Notes for Lighting and Rhythm Residency Nov (13)17-26

Chris, Garrett, Julian, Omar, Chris Z, Evan, Byron, Prashan, Althea, Mike B, Ian S, Aniket, et al.

This is a preliminary note to sound out who is down for what for the coming residency on Lighting and Rhythm (LRR).  

The goal is to continue work on temporality from the IER last Feb March, and this time really seriously experimentally mucking with your sense of time by modulating lighting or your vision as you physically move.  First-person experience

NOT

 designing for spectator
.    

We need to identify a more rigorous scientific direction for this residency.  Having been asking people for ideas — I’ll go ahead and decide soon!

Please think carefully about:


The idea is to invite Chris and his students to work on site in the iStage and have those of us who are hacking time via lighting play in parallel with Chris.   Pavan & students and interested scientist/engineers should be explicitly invited to kibbutz.


Lighting and Rhythm 
The way things are shaping up — we are gathering some gadgets to prepare for .

Equipment requested (some already installed thanks to Pete Ozzie and TML)
Ozone media system in iStage
Chris Ziegler’s Wald Forest system (MUST be able to lift off out of way as necessary within minutes — can an inexpensive motorized solution be installed ?)
3 x 6 ? grid of light fixtures with RGB gels, beaming onto floor
IR illuminators and IR-pass camera for tracking
Robe Robin MiniMe Moving Light/ Projector 
Hazer (?)
Strobe + diffuser (bounce?)
+ Oculus DK1, (Mike K knows )
+ Google Glass (Chris R can ask Cooper , Ruth @ CSI)

We need to make sure we have a few rich instruments (NOT one-off hacked tableaux!) coded up ahead of time -- hence the call to Max-literate students who would like to try out what we have in order to adapt them for playing in the LRR by November.

Note 1:
Let’s be sure to enable multiplex of iStage to permit two other groups:
• Video portal - windows : Prashan, Althea Pergakis, Jen Weiler
•  shadow puppetting, Prashan working with Byron

Note 2:
Garth’s Singing Bowls are there.  Think about how to integrate such field effects.
Mike can you provide a Max patch to control them — ideally OSC -- but at least to fade up/down without having to physically touch any of the SB hardware.

Note 3:
This info should go on the lightingrhythm.weebly.com  experiment website that the LRR leads should create Monday unless someone has a better solution — it must be editable by the researchers and experiment leads themselves.  Clone from http://improvisationalenvironments.weebly.com !

Xin Wei

On Sep 4, 2014, at 8:53 AM, Adrian Freed <adrian@adrianfreed.com> wrote:

I am afraid I can't be very helpful here. I don't do MIR work myself. The field for the most part does
offline analyses of large data sets using musicologically naive Western musical concepts of pitch and rhythm.

One exception to the realtime/offline choice is from our most recent graduate student to work on the
beat tracking problem, Eric Battenburg. Here is his dissertation: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jf2g52n#page-3
There is interesting machine learning going on in that work but it presumes that one can make a reliable
onset detector which is a reasonable (but narrow) assumption for certain percussion sounds and drumming practice.

The questions of phase and "in sync." raised below interest me greatly. There are is no ground truth to the beat
(up or down or on the "beat"). I remember being shocked recently to discover that a bunch of research on dance/music entrainment relied as a reference on hand-labeled visual beat markings from "expert listeners in the computer music lab next door" . Various concepts such as "perceptual onset time" have been developed to sufficiently complicate this question and explain the difficulty people have observing concensus on musical event timing and relating a particular beat measurement to features of the acoustic signals.
Even a "simple" case, bass and drums, is extremely difficult to unravel. The bass being a low frequency instrument complicates the question of "onset" or moment of the beat. The issue of who in this pair is determining the tempo
is challenging and the usual handwaving that the tempo is an emergent coproduction of the performers is not very helpful in itself in elaborating the process or identifying which features of the action and sound are relevant to the entrainment. My guess is that we will find models like the co-orbital arrangment of Saturn's moons Epimetheus and Janus.
What are the system identification tools to reveal these sorts of entrainment structures? Can this be done from the sound
alone or do we have to model  embodied motions that produce the sounds?


NOTE from Adrian XW Mike Krzyzaniak on Percival-Tzanetakis Tempo Estimator :

On Sep 3, 2014, at 6:38 AM, Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:

Phase: I’m interested in both the convention of syncing on peaks
but also in the larger range of temporal entrainment phenomena that Adrian has identified with suggestive terminology.
In practice, I would apply several different measures in parallel.

Yes, it would be great to have a different measure.  For example, one that detects when a moderate number (dozens to 100) of irregular rhythms have larger number of simultaneous peaks.  This is a weaker criterion than being in phase, and does not require periodicity.

Xin Wei