Abstract
What would it be like if we could generate, control and transform complex information like quantum mechanics or molecular dynamics the way that a composer or artist creates and transforms a work of art, if we could use our senses to perceive very complex n-dimensional information intuitively and as second nature?
I would like to discuss composing and performing complex systems like quantum mechanics by using the model of music composition and performance. A complex system is an arrangement of a great number of various elements with intricate relationships and interconnections. They are difficult to model and predict. Components of a complex system may appear to act spontaneously such that predicting the outcome of the complete system at any given point of time may be difficult if not impossible. In this respect composing music is analogous to building a complex system. The system changes and unfolds over time at many different levels of temporal and spatial dimensions and the outcome of the total system may not be predictable at various stages of composing the work. As a composer creating these complex systems the creative process involves what I describe as non-linear leaps of intuition. Could these leaps be quantum phase transitions? Let’s explore the possibilities.
Bio
Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on creative computational systems, multi-modal media systems content and facilities design. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California: the Digital Media Innovation Program.
She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. The culmination of Professor Kuchera-Morin’s creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets. Scientifically, the AlloSphere is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture—abstract higher dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow. Artistically, it is an instrument for the creation and performance of avant-garde new works and the development of new modes and genres of expression and forms of immersion-based entertainment. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin earned a Ph.D. in composition from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester in 1984.
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to:
seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
Sketches of Sensorium
Sketches for Sensorium showcases core elements of the late environmental artist Newton Harrison’s (1932 - 2022) long-term project, Sensorium for the World Ocean. It will premiere at the AlloSphere as a satellite to the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art and Technology’s forthcoming exhibition, Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, produced in partnership with the 2024 Getty PST Art: Art and Science Collide initiative. The installation will incorporate immersive audio and visual scientific climate and ocean health data provided by the Ocean Health Index of the Halpern Lab at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
Sketches for Sensorium is a project of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure in collaboration with Virtual Planet Technologies, Almost Human Media, and the AlloSphere Research Group. It will premiere with an original spatialized composition and an interactive data world, following Newton’s wish to impart a sense of hope to audiences.
For more information, please visit:
www.independent.com/2024/09/11/sketches-of-sensorium-part-of-getty-pst-art-at-uc-santa-barbara
allosphere.ucsb.edu/research/sketches_of_sensorium/2024.html
As part of the research team, they wrote the software and created the generative and AI content for the study: "Audio-Visual System to Mitigate the Negative Effects on Stress and Depression in Confined Spaces and Extreme Environments."
The research field relates to neuro-architecture and focuses on Media and Design Interventions in Isolated and Extreme Environments (ICEs), utilizing generative design tools and Artificial Intelligence tools to create virtual environments that aim to reduce the negative psychological impacts of long-term isolation.
Leading the Greek expedition, Architect-Engineers Christina Balomenaki and Efharis Gourounti have made history as the first Greek women researchers to set foot in Antarctica. The research conducted during this mission will contribute to the scientific understanding of human adaptation in extreme environments and strengthen Greece's position in international polar research.
The project is jointly led by Professor Konstantinos-Alketas Oungrinis, Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation; Marianthi Liapi, Research Program Director at the Transformable Intelligent Environments Laboratory (TUC TIE Lab); and Professor Michael Zervakis, Rector of the Technical University of Crete and Director of the DISPLAY Lab at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
www.eurecapro.eu/tuc-scientific-expedition-in-antarctica
The title of the NSF award is Dynamic Control Systems for Manual-Computational Fabrication. Professor Jacobs was awarded the NSF Career Award to further her research in integrating skilled manual and material production with computational fabrication.
The CAREER Program offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Professor Jacobs thanks all of the amazing members the Expressive Computation Lab whose research contributed the intellectual foundations of this award.
NSF link: Dynamic Control Systems for Manual-Computational Fabrication
George Legrady: Scratching the Surface. Digital Pictures from the 1980s to Present.
RCM Galerie, Paris
Tuesday, December 17 2024 to Sunday February 16, 2025
32 rue de Lille, 75007
Tue-Fri 2pm-7pm & by appointment
whitehotmagazine.com/articles/32-rue-de-lille-paris/6789
Dr. Rincon is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the AlloSphere Research Facility at UC Santa Barbara. His interestes include Architectural Design/Engineering, Computational Design and Fabrication, New Media Architectures and Immersive VR Environments.
https://leonardo.info/blog/2025/01/21/recognition-of-leonardos-outstanding-peer-reviewers
α-Forest: An Immersive Sound and Light Journey Through Inner-consciousness Exploration
Production Team: Olifa Hsieh (MAT visiting scholar), Timothy Wood (MAT researcher), and Weihao Qiu (MAT PhD student).
The subconscious is where your intrinsic qualities thrive; where seeds of inspiration reside; and where many impulses, emotions, and thoughts are hidden and never expressed. Sometimes they only appear in dreams.
α-Forest is a participatory immersive theater with healing qualities, created by the following three artists: Olifa Ching-Ying Hsieh, Timothy Wood, and Weihao Qiu. The work integrates electronic sound, interactive design, and AI algorithmic imaging technology to capture the audience’s brainwaves (Electroencephalography, EEG) and collect data on their physical movements, resulting in real-time co-created content. At a residency base offered by the Experimental Forest of National Taiwan University, the artists collected unique forest sounds from a mountainous area in central Taiwan, Nantou. They also visited the region’s indigenous tribe and learned about their culture.
More about the exhibition (PDF)
The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
The Computer Music Tutorial, Second Edition (2023) by Curtis Roads
Curtis Roads, professor in Media Arts and Technology and affiliate faculty in Music at UCSB, has announced the publication of an expanded, updated, and fully revised Second Edition of his textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (2023, The MIT Press, 1257 pages).
Essential and state-of-the-art, The Computer Music Tutorial, Second Edition is a singular text that introduces computer and electronic music, explains its motivations, and puts topics into context. Curtis Roads's step-by-step presentation orients musicians, engineers, scientists, and anyone else new to computer and electronic music.
The new edition continues to be the definitive tutorial on all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, and psychoacoustics, but the second edition also reflects the enormous growth of the field since the book's original publication in 1996. New chapters cover up-to-date topics like virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, and instrument and patch editors. Exhaustively referenced and cross-referenced, the second edition adds hundreds of new figures and references to the original charts, diagrams, screen images, and photographs in order to explain basic concepts and terms.
Features include:
New chapters on virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, instrument and patch editors, and an appendix on machine learning.
Two thousand references support the book's descriptions and point readers to further study.
Mathematical notation and program code examples used only when necessary.
Twenty-five years of classroom, seminar, and workshop use inform the pace and level of the material.
As Prof. Roads states: "I finished writing the first edition in 1993. It finally came out in 1996, the year I joined the UCSB Music faculty as a Visiting Associate Professor. Writing the Second Edition required going through the research literature in the field since 1993. It often felt overwhelming but I just had to keep going. In 2017 I devoted all my creative time to the project. I promised myself I would finish it in 2020, and at 10 PM on 31 December 2020 I finished writing. Time for Champagne! The production process took all of 2021 and most of 2022. In a way it was a perfect project for the pandemic lockdown, as it gave me a daily purpose in a time of isolation. The textbook has been the core of my teaching at UCSB."
An article about the release of the 2nd edition was published in the UCSB Current:
The book can be found at MIT Press:
mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044912/the-computer-music-tutorial
Professor Roads's previous books include Microsound (2001, The MIT Press) and Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (2015, Oxford University Press).
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Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at UCSB is a transdisciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. Created by faculty in both the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science, MAT offers an unparalleled opportunity for working at the frontiers of art, science, and technology, where new art forms are born and new expressive media are invented.
In MAT, we seek to define and to create the future of media art and media technology. Our research explores the limits of what is possible in technologically sophisticated art and media, both from an artistic and an engineering viewpoint. Combining art, science, engineering, and theory, MAT graduate studies provide students with a combination of critical and technical tools that prepare them for leadership roles in artistic, engineering, production/direction, educational, and research contexts.
The program offers Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Technology. MAT students may focus on an area of emphasis (multimedia engineering, electronic music and sound design, or visual and spatial arts), but all students should strive to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and work with other students and faculty in collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects and courses.