Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference

Description

Contributor to conference proceedings

"Interdisciplinary Research as Musical Experimentation: A case study in musicianly approaches to sound corpora"

We present the early stages of an ongoing five-year project into ‘Fluid Corpus Manipulation’ (FluCoMa1), and frame our research as sharing Schaeffer’s aspirations in the Treatise on Musical Objects (Schaeffer [1966] 2017) to develop productive exchange between artistic and scientific approaches to musical research, and to establish a wholeheartedly pluralistic basis for such research.

FluCoMa instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sounds and gestures (corpora) within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs in DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists. As it stands, there is a widening gulf between what it is becoming technically possible to do with corpora, and what is usefully available to composers within their working environments.

A founding intuition of FluCoMa is that bridging this gulf requires more than simply supplying musicians with implementations of published algorithms. Rather, tools need to be packaged and presented in ways that are musically fruitful; that support progressively more intense or divergent engagement; and that respect a broad diversity of musical practices and proclivities. On this basis, we aim to develop a modular suite of tools for working fluidly and imaginatively with corpora that is of lasting use to a broad constituency of musicians.

Consequently, our technical outcomes must form part of a broader assemblage, geared at nurturing an ongoing community of practice around fluid corpus manipulation as an evolving topic among electroacoustic musicians, beyond both the lifetime of the project and the membrane of the academy. Key to this is a focus on enabling composers to make links between their situated and embodied musical knowledge and the ideas underlying possibilities in, for instance, digital signal processing or machine learning. We envisage that our technical products and emerging community of practice will be bound together around a set of informational resources that offer participants multiple pathways into musicking with corpora and exchanging knowledge, pitched at various levels of technical detail, musical application, or playfulness.

We will present our perspective on experimentation in FluCoMa; some early fruits of the project; and a set of questions for the EMS community.

Period	20 Jun 2018 - 23 Jun 2018
Event type	Conference
Location	Florence, Italy
Degree of Recognition	International