Anglia Ruskin University

A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event

Date: Tuesday 17 May 2011
Venue: Ruskin Gallery and Ruskin 203 (room above Ruskin Gallery), Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge

Entrance fee: £10.00

Sitting down motionless, staring at screens, and focusing on the task at hand are becoming much less common than using media on the go, touching and listening to a device, while also being involved in other activities. In mobile media contexts, alternative sensory modalities increasingly replace the largely visual paradigms of the (both physical and virtual) desktop era. This one-day event examined the role of sound in media interactions as an especially pertinent example of our post-desktop world. It featured invited speakers, performances, demos, pecha-kuscha-style short presentations and poster presentations.

There is much more to this than iPods and alert sounds. Interactions between various physical contexts, social networks, mobile bodies and networked devices can be mediated in an almost infinite number of ways by sound - and also though sound. Invited experts and selected projects (see call details below) from a wide range of fields illustrate how designers, artists, researchers, businesses and musicians explore the relationship between mobile media and sound/music.

The projects presented at this event questioned our dominant visual/screen culture and mapped out alternative scenarios for interacting with mobile media that take advantage of alternative sensory modalities, especially sonic ones. Sound also serves as a powerful reminder of the temporal aspects of media interactions, complementing the current focus on 'location' in relation to mobile media. Mobility does not only play out in space, but also over time: bodies and devices moving though spaces at various speeds, rhythms, and times. This event showcased the role of sound in the negotiation of social and intimate interactions as mediated though layers of located and mobile streams of media. It was organised by the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute (CoDE) at Anglia Ruskin University.

All photos taken by Ann Evelin Lawford - please click to enlarge. More photos of the event can be found on the Flickr pages of Julio D'Escrivan and Frauke Behrendt.

 

Schedule

10:00 Registration & Coffee

10:30 Welcome: Dr Samantha Rayner, Co-Director of CoDE

10:45 Presentations (Chair: Professor Georgina Born):

Atau Tanaka: 'Continuous Evolution in Computer Music: from Stage to Pocket'

Frauke Behrendt: 'Sounds Like Mobility'

John Williamson: 'Physical and probabilistic audio models for unusual sensors'

Steve Symons: 'Aura: Projects in Sonic Augmented Reality'

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Demo session & networking: try GPS sound walks, audio-haptic interfaces, mobile phone instruments & more

14:30 Presentations (Chair: Julio D'Escrivan):

Rachel O' Dwyer: 'Mobile Listeners and Networked Publics'

Lalya Gaye: 'Digital Technologies and Urban Creativity'

Enrique Tomas: 'Augmented Aurality for Android'

Adam Parkinson: 'Expressive Latitude, Gestural Legibility and the iPhone-as-Instrument'

16:30 Coffee Break

17:00 networking /pescha kucha/ session (Chair: Justin Williams)

Richard Hoadley: '127 Messages'

Ashley Elsdon: 'Mobile Music 2006-2001: Presenting & performing a series of mobile devices & applications'

Nick Bryan-Kinns: 'Are we nearly there yet? Mutual Engagement all over the place'

18:30 Performances: Atau Tanaka & Adam Parkinson ' 4 Hands iPhone'

Profiles of Speakers and Chairs

Professor Atau Tanaka, Chair of Digital Media, Director of Culture Lab
Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He worked at IRCAM, was Artistic Ambassador for Apple France, and was researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, and was an Artistic Co-Director of STEIM in Amsterdam. Atau creates sensor-based musical instruments for performance, and is known for his work with biosignal interfaces. He seeks to harness collective musical creativity in mobile environments, seeking out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms. His work has been presented at Ars Electronica, SFMOMA, Eyebeam, V2, ICC, and ZKM and has been mentor at NESTA.

Professor Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford
Professor Born currently directs a five-year programme of research entitled 'Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies' ('MusDig') with funding of 1.7m Euros from a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant. Professor Born trained in Anthropology at University College London and worked subsequently at Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 1997-2010 she taught and conducted research at the University of Cambridge, most recently as Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. Her research uses ethnography to study cultural production, particularly music, television, IT, and knowledge systems. Her research interests include: cultural production, cultural politics and cultural institutions (high cultural, museums and media organizations); the anthropology and sociology of music and art; modernism and postmodernism in music and art; digitization and new media; music and technology, music and digitization; theories of the avant-garde; creativity, authorship, and intellectual property; interdisciplinarity; art-science; post-Bourdieuian cultural theory; post-Adornian critical theory; theories of mediation, materiality, and genre; ethnography; media policy and media regulation; public service broadcasting; television - including drama, documentary, news and current affairs.
Professor Born is engaged in cultural policy and media policy work on the BBC, public service broadcasting and the cultural sector in Britain and Europe. She is a member of the European Research Council's Social Sciences and Humanities expert panels. She is Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London, a Fellow of Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology, and an International Fellow of the Australian Sociological Association. In 2008 she was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for her contributions to music research. She will hold the Bloch Professorship in Music at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011-12.

Dr Frauke Behrendt, Research Fellow, CoDE
Frauke Behrendt's research interests include the areas of digital cultures, sound studies, mobility and media theory. Her research combines empirical and theoretical investigations of the link between mobility, sound and media and how this is articulated both in contemporary art and in everyday live.
Frauke is on the Steering Committee of the European COST Action on 'Sonic Interaction Design' and of the International Workshop of Mobile Music Technology. In addition, she is a member of NYLON (international research network in sociology, history and cultural studies), and the 'Centre for Material Digital Culture' (Sussex University). She is a Research Fellow at the Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (CoDE), Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Previously, Frauke has held positions at the University of Sussex and as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (US). She completed her PhD on 'Mobile Sound: Media Art in Hybrid Spaces' at the University of Sussex and holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University in Germany.

John Williamson, Research Associate, Dept of Computing Science, University of Glasgow
John Williamson's research is focused on continuous interaction systems. This includes gesture recognition/motion sensor based interfaces, brain-computer interaction, and particularly developing new feedback mechanisms for such systems. He currently works on the EPSRC Negotiated Interaction project, investigating continuous interaction in mobile devices. John also works on the EU TOBI project, looking at interaction design for EEG-based brain computer interfaces. Previous projects include investigating uncertain display and closed-loop interaction in brain-computer interfaces, and work on the Audioclouds project, combining gesture recognition and 3D sound for interfaces for mobile devices.

Steve Symons, Sound Artist / Member of Owl Project
Steve Symons is a sound artist known for an innovative series of sonic augmented reality projects titled 'aura' and as a member of the award winning Owl Project. He creates digital systems for his own use, which are often released for artists and musicians as free and open-source tools, and is currently extending this process to include commissioning artists to make new content for the systems he has created, thus challenging traditional notions of artist, maker and producer. These activities operate under the guise of muio.org; an art and technology interface consultancy he set up to facilitate his artistic practice and exploit the technology created in its realisation. Owl Project is a three person collaboration (Steve Symons, Simon Blackmore and Anthony Hall) who make and perform with sculptural sonic interfaces that critique human desire for technology. Nominated for the Northern Art Prize and awarded the Best of Manchester 2009, Owl Project (along with production manager Ed Carter) hold one of the Artists Taking the Lead commissions as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Rachel O' Dwyer, Dept of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
Rachel O'Dwyer teaches on the MSC for Interactive Digital Media in the Computer Science Department of Trinity College Dublin and is currently undertaking a PhD in the Department of Electronic Engineering of TCD on mobile media distribution, funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). She is an associate researcher in the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCam) where she leads the postgraduate seminar on 'audio cultures' from which the journal Interference arises. She is a facilitator of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA 2.0) with Benjamin Gaulon and a member of the sonic theory network. Her practice based work includes experiments with locative media, audio installation and electroacoustic composition. She has curated various panel discussions, workshops and exhibitions on subjects such as mobile computing, contemporary soundscape ecology, and electromagnetic spectrum within Dublin and internationally.

Lalya Gaye, Research Associate, Culture Lab
Lalya Gaye is a HCI/Interaction Design researcher, digital media artist and teacher, who works in multidisciplinary projects at the convergence of art, technology, and design. Lalya's work explores the poetic integration of digital technology into everyday environments, behaviours, urban space, clothing garments and other everyday artefacts, with a low-tech prototyping approach. She also builds public art installations with various media such as steel, light and sound, takes part in various audio experiments in urban space, and regularly organizes cross-disciplinary sound-oriented workshops and small festivals. At Culture Lab, Lalya is a RA in the Creative Media team of the SiDE (Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy) project, where she explores the creative potentials of digital media for social inclusion.
Lalya received a B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Geneva, a M.Sc.Eng. in Electroacoustics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, worked several years at the Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, and teached at the Interaction Design programme at the IT-University in Göteborg. She was recently a Visiting Professor and Artist in Residence at Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI, USA), before joining Culture Lab in 2010. She is also a member of the Swedish art group Dånk! Collective, and is finishing a Ph.D. thesis in Applied Information Technology that she will defend at the University of Göteborg, Sweden.

Enrique Tomás, Sound artist, part of Escoitar.org
Enrique Tomás is a sound artist living in Linz (Austria). He is also a member of Escoitar.org, a Spanish artistic collective focusing on sound heritage and aural studies. The work of Escoitar.org has been presented in many different formats like installations, performances, soundmaps, archives, workshops... in spaces of ZKM, Fonoteca Mexico, Medialab-Prado, Sonar, Laboral, KUMU, SMAK, etc. Present projects are noTours - Augmented Aurality and Sonic Weapons.

Dr Nick Bryan-Kinns, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London
Nick leads the Interactional Sound and Music Group at the Centre for Digital Music, is member of the IMC Research Group. Creativity and Cognition Studios Partner and recipient of the ACM Recognition of Service Award, 2010. The central focus of his research programme is on understanding how to design for mutually engaging interaction. Ongoing research includes the development of novel group music improvisation tools such as Daisyphone. These tools are used to systematically investigate the nature of mutual engagement in collaborative interaction. Such work has been partly funded by an ESPRC funded research project on Engaging Collaborations.
A key focus of Nick's research is haptic and non-screen based collaborative engagement with interactive music and collaboration such as work on uPoi, a wireless exertion interface for collective ad-hoc audiovisual performances. He is a Co-Investigator on the Centre for Digital Music EPSRC Platform Grant (£1m), the EPSRC funded Software Sustainability for Digital Music project (£1.1m), and the EPSRC Media and Arts Technology Doctoral Training Centre (£5m) at Queen Mary.

Dr Julio d'Escriván, Reader in Creative Music Technology, Anglia Ruskin University
Julio d'Escriván is a composer who uses music technology, both for concert music, and in its applications to film, video and new media. He is at present helping set up the Digital Performance Laboratory as part of the University's Cultures of Digital Economies Research Institute. Between 1991 and 2003 he was a successful writer/producer of music for film and TV for Latin America and the Caribbean region, working on national and international advertising campaigns as well as documentaries and feature films and shorts.
Julio has been twice winner of awards at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, France, in 1987 and 1989. He has also won awards for his film (Festival de Mérida, 2008) and advertising work (Premios ANDA) in Venezuela as well as mentions in the National Composition prizes there. His music has been performed at numerous music festivals in countries such as The Netherlands (Gaudeamus), Spain (Centro Reina Sofía), The Basque Country (Festival Klem), France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Argentina, Sweden, Mexico, Norway, U.S.A. and Venezuela. His work has been broadcast in America and Europe on stations such as BBC Radio 3, VPRO Amsterdam, Radio Nacional de España, and RAI (Italy) among others.

Dr Justin Williams, Programme Leader, Music, Anglia Ruskin University
Justin Williams gained degrees from Stanford University, King's College, London, and the University of Nottingham. He has taught previously at Leeds College of Music and was a postdoctoral fellow at Lancaster University at the Centre for Mobilities Research.
He has presented research to a number of international conferences, and has been invited to speak at a number of symposia and colloquia, including the University of Leipzig, University of British Columbia, University of Minnesota, Oxford Brookes University, Leeds College of Music and the University of Wuppertal.
His teaching and research interests include hip-hop culture, popular music, musical borrowing, film music, jazz, music and geography, mobility and sound studies, and the analysis of record production. He is currently writing a book on musical borrowing in hip-hop for University of Michigan Press.

Adam Parkinson, Researcher, Culture Lab, University of Newcastle
Adam is an electronic musician, composer, programmer based in Newcastle, England. Recent work has involved transforming the apple iPhone into a sensor instrument. This has lead to the development of '4-Hands iPhone', a piece with Atau Tanaka, which has so far been performed at FutureEverything Festival (Manchester, UK), Charm of Sound Festival (Helsinki, FL), Music With A View (New York, US) and Mois Multi (Quebec City, CA).
He has worked with many improvisers including Rhodri Davies, Noid, Klaus Filip, Robin Hayward and Dominic Lash. He also makes dance music, and under various guises has remixed Maximo Park, Dextro, Si Begg and others. He has released music on Entr'acte, Unique 3's Mutate Records, Noodles Records and more. He has also been involved in collaborations to create sound installations, most recently Middling English, with poet Caroline Bergvall at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.
He currently teaches on various undergraduate and postgraduate courses on music, cultural theories, digital media and composition practice at Newcastle University, whilst writing up a PhD with brings together various realist and materialist approaches to creative practice, constructing an 'Object-Oriented' and Deleuze influenced philosophy of listening, with special focus on the embodied experience of music.

Ashley Elsdon, Mobile Music Blogger
Ashley Elsdon has been writing about mobile music for 5 years covering hardware, software and mobile operating systems. Over this time the mobile music scene has grown from a tiny niche area to approaching mainstream. Now working with an ever increasing community of musicians, developers and hardware manufacturers the Palm Sounds blog is a well established hub for daily news and opinion on all aspects of mobile music.

Dr Richard Hoadley, Senior Lecturer, Music and Music Technology, Anglia Ruskin University
A graduate of the universities of Bristol and Durham (where he gained a PhD in Composition), Richard Hoadley was subsequently awarded the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust Composer-in-Residency at Charterhouse School. Instrumental compositions include Only Connect (1988), an orchestral piece recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Music in our Time, In Principio (1989) performed by the BBC Singers at the Huddersfield Festival and Three Pieces for Two Pianos (1992) performed by Philip Mead and Stephen Gutman.
Richard Hoadley as a composer has in recent years focused in particular on the investigation of the use of technology, indeterminacy and generative procedures in the expressive compositional process and the effect of embodiment and the musical instrument itself on the creative process. He has developed a number of hardware and software interfaces using a variety of platforms. Gaggle (2009) is a multi-ultrasonic interface designed for use with software developed in the SuperCollider audio environment and used mainly for performance and improvisation, in particular with dancers. Gagglina (2010) is a miniature version for use with Melodia and Melismata custom software.
In addition, he has published and presented a number of papers concerning issues arising from this work, including 'Form and Function: Examples of Music Interface Design' (HCI2010 Conference) and 'Implementation and Development of Sculptural Interfaces for Digital Performance of Music through Embodied Expression' (EVA2010 Conference).

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