Linux Audio Conference 2020
The 2020 edition of the Linux Audio Conference (LAC) took place 25–27 November 2020, held virtually and hosted by the Studio de Création et de Recherche en Informatique et Musiques Expérimentales in Talence, France. LAC is a meeting of developers, researchers, and artists developing and using free and open-source audio software, with specific focus on the GNU/Linux operating system. The conference included research presentations, workshops, and musical performances related to free and open-source audio software. Research presented at LAC 2020 included an artificial intelligence and machine learning toolkit for the OM# computer-assisted composition environment, the use of notebook-style computing interfaces for audio plug-in development, and a convolutional neural network for generating sound based on hand-drawn images. Workshops at LAC covered such topics as the creation of intermedia art using the Ossia Score software and sound spatialization using gesture. Musical works performed at the conference included Peggy Sylopp and Adam Chalk's Twilight, which sonified melting ice using a variety of processing schemes, and Michal Seta's mimoidalaube, an improvised work incorporating gestural sensors and an audiovisual environment created within a game engine.
Unsung Stories Symposium
The Unsung Stories Symposium was held 9–10 April 2021, hosted virtually by Columbia University in New York, NY. The symposium highlighted the work of women at the Columbia University Computer Music Center (CMC) across its 70-year history. The symposium featured panels and roundtable discussions inviting composers, sound artists, and scholars to discuss the lineage, musical excellence, experience, and visibility of the diverse women who have worked at the Center. The symposium's opening roundtable featured three early figures in CMC's history, Daria Semegen, Alice Shields, and Pril Smiley. Additional roundtable conversations covered themes such as early histories of the CMC, women at the CMC in the 1990s and 2000s, systemic barriers to in electronic music, and women of color in electronic music.
International Faust Conference 2020
The Second International Faust Conference (IFC) took place 1–2 December 2020. Held virtually, the conference was organized by the Centre de Recherches Informatique et Création Musicale and Musidanse Lab at Université Paris 8. IFC gathered researchers, developers, musicians, and digital artists using the Faust programming language to present current works, creations, and projects and to discuss future directions for Faust and its community. Among research presented at the conference was a framework for compiling Faust code to WebAssembly, the use of Faust for field-programmable gate array development, and a library of Faust code for working with complex adaptive feedback systems. Other research included sonification of brainwave signals, an interactive graph editor for digital signal processing development, and user interface development for Faust programs. A pair of workshops covered the use of Faust within PureData and composing interactive media using Faust.