Author: Oeyvind

Seminar and meetings at Queen Mary University of London

June 9 th and 10 th we visited QMUL, met Joshua Reiss and his eminent colleagues there.  We were very well taken care of and had a pleasant and interesting stay.  June 9 th we had a seminar presenting the project, and discussing related issues with a group of researchers and students. The seminar was recorded on video, to be uploaded on QMUL youtube. The day after we had a meeting with Joshua, going in more detail. We also got to meet several PhD students and got insight into their research.

Seminar discussion

Here’s some issues that were touched upon in the seminar discussion:

* analyze gestures inherent in the signal, e.g. crescendo, use this as trigger, to turn some process on or off, flip a preset etc. We could also analyze for very specific patterns, like a melodic fragment, but probably better to try to find gestures that can be performed in several different ways, so that the musician can have freedom of expression while providing a very clear interface for controlling the processes.

* Analyze features related to specific instruments. Easier to find analysis methods to extract very specific features. Rather than asking for “how can we analyze this to extract something interesting… This is perhaps a lesson for us to be a bit more specific in what we want to extract. This is somewhat opposite to our current exploratory effort in just trying to learn how the currently implemented analysis signals works and what we can get from them.

* Look for deviations from a quantized value. For example pitch deviations within a semitone, and rhythmic deviations from a time grid.

* Semantic spaces. Extract semantic features from the signal, could be timbral descriptors, mood, directions etc. Which semantics? Where to take the terminology from? We should try to develop examples of useful semantics, useful things to extract.

* Semantic descriptors are not necessarily a single point in a multidimensional space, it is more like a blob, and area. Interpolation between these blobs may not be linear in all cases. We don’t have to use all implied dimensions, so we can actually just select features/semantics/descriptors that will give us the possibility of linear interpolation. At least in those situations where we need to interpolate…

* Look at old speech codexes. Open source. Exitation/resonator model, LPC.  This is time domain, so will be really fast/low-latency.

* Cepstral techniques can also be used to separate resonator and exciter. The smoothed cepstrum being the resonator. Take the smoothed cepstrum and subtract it from the full cepstrum to get the excitation.

* The difficulty of control. The challenge to the performer, limiting the musical performance,  inhibiting the natural ways of interaction. This is a recurring issue, and something we might want to take care to handle carefully. This is also really what the project is about: creating *new* ways of interaction.

* Performer will adapt to imperfections of the analysis. Normally, MIR signals are not “aware” that they are being analyzed. They are static and prerecorded. In our case, the performer, being aware of how the analysis method works and what it responds to, can adapt the playing to trigger the analysis method in highly controllable manners. This way the cross-adaptivity is not only technical related to the control of parameters, but adaptive in relation to how the performer shapes her phrases and in turn also what she selects to play.

* Measuring collective features. Features of the mix. Each instrument contributes equally to the modulator signal. One signal can push others down or single them out. Relates to game theory. What is the most favorable behavior over time: suppress others or negotiate and adapt.

Meeting with Joshua

* Josh mentioned a few researchers that we might be interested in. Brech de Man: Intelligen audio switcher. Emannuel Chourdakis: Feature based reverb.  Dave Ronan: Groups, stems, automatic mixing. Vincent Verfaille: effect classification and A-DAFX. Brian Pardo: interfaces for music performance/production, visualization, semantics, machine learning. Pedro Pestana: sound engineer, best practices (phD), automatic mixing. Ryan Stables: SAFE plugins.

* Issues relating to publishing our work and getting an audience for it. As we could in some respect claim to create a new field, creating a community for it might be essential for further use of our research. Increase visibility. Promote also via QMUL press and NTNU info. Among connected fields are Human Computer Interaction, New Instruments for Musical Expression, Audio Engineering Society.

* QMUL has considerable experience in evaluation studies, user experience tests, listening tests etc. Some of this may be beneficial as a perspective on our otherwise experiental approach.

* Collective features (meaning individual signals in relation to each other and to the ensemble mix): Masking (spectral overlap). Onset times in relation to other instruments, lagging. Note durations, percussive/sustained etc.

* We currently use spectral crest, but crest also being useful in the time domain to do rhythmic analysis (rhythmic density, percussiveness, dynamic range). Will work better with loudness matching curve (dB)

* Time domain filterbank faster than FFT. Logarithmically spaced bands

* FFT of the time domain amp envelope

* Separate silence from noise. Automatic gain control. Automatic calibration of noise floor (use peak to average measure to estimate what is background noise and what is actual signal)

* Look for patterns: playing the same note, also pitch classes (octaves), also collectively (between instruments).

* Use log freq spectrum, and amps in dB, then do centroid/skew/flux etc

* How to collaborate with others under QMUL, adapting their plugins. Port the techniques to Csound or re-implement ours in C++? For the prototype and experimentation stage maybe modify their plugins to output just control signals? Describe clearly our framework so their code can be plugged in.

Seminar at De Montfort

Simon_and_Leigh
Simon and Leigh in Leigh’s office at De Montfort

Wednesday June 8 th we visited Simon Emmerson at De Montfort and also met Director Leigh Landy. We were very well taken care of and had a pleasant and interesting stay. One of the main objectives was to do seminar with presentation of the project and discussion among the De Montfort researchers. We found that their musical preference seems to overlap considerably with our own, in the focus on free improvisation and electroacoustic art music. As this is the most obvious and easy context to implement experimental techniques (like the crossadaptive ones) we had taken care to also present examples of use within other genres. This could be interpreted as if we were more interested in traditional applications/genres than the free improvised genres. Now knowing the environment at Leicester better, we could probably have put more emphasis on the free electroacoustic art music applications. But indeed this led to interesting discussions about applicability, for example:

*In metric /rhythmic genres, one could easier analyze and extract musical features related to bar boundaries and rhythmic groupings.

* Interaction itself could also create meter, as the response time (both human and technical), has a rhythm and periodicity that can evolve musically due to the continuous feedback processes built into the way we interact with such a system and each other in the context of such a system..

* Static and deterministic versus random mappings. Several people was interested in more complex and more dynamic controller mappings, expressing interest and curiosity towards playing within a situation where the mapping could quickly and randomly change. References were made to Maja S.K. Ratkje and that her kind of approach would probably make her interested in situations that were more intensely dynamic.  Her ability to respond to the challenges of a quickly changing musical environment (e.g. changes in the mapping) also correlating with an interest to explore this kind of complex situations.  Knowing Maja from our collaborations, I think they may be right, take note to discuss this with her and try to make some challenging mapping situations for her to try out.

* it was discussed whether the crossadaptive methods could be applied to the “dirty electronics” ensemble/course situation, and there was an expressed interest in exploring this. Perhaps it will be crossadaptivity in other ways than what we use directly on our project, as the analysis and feature extraction methods does not necessarily transfer easily to the DIY (DIT – do it together, DIWO – Do it with others) domain. The “Do it with others” approach resonates well with what we generally approach btw.

* The complexity is high even with two performers. How many performers do we envision this to be used with? How large an ensemble? As we have noticed ourselves also, following the actions of two performers somehow creates a multi-voice polyphonic musical flow (2 sources, each source’s influence on the other source and the resulting timbral change resulting thereof, and the response of the other player to these changes). How many layers of polyphony can we effectively hear and distinguish when experiencing the music? (as performers or as audience). References were made to the laminal improvisation techniques of AMM.

* Questions of overall form. How will interactions under a crossadaptive system change the usual formal approach of a large overarching rise and decay form commonly found in “free” improvisation, At first I took the comment to suggest that we also could apply more traditional MIR techniques of analyzing longer segments of sound to extract “direction of energy” and/or other features evolving over longer time spans. This could indeed be interesting, but also poses problems of how the parametric response to long-terms changes should act (i.e. we could accidentally turn up a parameter way too high, and then it would stay high for a long time before the analysis window would enable us to bring it back down). Now, in some ways this would also resemble using extremely long attack and decay times for the low pass filter we already have in place in the MIDIator, creating very slow responses, needing continued excitation over a prolonged period before the modulator value will respond. After the session, I discussed this more with Simon, and he indicated that the large form aspects were probably just as much meant with regards to the perception of the musical form, rather than the filtering and windowing in the analysis process. There are interesting issues of drama and rhetoric posed by bringing these issues in, whether one tackles them on the perception level or the analysis and mapping stage.

* Comments were made that performing successfully on this system would require immense effort in terms of practicing and getting to know the responses and the reactions of the system in such an intimate manner that one could use it effectively for musical expression.  We agree of course.