Creating Research Instruments
for Computer-Assisted Art Composition and Performance
Stefan Muller Arisona
Media Arts and Technology, University
of California, Santa Barbara
Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Date: Friday, October 19,
2007
Place: Buchanan 1940
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm
Abstract:
In many domains, computers have become an
integral component in assisting an artist's everyday work: A wide selection
of software tools, available for various media types, attempt to satisfy
the needs of professionally working artists and designers, as well as
to support the creative amateur user. In contrast, research instruments
are typically not targeted at a wider audience at first sight, as their
primary goal is to provide researchers with new insights both at a theoretical
as well as a practical level. These instruments often help to identify
individual concepts and components that can be reused in future "mainstream"
implementations.
This lecture highlights previous work on designing and implementing research
tools for computer-assisted art composition and performance and how they
have actually been employed in real-world scenarios: We shortly present
the Rubato music software environment, and show how a formal mathematical
framework was successfully implemented to serve as an effective instrument
for musicologists and composers. Then, the lecture focuses on the Soundium
platform, which addresses several issues that arise in the domain of live
media performance, in particular issues that deal with real-time multimedia
processing, organisation of artistic content, and media library management.
As an illustration, a number of examples where Soundium has been employed
in order to realise media art installations and performances are presented.
Based on our experience with Rubato and Soundium, we outline ongoing work
carried out at MAT with a particular focus on how to deal with vast amounts
of content, for example available from annotated media libraries.
STEFAN MULLER ARISONA, born near Lucerne (Switzerland), received a MSc in Computer Science from Uppsala University (Sweden, 1997) and a MSc in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich (Switzerland, 1998). From 1998 to 2000 he was working as an UNIX system engineer and consultant at Atraxis AG, the former Swissair IT company. In 2001, he returned to academia and joined the University of Zurich's Multimedia Lab as a research assistant. He was visiting researcher at IRCAM Centre Pompidou's music representation group (Paris, 2003). The PhD thesis "Pianist's Hands - Synthesis of Musical Gestures" was completed in 2004. From 2005 to 2007, Stefan was a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at ETH Zurich's Computer Systems Institute, and he was scientific chair of ETH Zurich's Digital Art Weeks, an annual symposium and festival that explores new movements in digital art. In 2007, he was awared a two-year research fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), and since Ocotober 2007 he is a visiting post-doctoral research fellow at Media Arts and Technology (MAT) of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Stefan's main interests are at the intersections of art and technology, and in particular in the domain of live digital art. His research focuses on novel real-time multimedia systems and on live media composition and performance techniques. He is a founding member of Corebounce Association and co-author of the multimedia authoring software Soundium, which is frequently used for digital art installations and live performances by himself and his collaborators. A recent work, the Digital Marionette, is currently installed at the permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria, 2006 - 2008).
Host: Prof. Matthew Turk, Media Arts and Technology
