article about Moistmedia, written in 2000, in which he predicts "a convergence of three VRs" (Virtual, Validated and Vegetal): "At this interspace lies the great challenge to both science and art: the nature of consciousness. A technoetic aesthetic is needed which...may enable us as artists to address the key questions of our time."

Grains of Gold in All This Shift: Web 2.0, Crowdsourcing and Participatory Art
by Amanda Wasielewski
"The Web 2.0 ideas of 'social networking' and 'crowdsourcing' have filtered through to the art world where artists are, whether consciously or not, using Web 2.0 principles and forms in their work." Amanda Wasielewski's critical examination over the recent activities of participatory art both on and offline which "begins to look like crowdsourcing."

Dynamic screen / room:
by Thore Soneson
"During the last decades moving images, video and screens have expanded from on-the-wall projections to dynamic and multi-modulated images in different spatial settings – on multiple screens, in dynamic and interactive room environments and in an immersive physical context." Film maker/producer Thore Soneson's research into the contemporary "dynamic screen" for his project "Journey to Abadyl".

First Museum Shooters
by Mathias Jansson
"When the small company id Software in Texas, USA, 1993 released the videogame Doom few would have guessed that this game would change the entire game industry, and even fewer would have guessed which impact Doom would have on the art world." Game Art specialist Mathias Jansson's article about "museum shooters" in the field of Game Art.

SONOMATERIA: Audio-tactile Composition
by Irad Lee
Irad Lee, sound and interaction designer, "describes the inspiration and implementation of SONOMATERIA, a multi-user sound sculpture, installation, tangible sound interface and intersensory composition," which "aims to explore the mutual reinforcing effect that the manipulation of tactile and auditory perceptions can have on each other...."

New journal: JAR - The journal for artistic research

"The journal for artistic research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies, from all arts disciplines. The Journal is underpinned by the Research Catalogue (RC), a searchable, documentary database of artistic research work and its exposition, that functions as an inclusive, open-ended, bottom-up research tool supporting the development of the Journal's academic contributions."

Issue #0 presents work by:

• Bertha Bermudez, Scott deLahunta, Marijke Hoogenboom, Chris Ziegler, Frederic Bevilacqua, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Barbara Meneses Gutierrez, Amsterdam
• Richard Blythe, Melbourne
• Sher Doruff, Amsterdam
• Cathy van Eck, Zürich
• Mark Fleischman, Cape Town
• Abhishek Hazra, Bangalore
• Anders Hultqvist, Gothenburg
• Daniel Kötter, Constanze Fischbeck, Berlin
• Tuija Kokkonen, Helsinki
• Elina Saloranta, Helsinki
• Sissel Tolaas, Berlin
• Otto von Busch, Gothenburg

JAR is published by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). "[SAR] was established in March 2010 as an independent, non-profit organisation for the purpose of publishing JAR." SAR:s institutional members are art and design schools and universities.

The journal invites submissions. JAR is peer-reviewed, but not the RC.

Hz calls for articles

On-line journal Hz (www.hz-journal.org) is looking for articles on New Media, Net Art, Sound Art, Electro-Acoustic Music, Virtual World/Machinima. We accept earlier published and unpublished articles in English. Please send your submissions to hz-journal@telia.com

Deadline: 1 March, 2011

Hz is published by the non-profit organization Fylkingen in Stockholm. Established in 1933, Fylkingen has been known for introducing yet-to-be-established art forms throughout its history. Nam June Paik, Stockhausen, Cage, Stelarc, etc. have all been introduced to the Swedish audience through Fylkingen. Its members consist of leading composers, musicians, sound artists, dancers, performance artists and video artists in Sweden.  For more information on Fylkingen, please visit http://www.fylkingen.se/about or http://www.hz-journal.org/n4/hultberg.html

The journal of music and meaning revamped

In the new issue, no. 9, of The journal of music and meaning, the editors announce that the journal will be published in blog format from now on. Entire issues will not be published at the same time. Instead, papers will appear in the blog when ready. The posts consists of and abstract, the author's credentials, and a link to the paper in PDF. This is good news, although I find the new format somewhat confusing, perhaps because the new issue lacks a table of contents.

JMM #9 contains some articles of particular interest to readers of this blog:

• "Through thick and thin: the ontology of tape music" by Adam Stansbie
• "Meaningful scribbles: an approach to textual analysis of unconventional musical notations" by Douglas C. Wadle
• "Luciano Berio’s "Sequenza V" analyzed along the lines of four analytical dimensions proposed by the composer" by Niels Chr. Hansen
• "Rediscovering Artaud's sonic order" by Felipe Otondo
• "Why recorded music matters: a review essay" by David Hebert