Jeff Morris: Hearing Voices.

David Felder: Jeu de Tarot.

This double issue of Computer Music Journal consists of a guest-edited special issue as well as some off-topic articles handled by our usual editorial staff. The guest editors, Franziska Schroeder and Romain Michon, have written this issue's Editors' Notes, in which they describe the articles they selected, all of which concern new musical interfaces. Among other topics, the articles highlight accessibility

For the past 20 years, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (NIME) has served as a hub for musicians and researchers from all over the world to share their late-breaking work on new musical interface design, and to collectively think about the future of this field.

Nearly two decades after its inception as a workshop at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) exists as an established international conference significantly distinct from its precursor. Although this origin story is often noted, the implications of NIME's history as emerging from a field predominantly

In this article, the research group Performance without Barriers reflect on the process of collaboratively designing a custom guitar-inspired instrument with Eoin Fitzpatrick, a physically disabled musician from the Drake Music Project, Northern Ireland. As part of a longitudinal ethnographic case study designed to uncover factors that contribute to the longevity of custom assistive music technology

We present the second iteration of a Touch-Responsive Augmented Violin Interface System, called TRAVIS II, and two compositions that demonstrate its expressivity. TRAVIS II is an augmented acoustic violin with touch sensors integrated into its 3-D printed fingerboard that track left-hand finger gestures in real time. The fingerboard has four strips of conductive PLA filament that produce an electric

Annette Vande Gorne: Illusion.

Thomas DeLio is a composer and theorist of international renown in both fields and especially noted for his work in computer music. In this conversation he discusses his musical thinking with over 40 years in the field. His compositions have been performed worldwide and are recorded on numerous labels. Neuma recordings has recently released five volumes of his recorded compositions in an ongoing series

A khipu is an artifact used in the ancient Inca Empire and previous Andean societies to process and transmit statistical and narrative information. It is known as one of the first textile computers, a tangible interface encrypted in knots and strings made of cotton and wool. This system was widely used until the Spanish colonization that banned and destroyed many of the existing khipus. This article

Digital musical instruments offer countless opportunities for musical expression by allowing artists to produce sound without the physical constraints of analog instruments. By breaking the intuitive link between gestures and sound they may hinder the audience experience, however, making the musician's contribution and expressiveness difficult to discern. To cope with this issue without altering the

Kerry Hagan composed “nyx,” a real-time computer music work, in 2017. The key inspiration of “nyx” is noise, which Hagan achieves through chaos theory. In Greek mythology, Nyx was born from Chaos, and she is the deity of the night. In the same way, two key materials of the work are chaotic synthesis and, at a higher level, the use of several random algorithms. To analyze “nyx,” I apply a specific methodology

On several keyboard instruments the produced sound is not always dependent exclusively on a discrete key-velocity parameter, and minute gestural details can affect the final sonic result. By contrast, variations in articulation beyond velocity have normally no effect on the produced sound when the keyboard controller uses the MIDI standard, used in the vast majority of digital keyboards. In this article

Established in 1988 by composers Laura Bianchini and Michelangelo Lupone, the Centro Ricerche Musicali (CRM) in Rome was officially recognized in 1990 as a Music Research Center by the Ministry for University Education and Scientific and Technological Research. The Center focuses on musical production in relation to new technologies, in order to create a continual interaction among musical language

Lefteris Papadimitriou: Objects.

Computer Music Journal, Volume 43, Issue 4, Page 121-121, Winter 2019.

Computer Music Journal, Volume 43, Issue 4, Page 94-109, Winter 2019.

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This collection of works represents a journey through different sonic perspectives, from composers who have impacted us, and compelled us to think differently about music, sound art, composition, gender, or technology. They disrupt stereotypes about what music by women should be. Each composition represented here is an uncommon and meaningful adventure by a sound-exploring composer, ranging from Laurie

Research in computer music at the University of Padua, Italy, began in the early 1970s and was formalized in 1979 by establishing the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC). Since its foundation, CSC has established itself as a leading research center in the field of computer music. This article describes the scientific and musical research activities of the center and of the composers and members

The widespread adoption of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has made touchscreens a common interface for musical performance. Although new mobile music instruments have been investigated from design and user experience perspectives, there has been little examination of the performers' musical output. In this work, we introduce a constrained touchscreen performance app, MicroJam, designed

Nonlinear dynamic processes are fundamental to the behavior of acoustic musical instruments, as is well explored in the case of sound production. Such processes may have profound and under-explored implications for how musicians interact with instruments, however. Although nonlinear dynamic processes are ubiquitous in acoustic instruments, they are present in digital musical tools only if explicitly

This article presents a free framework for collaborative creation of interactive and experimental computer music called Soundcool. It is designed to fill a gap between rigid ready-to-use applications and flexible programming languages. The system offers easy-to-use elements for generating and processing sound, much like ready-made applications, but it enables flexible configuration and control, more

Computer Music Journal, Volume 43, Issue 2-3, Page 172-201, Summer/Fall 2019.

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Each year the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presents a concert that highlights collaborations between its graduate composers and pianists. In the two decades since it first received funding from donors Richard C. Anderson and Jana M. Mason, it has made a space for emerging composers and pianists to examine the historical and contemporary roles of composer and pianist. Among the twenty

In this article, a combination of two novel approaches to the harmonization of chorales in the style of J. S. Bach is proposed, implemented, and profiled. The first is the use of the bass line, as opposed to the melody, as the primary input into a chorale-harmonization algorithm. The second is a compromise between methods guided by music knowledge and by machine-learning techniques, designed to mimic

This article describes a software implementation dealing with the ancient Basque musical tradition of the txalaparta. The research is different from earlier studies of the txalaparta in that, by digitizing the instrument and its performance rules, we have had to formalize and make explicit conventions that hitherto have been tacit knowledge of improvisational practice. Analysis through software development

This article focuses on learning the hierarchical structure of what we call a “temporal scenario” (for instance, a chord progression) to perform automatic improvisation consistently over several different time scales. We first present a way to represent hierarchical structures with a phrase structure grammar. Such a grammar enables us to analyze a scenario at several levels of organization, creating

This article introduces an open-source Java-based programming environment for creative coding of agglomerative systems using Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies. Our software originally focused on digital signal processing of audio—including synthesis, sampling, granular sample playback, and a suite of basic effects—but composers now use it to interface with sensors and peripherals through general-purpose

Combining a new software system with the familiar interface of the MIDI keyboard, bitKlavier is a versatile instrument for exploring the nature of tuning and temperament. We describe a number of approaches it facilitates, including composed tunings, moving fundamental systems, and a novel system for adaptive tuning. All of these are characterized by the overarching design priority for bitKlavier to

This article describes a new kind of digital musical instrument, a novel assemblage of the familiar MIDI keyboard with custom interactive software. Inspired by John Cage's prepared piano, our instrument both takes advantage of and subverts the pianist's hard-earned, embodied training, while also inviting an extended configuration stage that “prepares” the instrument to behave in composition-specific

Sound synthesis using physical modeling, emulating systems of a complexity approaching and even exceeding that of real-world acoustic musical instruments, is becoming possible, thanks to recent theoretical developments in musical acoustics and algorithm design. Severe practical difficulties remain, both at the level of the raw computational resources required, and at the level of user control. An approach

Synthesis using physical modeling has a long history. As computational costs for physical modeling synthesis are often much greater than for conventional synthesis methods, most techniques currently rely on simplifying assumptions. These include digital waveguides, as well as modal synthesis methods. Although such methods are efficient, it can be difficult to approach some of the more detailed behavior

We present research for automatic assessment of pianist hand posture that is intended to help beginning piano students improve their piano-playing technique during practice sessions. To automatically assess a student's hand posture, we propose a system that is able to recognize three categories of postures from a single depth map containing a pianist's hands during performance. This is achieved through

The recent emergence of robot opera, in which robots and robotic entities have served polyvalent and at times ontologically ambiguous roles, has challenged the distinction made by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy between anthropocentric and mechanized eccentric theater, as is outlined in his 1924 essay “Theater, Circus, Variety.” When incorporated into the context of music theater, is the robot dimension

Electronic Music Midwest (EMM) celebrated its 19th annual festival in September of 2019, with three days of engaging electroacoustic music and inspiring collaborations. Hosted at the Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) by KCKCC professor Ian Corbett, who served as both Technical Director and Festival Co-Director, and Kay He, who served as the Creative Director. EMM’s nine concerts showcased

This article deals with a way that algorithmic composition systems can be informed by material realities of musical performance. After a general discussion of the relation of abstract algorithms to concrete materiality, the article focuses on the idea of an instrument's space of possibilities. It briefly discusses a number of compositional approaches that seek to derive musical structure from bodily

Mechatronic instruments can create complex sounds that computers and digital instruments have yet to offer. As a specific example, we explore mechatronic chordophones, which use strings as a sound generator and offer a wide array of parametric affordances. The purpose of this work is to review recent approaches for chordophone design and construction, and present current, state-of-the-art devices.

This selection of music compiled for the readers of the current issue of Computer Music Journal is conceived as an imaginary concert. With a duration of just under 80 minutes, the sonic proceedings, including breaks, reach a length typical for a DVD, a CD, or a concert with electroacoustic music—not too short, not too long. The individual works, with lengths falling between 4 and 15 minutes, are also

This article presents the results of collaboration between a composer and researchers in the context of vocal roughness and composing for voice. Our research focused on parametric control of distortion. Specifically, we present a software device that supports the manipulation and control of vocal roughness in real time, using a method based on amplitude modulation and filtering. The compositional interest

In a concert performance of musique mixte (i.e., music combining electronics with acoustic instruments), the documentation accompanying the score is of great importance. But this information is often missing or, at best, incomplete. Moreover, there has never been a systematic study of this subject. For these reasons, we decided to examine the documentation practices of the electroacoustic repertoire

Electroacoustic music on analog magnetic tape is characterized by several carrier-related specificities that must be considered when creating a copy for digital preservation. The tape recorder needs to be set to the correct speed and equalization, and the magnetic tape could have some intentional or unintentional alterations. During both the creation and the musicological analysis of a digital preservation

Music information retrieval (MIR) has a great potential in musical live coding because it can help the musician–programmer to make musical decisions based on audio content analysis and explore new sonorities by means of MIR techniques. The use of real-time MIR techniques can be computationally demanding and thus they have been rarely used in live coding; when they have been used, it has been with a

We investigate a dynamically adaptive tuning scheme for microtonal tuning of musical instruments, allowing the performer to play music in just intonation in any key. Unlike other methods, which are based on a procedural analysis of the chordal structure, our tuning scheme continually solves a system of linear equations, rather than relying on sequences of conditional if-then clauses. In complex situations

There is interest in our era in the topic of sound spatialization, as evidenced by the writings, compositions, and facilities dedicated to the practice. One frequently expressed goal is to elevate space in importance as a compositional parameter. There are many approaches that make this possible, one of which is to create multichannel compositions for listeners who move physically through the presentation

Our research concerns the development of biocomputers using electronic components grown out of biological material. This article reports the development of a novel biological memristor and an approach to using such biomemristors to build interactive generative music systems. The memristor is an electronic component regarded as a resistor with memory. After an introduction to harnessing the Physarum

This interview sheds light both on a composer and on a hitherto overlooked field, the evolution of electroacoustic music in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, commonly called East Germany). This latter focus is vital insofar as little of it, if anything at all, is included in established histories of electroacoustic music. These typically take Cologne, Paris, or New York, together with the

This article presents a machine-learning technique to analyze and produce statistical patterns in rhythm through real-time observation of human musicians. Here, timbre is considered an integral part of rhythm, as might be exemplified by hand-drum music. Moreover, this article considers challenges (such as mechanical timing delays, that are negligible in digitally synthesized music) that arise when

Innovation and tradition are two fundamental factors in the design of new digital musical instruments. Although apparently mutually exclusive, novelty does not imply a total disconnection from what we have inherited from hundreds of years of traditional design, and the balance of these two factors often determines the overall quality of an instrument. Inspired by this rationale, in this article we

This article presents two methods to generate automatic improvisation using training over multidimensional sequences. We consider musical features such as melody, harmony, timbre, etc., as dimensions. We first present a system combining interpolated probabilistic models with a factor oracle. The probabilistic models are trained on a corpus of musical work to learn the correlation between dimensions

We use one-dimensional coupled map lattices (CMLs) to generate sounds that reflect their spatial organization and temporal evolution from a random initial configuration corresponding to uncorrelated noise. In many instances, the process approaches an equilibrium, which generates a sustained tone. The pitch of this tone is proportional to the lattice size, so the CML behaves like an instrument that

Eduardo Reck Miranda (see Figure 1) is a classically trained composer and artificial intelligence (AI) scientist with an early involvement in electroacoustic and avant-garde pop music. He studied computer science and music in his native Brazil and subsequently took post-graduate degrees at the University of York and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. He held academic positions at universities