Other artists include Carrie Bodle, Jacob C. Hammes, Tesia Kosmalski, Lou Mallozzi, Shannon McMullen/Fabian Winkler, Stephanie Rowden, and Jesse Seay.

Waveforms will open to the public with a reception Friday, October 21, 6:00 – 8:00pm and be on view through Friday, November 18, 2011. An “illustrated conversation” (symposium) will be held Friday, October 21 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm followed by a performance by Chicago sound artist Lou Mallozzi from 4:00 – 6:00pm. For full details, see the Grunwald Gallery of Art.

My chapter ‘The Composition-Instrument: emergence, improvisation and interaction in games and new media’ appeared in the book From Pac-Man to Pop Music: interactive audio in games and new media, edited by Karen Collins in 2007.

This chapter is now available by permission of the Publishers of ‘The Composition-Instrument: emergence, improvisation and interaction in games and new media’, in From Pac-Man to Pop Music: interactive audio in games and new media, ed. K Collins, (Aldershot etc.: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 103-123.Copyright © 2007.

Download the PDF

Citation:
Herber, N 2007, ‘The Composition-Instrument: emergence, improvisation and interaction in games and new media’, in From Pac-Man to Pop Music: interactive audio in games and new media, ed. K Collins, Ashgate, Hampshire; Burlington, VT.

Deadline for Proposals: 1 April 2011

The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio is under contract at Oxford University Press.

Through a collection of chapters on interactivity in music and sound, the book is meant to offer a new set of analytical tools for the growing field of interactive audio.  A series of related questions drive the book: What makes interactive audio different from non-interactive audio?  Where does interacting with audio fit into our understanding of sound and music in media? Where is interactive audio heading in the future? And how do we begin to approach interactive audio from a theoretical perspective?

It is our belief that interacting with sound is fundamentally different from just listening to sound. The physical agency and control of interactivity adds a level of engagement and involvement with sound that alters the way we experience sound in games, interfaces, products, toys, environments (virtual and real) and art. There are considerable consequences of interactivity when it comes not only to audience, but also to practice, distribution, tools, and copyright law.

We encourage proposals that raise questions and explore new theories about how scholars and practitioners can approach interactive sound. A handbook chapter should make new and original arguments in a new piece composed specifically for the handbook.   It may be a survey what you believe to be the essential issues and questions in the field and offer a contemporary critical analysis of these.

Potential topic areas include (but are not limited to):

• Composition theory and practice (including improvisation, music-based games, virtual worlds, mobile music)
• Sound design theory and practice (including sounds, interface, branding, web, sound art, interactive spaces, virtual worlds, toys, pinball)
• Voice interaction
• Mixing, implementation of interactive audio
• Playback and distribution systems
• Interactive audio tools (composition, synthesis, note tracking, etc.)
• Distribution, copyright and legal issues

Submission details: Chapter proposals of about 500 words and short bio (name, affiliation) in English to be submitted by April 1, 2011 to the editors at one of the email addresses below. Please address any questions or queries to the editors at one of the email addresses below.

Decisions will be made by June 1, 2011. Upon acceptance, full guidelines will be furnished. Completed chapters of about 6000 words are to be submitted by June 1, 2012.

Editors: Karen Collins (collinsk@uwaterloo.ca), Bill Kapralos (bill.kapralos@uoit.ca) and Holly Tessler (h.tessler@neu.edu)

I wrote a paper “Dérive en Mille Sons” for the 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. It has just been re-published as “Dérive entre Mille Sons: a psychogeographic approach to mobile music and mediated interaction” in Technoetic Arts: a journal of speculative research. Much thanks to journal editor Roy Ascott, publishers Intellect, and Guillaume Ansart for his help with a more precise title translation.

Abstract: Dérive entre Mille Sons (Drifting in a Thousand Sounds) is a musical work that uses mobile media technology to artistically examine the relationship between music and the listener. Contemporary media technologies, be they at work, home or in your pocket, emphasize playback. These devices are designed to facilitate the storage and retrieval of pre-made media assets. This work leverages the processing capabilities that rest dormant within these technologies. Drawing from the writings of Guy Debord and the situationist/surrealist practice of the dérive, ‘drifting’ becomes a metaphor for instrumental performance in which the openness and emergence of interactivity is articulated through sound, as music.

Technoetic Arts requires a subscription. Check to see if your library has online access or print copies of the journal. My original Spark paper is available online.

MP3 sample of a Dérive recorded in July 2010

The Syncretic Sense

4 April – 24 May 2009

Plymouth Arts Centre

The first UK retrospective exhibition of the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott, curated in collaboration with i-DAT (Institute for Digital Art and Technology, University of Plymouth).

Long before email and the internet, Roy Ascott started using online computer networks as an art medium and coined the term telematic art. Since the 1960s he has been a pioneer of art, which brought together the science of cybernetics with elements of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Parallel to his artwork, Roy Ascott is a highly acclaimed teacher and theorist of art pedagogy.

This exhibition explores the influences and rhetoric of Roy Ascott’s work, mapping the impact, history and development of technology and looking to the future of Web2 and Second life. Roy Ascott sees telematic art as the transformation of the viewer into an active participant in creating the artwork, which remains in process throughout its duration.

Converting an existing web site to a blog may seem to go against the core ideas of blogging, but this redesign process placed its emphasis on looking forward rather than backward. All entries from the “old” site have been posted without the option to leave a comment. It’s not that feedback and discussion are unwelcome, but most of the older matieral links to work that is done and finished. I’m ready to move on. Plus, this scheme allows me to start new conversations about current projects and launch the site with the most relevant details up front.

Launch first study: Dérive
Launch second study: Mazes

This research has taken me to some unexpected and very interesting places. “Psychogeography” in the writings of Guy Debord (1955) and the idea of “city imageability” by Kevin Lynch (1960) have helped me come to the latent realization of a conceptual spatiality in the way I organize sounds in a musical work. My approach is to first conceptualize the core ideas of a project as different sounds. I then arrange these within a conceptual territory (similar to Henri Lefebvre’s socially produced space (1991)) that is then given over to exploration. Debord’s psychogeography, Lynch’s imageability, and Lefebvre’s social space are all constructions of consciousness. They may make reference to actual physical space, but they are immaterial. These spaces are only real to us as a means of facilitating communication and understanding. I am interested in making music that can be experienced in this way. By conceiving of a subject spatially I find the freedom to explore that subject in all its nuance and complexity. When rooted in sound, spatial concepts can acknowledge potentiality. Movement through space then becomes a kind of instrumental performance where the openness and emergence of true interactivity is articulated through sound, as music.

Launch “Clapping Music”

Note: due to errors with onSoundComplete() introduced in Flash Player 9 “Clapping Music” Variation no longer plays correctly. Thanks to these guys, repairs have been initiated, but my file won’t work without a major overhaul…

Launch Tonal Clusters

Launch MollyZ music interface (click the colored buttons on each finger to navigate)