r _Web.log

I have recently contributed a chapter to a Springer textbook on Computers and Creativity. Edited by Jon McCormack and Mark d'Inverno, it's a great collection of essays which emerged from a Dagstuhl seminar on computational creativity and the surrounding issues: can algorithmic systems be said to be creative? What systems can we use to evaluate creative practice - or is a "fitness function" even possible for aesthetic values? How are computing and simulation altering our philosophies of creativity?

My contribution, co-authored with Mark d'Inverno and Andrew R. Brown, sidesteps ideas of autonomous creative systems to instead focus on how we can extend our own innate creative practice using generative algorithms, particularly in the domain of music making.

The chapter builds extensively on Clark and Chalmers' concept of the Extended Mind, which proposes that cognitive processes can take place outside of our physical brains; for example, when we are writing notes to remember later, or shuffling tiles on a Scrabble board to jog ideas of words to play.

In homage to Clark and Chalmers, it is titled The Extended Composer.

Abstract
This chapter focuses on interactive tools for musical composition which, through computational means, have some degree of autonomy in the creative process. This can engender two distinct benefits: extending our practice through new capabilities or trajectories, and reflecting our existing behaviour, thereby disrupting habits or tropes that are acquired over time. We examine these human-computer partnerships from a number of perspectives, providing a series of taxonomies based on a systems behavioural properties, and discuss the benefits and risks that such creative interactions can provoke.

It's sadly an expensive publication and only viable to most through a University library subscription.

For general readers, available here is a pre-print PDF of the The Extended Composer. Please note that this document is intended for research purposes only.

My good friend Josh Pollen is one-third of food design studio Blanch and Shock, who meld sustainable, local and seasonal food with an exotic array of chemical practices.

He has just returned from the Nordic Food Lab, the sea-faring research adjunct of Noma, at which he has been developing culinary techniques that make of insects: cockroaches, locusts, woodlice, and more. The resulting dishes were served at the Wellcome Collection Pestival event, with some beautiful results.

In more relaxed surroundings, I was surprised to find that unadorned black ants make a tangy and remarkably moreish accompaniment to a beer.

Josh documents his food work on Infinite Slice, a tumblr that is as visually rich as it is hunger-inducing. There is a satisfying tension between the overgrowth of wild meat and foliage, and the clean lines and labelled zip-lock bags of the preparation process, reflecting the order that we impose in striving to understand the teeming world around us.

More: Infinite Slice

ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTE is a live radio station playing every Absolute Radio broadcast simultaneously (Absolute 60s, Absolute 70s, Absolute 80s, Absolute 90s, Absolute 00s, Absolute Classic Rock).

Described by critics as "So ontologically terrifying it reminds you how incredible life is" (Paul Bennun), "Radio for those who understand the horror of existence" (Tulta Behm), and "The end of history" (Hestia Peppé), it will be broadcasting for a limited time only. Don't miss it.

ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTE

(To play in iTunes, right-click and Copy Link Location; in iTunes, hit cmd-U and paste the URL.)

Below is a 5-minute excerpt (recorded 2013-03-08, 17:14)

An extended version of Radio Reconstructions is installed at new art/science space LimeWharf over the next six weeks. It's the first in a series of temporary residencies hosted there, and resonates nicely with their general ethos:

LimeWharf is an evolving project that aspires to immerse guests and practitioners alike in thematic journeys. The core values of our programming are centred around building a positive relationship to the future, connecting the old and the new, meshing crafts with technology all in a non-market driven process-led series of experiments...

It's been a good opportunity to reflect on how the piece links together the history and nostalgia of analogue radio with the futurist technology of digitally-controlled tuners and algorithmic analysis. I expect that when the Mac Mini controlling the installation has gasped its last bits, the venerable radios distributing the audio will be still going strong.

It has also given us the opportunity to think about the separation between the physical apparatus of the installation, and the sound that is heard through it.

We have started considering the installation itself to be akin to a semi-autonomous instrument, which has a particular space of timbres and behaviours associated with it -- in this case, the space of locally-receivable radio broadcasts, and the capability to record, arrange and analyse those broadcasts into pitched fragments.

We can then compose scores for the piece which determine the dynamics of these behaviours over time. Here, we are scoring for grain amplitude, duration and diffusion, and two EQ parameters.

Separating score from instrument means that we can write multiple distinct scores for the installation, exploring different capacities and approaches. We have composed two new 30-minute scores for Radio Reconstructions, which are designed to be played at specific times and capitalise on the fact that we know in advance what is scheduled on major FM stations -- so, we can navigate between programmes with an awareness of the kind of content that will be played, juxtaposing talk radio chatter with distant shortwave broadcasts with local Citizens Band static...

Both of these scores will be broadcast on art radio station Resonance FM. Listen in on their website at 8pm on Tuesday 12 March and Tuesday 19th March.

Next month at the Barbican, James Bulley and I are debuting a new piece of work which harnesses the tiny sound-systems that 6 billion people carry around with them each day.

xtet uses mobile phone handsets to create an ephemeral multichannel sound system, which only exists for as long as the event itself:

By broadcasting real-time audio to the audience's wireless mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, mp3 players, etc), the audience itself becomes a temporary speaker system comprised of countless distributed sound sources, forming a uniquely spatial and participatory experience. The movements of listeners cause the music's spatial formation to shift and grow, akin to the reactive motions of a shoal of fish.

It is both a platform (as a method for streaming multiple unique audio streams over HTTP, with HTML5 display) and a series of works; we are composing a number of pieces of music for xtet as a medium, considering the unusual set of constraints that it imposes. These include not knowing ahead of time how many speakers will be present, and writing for highly treble-weighted playback.

xtet I (α, β, γ, δ, θ, μ) is the first in the series, commissioned by the Barbican and Wellcome Trust for Wonder: Art and Science on the Brain. It is modelled on the patterns and characteristics of neural activity, taking the relative lengths of key types of neural oscillation (alpha waves, beta waves, delta waves...) and using them to determine the structure and timings of musical events.

It's a much looser, higher-level interpretation of cognitive patterns than something as rigorous as the neural nets of The Fragmented Orchestra, but basing the piece on the emergent properties of thought seems like an apt way to start writing for an installation which is itself wholly dependent on collective activity.

We're also excited to be incorporating xtet into the Marcus du Sautoy performance lecture on consciousness, using it to diffuse James Holden's trance-inducing musical material across the audience.

We prototyped it for the first time yesterday, with much assistance from a generous throng of Barbican volunteers, and it was quite magical to hear James's analogue sounds splinter and shimmer across the auditorium.

More information: xtet

Commencing on 21st September is SHO-ZYG, a week-long showcase of the various artists working with sound at Goldsmiths, University of London. As well as contemporary sound installations and compositions, the exhibition will incorporate the historical archives of various prominent Goldsmiths alumni, including Radiophonic co-founder Daphne Oram and pioneering computer musician Hugh Davies.

Taking place in the newly acquired St James' Hatcham Church (SE14 6AD), it is set to be comprehensive in scope, with installations, film programme, and a set of works for Disklavier MIDI-controlled grand piano, alongside a week-long series of evening events. There's some fantastic work on show; don't miss the pieces by Paul Prudence and Francisco Lopez, Ryo Ikeshiro, Emmanuel Spinelli, and Jeremy Keenan.

Debuting at SHO-ZYG, is a new collaborative installation by James Bulley and I: Radio Reconstructions, a piece for 12 repurposed radios and algorithmically-controlled wideband radio tuner. We're putting the finishing touches to the piece right now, and will write more on this shortly.

Incidentally, the name of the exhibition is taken from a sound work by Hugh Davies. The eponymous piece was embedded within a volume of an encyclopaedia, whose contents ranged from Shoal to Zygote.

More info: sho-zyg.com

Humankind, I salute you. With this Wikipedia entry, you have truly reached your zenith.

This same page also led me to Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists (or "The Vertigo of Lists" in its original Italian, surely a far better title), which itself now finds a place on my To-Read List.

Digital sound pieces like The Listening Machine and Maelstrom raise lots of interesting questions about rights, access and commissioning. Authorship and the constituent materials of an artwork are suddenly distributed: should we be crediting the Twitter users, whose behaviours serve to organise the piece, as joint conductors? When access is no longer a geographical issue, but one of cross-platform compatibility and usability, should commissions be sought to target deprived sectors such as Flash-deficient Linux users? How can work be owned and collected when it is fundamentally immaterial? What attitude should we take to support, when a piece of work is subject to the same maintenance needs as a piece of software engineering? And should traditional artworks and organisations be uncritically diving into the digital realm, or does curatorial care need to be taken over the appropriate presentation for each kind of media?

The Third Ear Symposium (13 July 2012, South Bank Centre) seeks to address these questions, with a day-long schedule of talks on "Commissioning and Patronage in a Digital Age". Peter Gregson and I will be talking on The Listening Machine, on a panel with Matthew Herbert and The Space's Susanna Simons.

There are some great-sounding panels later in the day, with a session on "Commissioning & Collecting Sound and Performance in the Visual Arts", and the creative role of the commissioner themself.

Tickets here.

Over the past few months, I've had my head down working at Animal Systems on a tremendously exciting new platform by the name of Chirp. In a nutshell, Chirp is a way to treat sound as data, enabling devices to communicate with each other using short packets of audio. A sender emits a series of tones; a receiver hears and decodes them, translating them into a code which can point to a picture, text, URL, or even another piece of sound.

My work has been focused on developing an iOS app which will very shortly be seeing the light of day, App Store pending. The experience is simple: Alice want to send a picture to Bob, so she imports it into Chirp, hits a button, and the device chirps it (a sound like this). Bob's phone, and any nearby devices within earshot, can then decode the chirp and display the image. No painful Bluetooth pairing, no typing of email addresses, no USB-stick fiddling.

Of course, the system isn't breaking the laws of entropy and cramming a large JPEG into a second of audio: behind the scenes, the data itself is transferred to a cloud infrastructure and translated into a "shortcode", which is then sent over sound, decoded and resolved. There's an inherently low bitrate in a noisy sonic environment. But then, the bitrate of human speech is estimated at less than 100bps, and spoken language has turned out to be quite a useful feature.

One of the big lessons for me has been the sheer amount of engineering required for a magically simple transaction. Developed from conversations about the information-theoretic properties of avian linguistics, Chirp's audio system has been honed over countless months by a team of DSP gurus based in Barcelona, with an array of simulations operated from UCL's Legion supercomputing cluster, rendering it resilient to hostile reverberant and noisy conditions; the underlying network consists of an infinitely-scalable REST API that we have designed over many iterations, developed by a team of inveterate network architects and now residing in the cloud. The inverse correlation between intuitive simplicity and actual complexity, in the tech domain at least, couldn't be clearer here.

The app is an exploratory first step, and there are almost too many next steps to contemplate. Anything that can transmit sound can send a chirp, so we've been experimenting with all sorts of lo-fi devices: the joy of sending a YouTube video link via a dictaphone is pretty much unrivalled. Throw an Arduino into the equation and suddenly there's an explosion of possibilities of conversing machines.

And there's an equal amount of philosophical potential in this research. Suddenly, the dumb alert tones produced by phones, lorries and fire alarms seem absurd. Why aren't these designed for machine as well as human ears, conveying valuable information about the state of the world? Why is the visual given default primacy as an information medium? And what happens when the typical silence of network communications are suddenly tangible, embodied, and broadcast?

Chirp will be free on the Apple iOS App Store.

The Listening Machine is an orchestral sonification of the online activity of several hundred (unwitting) UK-based Twitter users. Created with cellist Peter Gregson and Britten Sinfonia, it has been a vast adventure combining studio recordings with a chamber ensemble, countless hours of coding towards a growing generative compositional toolkit, and delving into the mechanics of linguistics, prosody, and natural language processing.

Key to the compositional process is a system to translate the flow and rhythm of a text passage into a musical score, based on ordering the formant frequencies of the human voice, which characterise the qualities of each vowel sound. We determine the piece's musical mode via sentiment mapping, and then generate individual note-wise patterns by translating syllables into notes in the current scale. As several Twitter users are typically active at the same time, the result is multiple, intertwining melody lines, tonally related but structurally distinct.

The Listening Machine launched at the start of last month as part of The Space, a great new BBC/Arts Council initiative encouraging National Portfolio organisations into the realm of online content. With a team of BBC broadcast technology ninjas, our contribution is a piece of music which lasts 6 months and is quintessentially digital: using data sourced from internet discussions, and streamed solely over the web.

But maybe the most exciting part has been the combination of algorithmic processes with thousands of fragments of orchestrally-recorded refrains. The objective was always to create a piece of music which sounded organic, and -- in spite of its metronomic pulse -- the results aren't too far from what we envisaged. See the website for information about the compositional process.

The other integral part of the project is the graphic design, created by the excellent Joe Hales. Joe is more typically found creating design for print, and we wanted to translate this page-based aesthetic to the screen, presenting the project almost as if it were a textbook.

With some judicious JSON and HTML 5 <canvas> voodoo, we animated his cog-and-dial visualisation to present a continuous representation of The Listening Machine's state at any point. The collective's mood, activity rate and topics of conversation are displayed live on thelisteningmachine.org, similarly reflected in the musical output.

The Python code behind the algorithmic composition parts is available on github.com/ideoforms/isobar; the text analysis framework will be released in due course.

The Listening Machine can also be found on Twitter @listenmachine and facebook.com/thelisteningmachine.