FIMPaC - Forum for Innovation in Music Production and Composition

On Friday, 20.February 2009, the Leeds College of Music organised the FIMPaC event (http://www.lcm.ac.uk/research-conference/FIMPaC.htm). Leeds Metropolitan University was well represented at this event: two compositions ("Polychoron" by
Nikos Stavropoulos, and "Tokyo Yakimono" by Stephen Kilpatrick), one paper ("Utilising Aural Spatial attributes to Implement Compositional rational" by Nikos Stavropoulos), and four delegates. Overall a very interesting event and very successful for our music group.

Information about the event, the papers, and compositions presented can be obtained from Nikos Stavropoulos.

AES Conference in London, 11.-13.Feb.

We, Dave Raybould and Richard Stevens, have just returned from the 35th International Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference. This conference was focussed on audio for games, and we presented our interactive audio tutorial. This is a learning tool that uses the Unreal 3 game engine for teaching a range of techniques relevant to audio for games. As well a our 1 hour presentation as part of the conference we also had the game tutorial set up for delegates to visit and have a go on. Our approach seemed very popular and there seemed to be a real demand for such games-based-learning interactive tutorials.

We were also involved in the panel discussion on the subject of "Education and training in games audio". Although there is a lot of interest in developing games audio curricula, we seem to be ahead of the game here with our MSc in "Sound and music for interactive games", and there was a lot of interest in the course and support for the content we described. This fed into the work I (Richard Stevens) have been involved in with the Interactive audio special interest group (http://www.iasig.org/wg/eduwg/index.shtml) and which we intend to take forward through discussions in the UK with Skillset.

Although the field is maturing this seemed to be an area ripe for further research and a number of areas were defined:

- Interactive dynamic musical systems.
- Real time mixing in game environments
- Further work relating to sound propagation systems in games – particularly in relation to sound occlusion
- Synthesis and processing for non-repetitive dialogue systems
- Multiplayer sound. When you have multiple players but only one set of speakers how do you represent their multiple perspectives ? (Some interesting work on personalised HRTF’s)
- Non-repetitive sound through modal synthesis and physical modelling
If you’d like to know any more about the conference, have an interest in these fields, or would like to have a look at our work then please get in touch!

Richard Stevens and Dave Raybould

SAGSET Conference: 22.-24.July 2009

The 39th Annual SAGSET (Society for the Advancement of Games and Simulations in Education and Training) Conference will be organised by Leeds Metropolitan University and will be held in The Old BBC Broadcasting House in Leeds City Centre from 22nd-24th July.

Details are on the conference web site.

Event: Sonic Spatial Perspectives. 6.-7.Feb.

Leeds Metropolitan University and the Centre for Creative and Cultural Knowledge Exchange (C3KE) invite you to attend Sonic Spatial Perspectives on Friday the 6th and Saturday the 7th of February 2009.

The two-day event features a series of concerts and workshops on the techniques, practices and aesthetics of sound diffusion; the practice of enhancing spatial components of electronic music and sound sculpture through the use of
multi-channel sound systems.

Keynote address by Professor Jonty Harrison, Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music at the University of Birmingham.

Showcasing:

BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre), the concert sound system of the
University of Birmingham’s Electroacoustic Music Studios. www.beastmusic.co.uk

RESOUND Open Source software package for the live spatialisation of sound via multiple loudspeakers. http://resound.sourceforge.net


Participate in the dynamic dialogue
Debate and exchange perspectives in the area of spatial audio
Gain and encounter some of the leading research in this area

Event Venue: Leeds Metropolitan University, Headingley Campus, James Graham Building

Friday 06/02/09
12:00 – 12:15 Opening by Derek Hales, Director of the C3KE
12:15 – 13:15 Keynote address by Prof. Jonty Harrison, University of Birmingham
13:15 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 16:00 Workshop on the BEAST sound diffusion system
16:00 – 17:00 Coffee
17:00 – 19:00 Concert 1
19:00 – 20:00 Buffet

Saturday 07/02/09
11:00 – 13:00 Workshop on the RESOUND sound diffusion system
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:00 Concert 2
15:00 – 15:30 Coffee
15:30 – 17:00 Round Table Discussion
17:00 – 19:00 Concert 3

To book your place please e-mail Tie Doepel at t.doepel@hud.ac.uk or call on 01484 471364. Queries about the specific workshop content should be addressed to Dr Nikos Stavropoulos at n.stavropoulos@leedsmet.ac.uk. Directions to Headingley Campus and information on hotels and transport links can be found at www.leedsmet.ac.uk

Paper at LCEA 09 Symposium

A paper has been accepted at the LCEA09 Symposium to be held at 19th January 2009:

Richard Stevens, Tony Renshaw, David Raybould and Paul Marchant (Leeds Metropolitan University). Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Eye tracking for the evaluation of dynamic scenes.

It describes the 2006/7 multimedia exhibition, ‘Repossessed’, during which over 400 members of the public watched scenes from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’. The paper describes the basis of an approach to the use of eye tracking techniques, visualisations, and metrics to measure the influence of directorial techniques on film viewers’ experience.

Project with India

Recently, Reinhold Behringer has been invited to join the project "Voices from Gujarati and Yorkshire Rivers", and he just returned from a travel to Gujarat (India) where this project was conducted in partnership with the Sardar Patel University in Vallabh Vidyanagar. The aim of this project is to "create awareness of climate change with means of arts", and the specific focus was on "linking" rivers from two local regions in the global context: Yorkshire and Gujarat. The poject involved the organisation of workshops for painting, poetry, and translation. Reinhold's role was to provide technology: recording video, audio, and GPS tracks for creating later a multimedia experience. This resulting documentation is intended to be created by L3 students as part of their final project work. In the course of the project, artists created works based on their relation with rivers. The artefacts will be collected abd may be published in book form at a later time. A development blog highlights the progress and timeline of this project.

During this visit, links have been made to the following institutions:
Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar
Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmadabad
Inter-Human Education and Charitable Trust (IET), Surat.

Mini-Symposium at Staff Development Festival

Today, the centre organised the Mini Symposium "Creative Technology - An Oxymoron?", in the framework of the Annual Leeds Met Staff Development Festival Research Day. Reinhold Behringer gave an overview on a few systems which claim to be true creative technology in the artificial creativity domain. John Elliott gave a talk about the human mind, Michael Ward demonstrated the current state of the art in beat tracking, and Ben Dalton presented projects related to telepresence and robotics.

The presentations are available at http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/Presentations.php.

Here are a few more links related to Ben's talk:

www.burnsideinstitute.com/robot_book/robots.html - French book 'What do robots think about?', translated into Russian. A precursor to the irobot roomba.
www.robotlab.de/bios/bible_engl.htm - robot arm as caligraphic scribe of the bible.
www.robotlab.de/bios/video_engl.htm - video of the bible robot lab project.
brl.ee.washington.edu/publications/Rep127/TE.chapt.html - teleoperation examples.
www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2007/05/soldierrobot_lo.html - people humanising their military robot companions.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1898525.stm - Chris Csikszentmihalyi's robotic journalism project as reported by the BBC.
www.appliedautonomy.com/lb.html - institute for applied autonomy - pamphlet robot.
www.appliedautonomy.com/gw.html - the IAA's graffiti writing street robot.
www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1830 - Natalie Jeremijenko's Ooz project with Robotic Geese
www.vestaldesign.com/design/ooz-goose/ - more Ooz pics.
www.auger-loizeau.com/projects/soctel/pro_soctel.html - Auger & Loizeau's teleprescence through dog mounted robotics.
www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/pubs/teleactor-icra02.pdf -
Collaborative Online Teleoperation project that includes human teleactors.
www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/index.html - Wodiczko's Tijuana project.
www.zprod.org/PG/machines/roboticEars.htm - Paul Granjon's robotic ears.
www.zprod.org/PG/performances/zLabTrans.htm - performance with the ears and tail video.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A6mon_(His_Dark_Materials) - Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine" (1489-90)
www.gutenberg.org/files/22117/22117-h/22117-h.htm - Kerman and Zeris, the two Kittens who accompanied Author on his wanderings
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5alYLJS4OrE - The Golden Compass: Defining Daemons
muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Jim_Henson
www.creatureshop.com - Jim Henson's effects workshop where the Big1 controllers were developed.
flickr.com/photos/bre/208151402/ - example of puppet controller system in action
www.hektor.ch - graffiti robot