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

Our Music, Our City won at B.TWEEN !

At B.TWEEN 08, a prize of £ 10,000 was awarded to our Ben Dalton and his team for their entry into the competition "Expoding Narratives", which was jointly organised by JustB and HP-Labs and called for project ideas for geo-referenced applications built on the MSCAPE platform for mobile phones and PDAs. Ben and his colleagues Ben Halsall and Megan Smith had developed a pitch of their project Our Music, Our City .

Congratulations to the team!

The "DoGoSee Project" at ICA

On 10.June 2008, Ben Dalton (Leeds Met, Innovation North), Megan Smith and Ben Halsall (Leeds Met, Faculty of Arts and Society) will present their project DoGoSee at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

Their work is one of the five projects which had been shortlisted in the Exploding Narrative competition organised by b-tween to win a £10,000 prize grant for developing their concept into a product. The projects are around ideas for location-based games, stories or educational journeys, using software developed by HP Labs (MScape). The audience and a panel of experts, including Adam Gee (C4), Steve Moffett (Creative Partnerships) and Richard Hull (HP Labs), will give feedback.

See the final pitches and vote at the ICA on 19 and 20 June, or at b-tween.

More info on this project is in the blog Our City, Our Music.


Info re. the evening event on 10.June (starts at 7pm) at ICA is available from Emma Quinn emmaq@ica.org.uk
£5 / £4 Concessions / £3 ICA Members.
Advance booking advised.
Please call the ICA box office on 020 7390 3647 or visit the ICA web
site www.ica.org.uk

ICA, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
Nearest Tube Stations: Piccadilly and Charing Cross

Location-Based Tracking Trials at Great Student Run

Today (10. May 2008, 10:30am)the Carnegie Great Student Run takes place at the Headingley Campus of Leeds Met. We have developed a simple tracking application which runs on mobile phones and allows that the position of runners (who carry their phones during the run) is automatically sent to our web server.

We have only a few participants, and we are using this to test the feasibility of a few approaches that can be empoyed in this technology field.

Check out our tracking site and monitor live the progress of a small set of runners!