Audio Developer Conference (ADC'17) Keynote

Re-visiting the Distributed Immersive Performance (DIP) Project as part of the keynote at the Audio Developer Conference (ADC'17 | JUCE) at Code Node in London (13-15 November 2017).  Back then, we ran some experiments testing musicians' tolerance to network latency when performing together over the Internet.  It was interesting to re-visit this work in the current context, when mobile app and audio tool developers (Smule, ROLI, Google Android, Facebook) still grapple with this problem.

I am grateful to Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut for the kind invitation to speak at ADC'17 | JUCE and for the opportunity to meet this growing community of audio developers, which includes a good number of graduates of our Masters degree programme in Sound and Music Computing at QMUL. It was also a pleasure to meet two of the other keynote speakers, Jeannie Yang (product leader and innovator at Smule) and Julian Storer (head of software architecture at ROLI). Many audio companies were represented at the conference, including Apple, which was looking to recruit > 40 engineeers for its Core Audio teams and Interactive Media Group!


Elaine Chew - Keynote: The Human in the Musical Loop

Music we hear is most often made by humans, directly or indirectly, for consumption by humans. In a series of anecdotes, we consider the imagination and sensory constraints of the human mind when creating and apprehending music. From the architecting of large-scale forms and structures in human-computer improvisation to the limits of ensemble interaction in distributed immersive performance, experiments reveal the workings of the musician’s mind in motion. The art of crafting musical experiences has been described as the choreography of expectation. Evidence of this work is made visual in expectation violations that generate musical humour, time delays that heighten anticipation, and tension modulations that create narrative interest. Finally, together with the modulation of tension, we examine how and if repetition structure imbues coherence in computer composition.