Conferences

CIRMMT Symposium on Force Feedback and Music

Dec 9-10, 2016. See the symposium website for more information and for registration.cirmmt_logo2005onlyhi

Though haptics research in music is a very active research field, it seems presently dominated by tactile interfaces, due in part to the widespread availability of vibrotactile feedback in portable devices. Though not recent—with some of its early contributions dating back to the end of the 70s—research on force-feedback in musical applications has traditionally suffered from exogenous issues such as hardware cost, as well as the lack of community-wide accessibility to software and hardware platforms for prototyping musical applications. Despite this situation, in recent years several works have addressed this topic proposing software platforms and simulation models.

This symposium will discuss the current state of research and future trends on force-feedback and music (FF&M).

Speakers

  • Bret Battey, De Montfort University, England
  • Edgar Berdahl, Louisiana State University, USA
  • Christian Frisson, Inria Lille, France
  • Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos, Cardiff School of Art and Design, Wales [on career break]
  • James Leonard, Grenoble, France
  • Joseph Malloch, Dalhousie University, Canada
  • Julian Neri, McGill University, Canada
  • Thomas Pietrzak, Université Lille 1, France
  • Ian Sinclair, MPB Technologies Inc, Canada
  • Stephen Sinclair, Inria, Chile
  • Marcelo Wanderley, IDMIL/CIRMMT, McGill University, Canada

3DMIN Symposium

3dmin-symposium-fb-event-header-768x289

Last week I was back in Berlin for an exhibition, concert and international symposium on Design, Development, and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments (3DMIN). The symposium was titled “Musical Instruments in the 21st Century — Identities, Configurations, Practices” and included a range of interesting speakers from the 3DMIN project itself and invitees like myself. The other speakers included:

Ableton Loop

loop

I recently had the pleasure of participating as a panelist in Ableton’s Loop Summit in Berlin. Our panel was titled “New Instruments and Evolving Performance Practices”, and was organised by Mark Zadel – a colleague from graduate studies at McGill and now an Ableton employee.

The summit was one of the most interesting, enjoyable conference I have ever attended. It was extremely well organised – despite the fact that there were parallel presentations and activities, it was easy to jump between them and try to catch a bit of everything since almost everything ran exactly on schedule.

Some of my favourite sessions:

loop_banner

SMC Summer School

SMC2009 - Sound and Music ComputingI am currently attending the Sound and Music Computing (SCM) Summer School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds, taking place at the Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal, from July 18 to 21, 2009.

The teachers this year are Marcelo Wanderley (IDMIL), Joel Chadabe (Electronic Music Foundation) and Xavier Serra (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain). Tutors include Jean-Julien Acouturier, Stephan Baumann, Eoin Brazil, Federico Fontana, Bram de Jong, Luis Gustavo Martins, Rui Penha and Stefania Serafin.

I will likely post some more on this topic over the next week, but for now here’s a taste of what’s going on.

Michel Waisvisz Talk/Performance

I just finished uploading some video from the IDMIL archive to YouTube: a keynote lecture and performance by the late Michel Waisvisz (of STEIM, Amsterdam) from the NIME conference in 2003. Waisvisz made huge contributions to the field of gesture- and touch-controlled electronic music, inventing and performing with The Hands, the Cracklebox, and the Web.

Here is part 1 of 6:

The rest of the lecture can be viewed here.