ABSTRACT The author describes the practical application of crowdsourcing human intelligence as a form of collaborative music-making. Spectral decomposition of an original recording is used to derive components from original audio, and these are then offered as on-line tasks in which contributors are asked to record their own interpretations of each component. Components are then gathered in order to re-synthesize the original corpus, which is used to build an improvisation system. The author uses Bernard Stiegler's ecology of attention paradigm to situate crowdsourcing as an emerging form of public participation in music-making and Glenn Gould's ideas on performance and public access to position this participation as an act of composition. The work is offered as an illustration of the author's individual process as a composer for finding new notational pathways for collaborative practice.

ABSTRACT The advent of on-line communities has democratized the process of musical interface design and allowed users to directly participate in the future development of the devices they use. On-line communities, acting as centralized repositories for information pertaining to the development of an interface, allow users to discuss their experiences and ideas as well as providing a framework for managing information pertaining to an interface. This centralized access to information regarding the design, use and development of an interface both focuses and accelerates the developmental process.

ABSTRACT There have been numerous artists, architects and designers whose encounters with traditional Japanese garden aesthetics have produced creative works. The author examines John Cage's Ryoanji , a musical translation of the famous karesansui garden in Kyoto, as an important musical precedent and uses it to position his own methodologies for transmediating the spatial predilections of the Japanese garden Sesshutei. He also documents various mapping techniques and data visualizations used to inform his recent multi-channel sound installation/performance environment, Sesshutei as a spatial model .

ABSTRACT Increased maturity in modeling human musicianship leads to many interesting artistic achievements and challenges. This article takes the opportunity to reflect on future situations in which virtual musicians are traded like baseball cards, associated content-creator and autonomous musical agent rights, and the musical and moral conundrums that may result. Although many scenarios presented here may seem far-fetched with respect to the current level of artificial intelligence, it remains prudent and artistically stimulating to consider them. Accepting basic human curiosity and research teleology, it is salutary to consider the more distant consequences of our actions with respect to aesthetics and ethics.

ABSTRACT The author discusses live coding as a new path in the evolution of the musical score. Live-coding practice accentuates the score, and whilst it is the perfect vehicle for the performance of algorithmic music it also transforms the compositional process itself into a live event. As a continuation of 20th-century artistic developments of the musical score, live-coding systems often embrace graphical elements and language syntaxes foreign to standard programming languages. The author presents live coding as a highly technologized artistic practice, shedding light on how non-linearity, play and generativity will become prominent in future creative media productions.

ABSTRACT Written and drawn annotations of musical scores form a core part of the music composition process for both individuals and groups. This article reflects on the annotations made in new forms of distributed music-making wherein the score and its annotations are shared across the web. Four kinds of annotation are identified from 8 years of studies of mutual engagement through distributed music-making systems. It is suggested that new forms of web-based music-making might benefit from shared and persistent graphical annotation mechanisms.

ABSTRACT The author discusses the notation of action-based music, in which physical gestures and their characteristics, such as shape, direction and speed (as opposed to psychoacoustic properties such as pitch, timbre and rhythm), play the dominant role in preserving and transferring information. Grounded in ecological perception and enactive cognition, the article shows how such an approach mediates a direct relationship between composition and performance, details some action-based music notation principles and offers practical examples. A discussion of tablature, graphic scores and text scores contextualizes the method historically.

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of symbolic score data in the authors' mobile music-making applications, as well as the social sharing and community-based content creation workflows currently in use on their on-line musical network. Web-based notation systems are discussed alongside in-app visual scoring methodologies for the display of pitch, timing and duration data for instrumental and vocal performance. User-generated content and community-driven ecosystems are considered alongside the role of cloud-based services for audio rendering and streaming of performance data.

ABSTRACT Bowed string music has always existed as an aural culture with improvisation considered as a prime focus of expression. It is the author's strong belief that experimentation is the natural state of all string music. This paper concentrates on recent history: bows that have incorporated interactive sensor technology. The central narrative deals with the author's own experiments and experience at STEIM since 1987. How reliable and practical is this technology? Are the results worth the trouble? Are there new modes of improvising only possible with an interactive bow?

ABSTRACT This article discusses the balance between composition and improvisation with respect to interactive performance using electronic and computer-based music systems. The author uses his own experience in this domain in the roles of both collaborator and composer as a point of reference to look at general trends in “composed improvisation” within the electronic and computer music community. Specifically, the intention is to uncover the limits and limitations of improvisation and its relationship to both composition and “composed instruments” within the world of interactive electronic musical performance.

ABSTRACT The author considers the technology-enabled improvisation of musical form—the projection of the dynamics of structure on the unfolding of improvised performance. Improvisation with technology has been largely concerned with its potential for more complex activity in the present. He proposes reclaiming the radical potential of technological improvisation by subverting the “permanent present.” Technology importantly affords a dynamical temporal prosthesis. Following a re-examination of times and forms in music and performance, the imagining and projection of future events is predicated on the same architecture as memory. Finally, brief consideration is given to the technological challenges of such an approach.

ABSTRACT Earlier interactive improvisation systems have mostly worked with note-level musical events such as pitch, loudness and duration. Timbre is an integral component of the musical language of many improvisers; some recent systems use timbral information in a variety of ways to enhance interactivity. This article describes the timbre-aware ARHS improvisation system, designed in collaboration with saxophonist John Butcher, in the context of recent improvisation systems that incorporate timbral information. Common practices in audio feature extraction, performance state characterization and management, response synthesis and control of improvising agents are summarized and compared.

ABSTRACT This paper describes a series of investigations into the use of sustainable methods for powering electronic musical instruments and perhaps ultimately a large ensemble such as the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, a collection of 15–25 meta-instruments each consisting of a laptop computer, interfacing equipment and a hemispherical speaker. The research discussed includes the development of instruments specifically designed for solar power, as well as the use of solar panels and/or batteries to power more conventional devices such as computers and amplifiers.

ABSTRACT Based on 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork with builders of boutique music effects boxes, this essay explores the ways in which improvisation figures into the creation of music technology. The author argues that expanding the rubric of improvisation to encompass the processes of designing and building effects boxes pushes scholars to understand relationships between music and improvisation as existing beyond the boundaries of performance. Ultimately he posits that improvisatory behavior and exploratory engagement with material at hand is central to building pedals, and should be assessed as part of the continuum of social-aesthetic practices composing music making.

ABSTRACT This article explores the author's strategy for developing a computer performance system designed for free improvisation with acoustic instruments following a non-idiomatic approach. Philosophical considerations on potentiality and personal and social space and research into the psychology of motivation and behavior have inspired and enabled a different approach to integrating technology with improvisation. The technical realization of a parameter space, in particular utilizing contingent behavior emerging from the convergent mapping of a mixture of controller types, has proven effective for the spontaneous creative decision making required to extend the sonic potential of an acoustic piano while minimizing direct computer operation, as applied regularly in practice by the author.

ABSTRACT The disembodied hands of spiritualist sittings touched people and levitated objects but also strummed guitars, rang bells, played closed pianos and accordions in cages. Likewise, the mechanical music machines of the time (orchestrions, pianolas, etc.) seemed animated by invisible fingers. Highlighting the historical and haptic parallels between these manifestations, the author addresses the lack of a visible performing body, which remains implicit through the invisible animating agency. She looks at the moment before music became abstracted into the grooves of the gramophone, when music still looked like instruments, though without the gestural presence of the performer. The article is illustrated with images from the author's project Automamusic.

ABSTRACT This paper challenges the assumption that improvisation is a process unique to humans. Despite the general reluctance of biologists to consider birdsong “music,” they routinely comment on improvisation found in the signals of songbirds. The Australian pied butcherbird ( Cracticus nigrogularis ) is such a species. Analysis (including transcriptions and sonograms) of solo song, duets and mimicry illustrates their remarkable preoccupation with novelty and variety, and traces improvisation's role in the creation of their complex song culture. The author suggests further zoömusicological case studies for the relevance this research could have to other human (musical) capacities.

ABSTRACT This article presents findings from experiments into piano and live electronics undertaken by the author since early 2007. The use of improvisation has infused every step of the process—both as a methodology to obtain meaningful results using interactive technology and as a way to generate and characterize a collaborative musical space with composers. The technology used has included pre-built MIDI interfaces such as the PianoBar, actuators such as miniature DC motors and sensor interfaces including iCube and the Wii controller. Collaborators have included researchers at the Centre for Digital Music (QMUL), Richard Barrett, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Atau Tanaka.

ABSTRACT Listening to the Mind Listening (LML) explored whether sonifications can be more than just “noise” in terms of perceived information and musical experience. The project generated an unprecedented body of 27 multichannel sonifications of the same dataset by 38 composers. The design of each sonification was explicitly documented, and there are 88 analytical reviews of the works. The public concert presenting 10 of these sonifications at the Sydney Opera House Studio drew a capacity audience. This paper presents an analysis of the reviews, the designs and the correspondences between timelines of these works.

ABSTRACT The author considers the ideas behind her series of temporary audio (and video) installations collectively entitled A Record of Fear , made for the site of Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast. This remote shingle spit was a covert military testing site for much of the 20th century and is now owned and run by the National Trust. The author worked with three sound recordists to capture ambient and “performed” sounds subsequently used in three separate on-site installations. These pieces were a response to both the site's painful history and its current rich soundscape.