06.17 - Intl Conf on Mathematics & Computation in Music @ Ircam

Members of MuCoaCo attended the MCM (Mathematics and Computation in Music) meeting held at Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) this week.

MuCoaCo alum, Anja Volk, and Aline Honingh co-hosted a panel on "Bridging the Gap: Computational and Mathematical Approaches in Music Research."

On the first evening was a dialog with Pierre Boulez and Alain Connes coordinated by Gérard Assayag at Ircam's Espace de Projection.

We had a group picture with Gérard in the Ircam corridor. From left to right: Isaac Schankler, Anna Huang, Gérard Assayag, Anja Volk, Elaine Chew, Jordan Smith, Aline Honingh.

Isaac and Jordan presented a paper on "Emergent Formal Structures of Factor Oracle-Driven Musical Improvisations" and Isaac gave a demonstration of Mimi on the final day of the conference.  The paper is described in this earlier post.

05.22 - Light and Power reviews

Isaac Schankler's chamber opera, Light and Power, was recently reviewed in Miss Music Nerd and the Boston Musical-Intelligencer, which wrote:

Schankler’s music is extraordinarily eclectic--where traditional operatic roles may have themes or motifs associated with characters, Schankler attached entire musical idioms to them... All of the music was masterfully composed.

Congratulations to all the performers and crew!

05.19 - Light & Power!

The Juventas New Music Ensemble premieres Isaac Schankler's opera, Light & Power, billed as "a Nikola Tesla World Premiere Opera" and "a Tesla/Edison story" (libretto by Jillian Burcar), in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Cambridge YMCA Theater
820  Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02139

Thu, May 19, at 8 pm | Fri, May 20, at 8 pm
Sat, May 21, at 8 pm | Sun, May 22, at 2 pm

More details here.

04.29 - Ge Wang Visit (Pictures)

Ge Wang's visit to USC began with the Structure In Music (ISE575/EE675/CSCI575) class, where he chimed in on Huihui Cheng's presentation of a paper on his iPhone Ocarina app, and Samir Sharma's presentation of a paper on the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrK), and gave numerous insights into the development of both the Ocarina and SLOrK.

Following the class, we had lunch at Morton Fig, where Ge showed off his Magic Piano app, which is about to be released on the iPhone in two weeks. At Maged Dessouky's request, Ge called in to Smule to have Chariots of Fire reinstated on the playlist so we could play the piece on the Magic Piano.

The activities culminated in a talk by Ge Wang in the Epstein Institute Seminar Series (the ISE PhD seminar), which gave us a glimpse of laptop ensemble concerts orchestrated by Ge, and the many apps created by Smule, including Sonic Lighter, World Stage, Leaf Trombone, Magic Fiddle, and I Am T-Pain.  Ge described how they experimented with giving users a social experience with the development of each app.

04.26 - Ge Wang Visit

ISE PhD Seminar Series:

The World Is Your Stage — 

Social Music-Making 
on Mobile Phones

Ge WANG, Stanford / Smule

TUESDAY, April 26, 2011

3:30pm - 4:50pm, RTH 105

Ge Wang visits USC and gives a talk in the ISE PhD Seminar Series.  Ge Wang is an Assistant Professor at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and CTO and Chief Creative Office of Smule, creators of the Ocarina iPhone app.

04.17 - Isaac and Mimi @ Ussachevsky Memorial Festival (Video)

Isaac Schankler's performance with Mimi at the Ussachevsky Memorial Electronic Music Festival (see Feb 4 post) has been posted on VIMEO:

Mimi and Isaac Schankler in Concert at Ussachevsky Memorial Festival from People Inside Electronics on Vimeo.

04.16 - MicroTextual: music with words | words without music

MicroTextual, a Catalysis Projects presentation curated by Aron Kallay, brings together musicians and artists to create microtonal music, text performance, and performance-integrated sculpture, expanding the points of convergence between modes and disciplines of artmaking.

MicroTextual will present the premiere of Honey, Milk and Blood for soprano, women's chorus, and electronics: a collaboration between composer and MuCoaCo artist-in-residence Isaac Schankler, artist Kim Ye, and writer Jillian Burcar. Also featuring works and premieres by Harry Partch, Cat Lamb, Jeffrey Holmes, Bill Alves, Quintan Ana Wikswo and David Rosenboom.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16 8:00 PM • MIMODA STUDIO
5772 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019
$15/$10 online or at the door

For more information, call (818)397-6954 or go to catalysisprojects.com.

04.07 - Isaac Schankler at Electronics Live!

Today at Electronics Live!, Isaac Schankler presents and performs with The Harvester, a new interactive audio installation based on Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation), a system that allows humans and machines to create improvised music together, designed and implemented using François' SAI framework. For this installation, Isaac Schankler creates a new sonic environment for Mimi, which helps it interpret, synthesize and resample audio information.

This installation will also feature a special guest appearance by the BoeBot Music Ensemble, created by Keith DeRuiter, Isaac Schankler and Elaine Chew.

Electronics Live! is the third CARL residency hosted by the Culver Center. Creating an environment that is equal parts sound art installation, live music performance, and media fair expo, composers Jason Heath and Robert Giracello convert the atrium floor of the Culver Center into an interactive media fair, demonstrating a variety of approaches to interactive technologies in music and the arts, and engaging the public with hands-on experience of these technologies in a fun and experimental environment.


THU, April 7, 6-9 PM • Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts
3834 Main St, Riverside CA 92501 • FREE admission (Info: 951-827-3755)

04.06 - Eran Egozy Visit (Pictures)

Eran Egozy met with students in the MuCoaCo Lab at 3pm.  Isaac Schankler gave a demonstration of Mimi, including a preview of Mimi making music with the BoeBots — the BoeBots are programmed by freshman Keith DeRuiter.

Informal Q&A with Eran took place at Tutor Cafe.

At the formal event, Eran performed two movements from Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata with Elaine Chew, and spoke about the founding of Harmonix Music Systems, its humble beginnings, the success of Guitar Hero, and the growth of the company.

04.06 - Eran Egozy Visit

A Conversation with Eran Egozy
CTO, Harmonix Music Systems
Wednesday, April 6, 2011, 7pm - 8pm
Parkside Performance Cafe

Eran Egozy, CTO of Harmonix Music Systems (creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band) visits USC and the MuCoaCo Lab, and gives a presentation at the Parkside Performance Cafe that includes a performance of Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata (with Elaine Chew).

Click on event poster on the left for Eran's bio.

For more information about Eran and Harmonix, see the following posts:
PBS: NOVA: Eran Egozy: Game Developer
Here & Now: The Secret Life of Eran Egozy
NYTimes: While My Guitar Gently Beeps

04.05 - KatieAnna Wolf receives NSF Graduate Fellowship

KatieAnna Wolf, DREU fellow at the MuCoaCo Lab in summer 2010, has received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Katie will be commencing Computer Science PhD studies at Princeton in the Fall.

Katie was also a 2010 CRA Outstanding Undergraduates Award Finalist — see the Nov 30 blogpost.

03.31 - Musical Patois — reflections of language in music

Visions and Voices: the USC Arts and Humanities Initiative

Thursday, March 31, 2011 : 7:30pm University Park Campus Alfred Newman Recital Hall (AHF) Admission is free.

Musical Patois is the result of a unique collaboration among a neuroscientist, a composer, a performer/engineer and a computer scientist. This event will boldly explore and transgress the boundaries between science, music, technology and art. The event is inspired by the research of neuroscientists Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen and composer Jason Rosenberg, which demonstrated that the instrumental music of British and French composers reflects the rhythm and intonation of their native languages. Patel, along with composer Peter Child, pianist-engineer Elaine Chew and computer scientist Alexandre François, will examine the influence of language on music through an evening of scientific presentation, musical performance, interactive visualization and lively conversation.

Organized by Elaine Chew (Engineering) and Alexandre François (Engineering).

More information at the Visions and Voices website.

03.31 - When Music & Technology Collide

Megan Dickey or Annenberg Radio News interviews Elaine Chew about this evening's Musical Patois event. The interview is posted here.

03.23 - Mirman School STEM Keynote

Elaine Chew is the keynote speaker at the Women in STEM event at the Mirman School for Gifted Children, where she gives a talk on Music, Mathematics, and Computing.  Keyboard Concepts provided the Yamaha Disklavier used in the lecture-demonstration.

Pictured to the left are the USC women faculty who also gave presentations at the event.

03.14 - Article accepted to MCM

An article submitted by the lab to the 3rd International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM 2011) has just been accepted! It is entitled "Emergent formal structures of factor oracle-driven musical improvisations" and was co-authored by Isaac Schankler, Jordan Smith, Alexandre François, and Elaine Chew.

The article investigates the formal structure of several improvisations performed by Isaac interacting with Mimi: a number of formal analyses of these performances are presented, after which several typical structures (such as rondo- and canon-like structures) are observed. Finally, potential reasons for the emergence of these structures are discussed.

Structure analyses of Performance 1

Structure analyses of Performance 2

Structure analyses of Performance 3

The above annotations were created by the improviser (Schankler) and an experienced structure analyst (Smith).

The MCM 2011 conference takes place from June 15 to 18 in Paris, France at IRCAM.

03.07 - Jordan Smith's Master's thesis

The final version of lab member Jordan Smith's Master's thesis, completed at McGill University under Prof. Ichiro Fujinaga, has this past month been submitted and approved. It describes a MIREX-like evaluation (i.e., a benchmark evaluation) of music structure analysis algorithms. A direct download link is here: PDF.

Others working on music structure analysis may be interested in downloading the evaluation data, all of which are public and downloadable at Jordan's website. The thesis also introduces a modest new data set for structure analysis that consists entirely of public domain recordings, so anyone can download and share it.

Jordan continues to work on music structure-related research both at MuCoaCo (he and Isaac Schankler recently submitted an article to MCM on the structure of improvisations performed with Mimi) and back at McGill, through the SALAMI project which has created a large new database of structural analyses.

03.05 - Preview of Musical Patois at FAST: live webcast

The preview of Musical Patois takes place at the MIT150 Festival of Arts, Science, and Technology as part of FAST Thinking. The event is webcast live at: www.media.mit.edu/events/webcast/fast.html. A slide show of the Mar 5 FAST-Thinking events can be found at: http://arts.mit.edu/fast/fast-thinking-events

02.04 - Ussachevsky Memorial Festival @ Pomona

Isaac Schankler performs with Mimi (Multimodal Interaction for Musical Improvisation) at the Ussachevsky Memorial Electronic Music Festival at Pomona College organized by Tom Flaherty.  Details below:

Friday, February 4, 2011 - 8:00pm
Lyman Hall, Thatcher Music Building, Claremont, CA
FREE admission

Isaac Schankler's performance with Mimi has been posted on VIMEO:


Other concert performers include:
Robots, Rachel Rudich*, flute; Cynthia R. Fogg, viola; Roger Lebow*, cello; Mojave Trio: Sara Parkins, violin; Maggie Parkins, cello; Genevieve Feiwen Lee*, piano; Joti Rockwell*, electric guitar; Tony Perman, kalimba
 
Electronic and acoustic music by MaryClare Brzytwa, Karlheinz Essl, Tom Flaherty*, Matthew Malsky, Frank Zappa, and more

01.23-28 - Dagstuhl Seminar on Multimodal Music Processing

Elaine Chew and Alexandre François participate in a Dagstuhl Seminar on Multimodal Music Processing organized by Simon Dixon, Masataka Goto, and Meinard Mueller. The participants give introductory presentations, and broke out in special topics discussion sessions.  Cynthia Liem (University of Delft) and Elaine Chew perform Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 (transcribed for piano four hands by Scharwenka) at the concert on the final evening.

More photos by Jeremy Pickens can be found here.

01.14 - Frequency Visualizer with Ondar at CalTech TEDx Event

Alexandre François created a program to perform real-time frequency visualization of vocal sounds by Ondar, the famed Tuvan throat singer.  As many as four to five major peaks are seen when Ondar does his throat singing.  The presentation was part of the fringe TEDx events in honor of Feynman at Caltech today, together with performances by Ondar's eclectic band.

01.11 - Structure in Music

This year's ISE 575 / EE 675 / CSCI 575 class — Topics in Engineering Approaches to Music Cognition — met for the first time today.  The topic this year is Structure in Music.  The class website is at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~ise575/e .

01.06 - AMS Math Music Special Sessions

Elaine Chew attends and presents a paper on The Pentahelix: a Four-Dimensional Realization of the Spiral Array at the Special Sessions on Mathematical Techniques in Musical Analysis organized by Robert Peck and Thomas Fiore at the AMS Joint Mathematics Meeting in New Orleans.

Photos below show the Mississippi shoreline, and pictures to the left are of the dinner after the two sessions.