Alain Bonardi

The preservation, emulation, migration, and virtualization of live electronics for performing arts: An overview of musical and technical issues

Centers for electronic music creation now face strong difficulties to reperform important works considered as belonging to their repertoire. They realize the fragility of works based on electronic modules, subject to technology changes. Sustainability can be achieved in four different ways that are examined in this article: preservation, emulation, migration and virtualization. We discuss these issues, showing the first steps towards solutions at Ircam in the framework of the European project Caspar.

Composing an Interactive Virtual Opera: The Virtualis Project

Designing the computer-based interactive opera Virtualis has led the authors to develop new tools for working with music, especially in three-dimensional spaces designed for representing and manipulating it, as well as an interaction model based on physical forces rather than on the users intentions. Although opera and computing are two dissimilar interactive situations, the software environment presented in this article is intended (1) to combine them through the generalization of certain operatic functional relationships and (2) to offset the relative absence of the spectator from the classical performance of drama.

Similarity in computational music: a musicologist's approach

The authors examine a number of methods for text processing, principally coming from computational biology, and examine in which manner they can apply to musical analysis. Then, we propose a number of modifications that can be made to these methods to allow for a better application to musical analysis. To this end, we first examine the practices of musical analysis. We focus on the field of extraction of motives. A common approach to this problem is to consider repetitions; whenever some part of the musical text is repeated, it can be considered as a motive. Detecting motives can either be based on a perfect match, or on inexact matching. To this end, the concept of similarity is introduced and analysed, and its meaning is defined in the scope of musical analysis. We also deal with the problem of the representation (or encoding) of the musical text. The role of encoding and its consequences on the application of algorithms is investigated.

Copier/coller, ou recopier ? La transmission entre artistes des œuvres musicales avec dispositif numérique

Dans cet article, nous nous interessons a la transmission active entre artistes des oeuvres musicales faisant appel au numerique. Dans le contexte actuel, le numerique envahit le domaine de la creation, proposant des dispositifs ne faisant plus appel aux supports culturels traditionnels tels que la partition. Toutefois les oeuvres ainsi creees sont immediatement soumises a l’obsolescence technologique ; le passage de l’oeuvre d’un artiste a l’autre ne peut se reduire au copier/coller, mais doit faire circuler des intentions. Un nouveau visage de l’informatique apparait ici : elle n’opere plus seulement au niveau des outils permettant la creation de l’objet artistique mais bien comme garant de sa perennite et surtout de son aptitude a etre assimile et joue par d’autres createurs.

Interactions médiatisées sur scène

Prenant acte de la crise des representations liees a la « graphosphere » et de la montee en puissance des representations multimedia, constatant l’emergence de l’informatique temps reel dans les arts de la scene, nous avons mene notre recherche depuis plusieurs annees sur le theme de la mediation des technologies de l’information et de la communication dans l’ecriture des spectacles vivants (theâtre et opera, principalement), et leur recreation par les spectateurs. Notre perspective est la conception d’environnements informatiques pour la creation artistique scenique et sa reception, destines a trois communautes d’utilisateurs : les createurs d’œuvres, les performeurs sur scene, et le public au sens large.

DESIGNING A LIBRARY FOR COMPUTING [PERFORMANCES] WITH WORDS

In this paper we focus on the interaction between performers and machines using linguistic tools. Indeed the Computing with Words (CW) framework is well-suited to human performances when linguistically expressed. We thus address the problem of designing a library that implements such concepts in the performing arts framework. The proposal takes place in the Max/MSP software where our patches have been included. A concrete example is given about how to use them to qualify performers observations in the theatre play Les petites absences.

Will software modules for performing arts be sustainable

When moving from hardware device to computers on stage at the end of the 1970psilas, artists did not realize they would sometimes be unable to reperform their works twenty years later. Many of them now use software modules that face important sustainability problems. In the framework of Caspar European project, the on line service team at Ircam proposes a series of new tools to accompany the maintenance of software modules required by performers on stage.

ReCollection: A disposal/formal requirement-based tool to support collection making

Modern Information Science deals with tasks which include classifying, searching and browsing large numbers of digital objects. The problem today is that our computerized tools are poorly adapted to our needs as they are often too formal: we illustrate this matter in the first section of this article with the example of multimedia collections. We then propose a software tool, ReCollection, for dealing with digital collections in a less formal and more sustainable manner. Finally, we explain how our software design is strongly backed up by both artistic and psychological knowledge concerning the ancient human activity of collecting, which we will see can be described as a metaphor for categorization in which two irreducible cognitive modes are at play: aspectual similarity and spatio-temporal proximity.

Human Actors and Virtual Agents Playing Together to Transform Stage Direction Practices

In this article, we show how approaches based on interactive data-mining may inspire new conceptions of theatre staging. They may be applied thanks to virtual agent systems interacting with comedians. We then give an example of such a theatre production, La Traversee de la nuit.

Knowledge Discovery as Applied to Music: Will Music Web Retrieval Revolutionize Musicology?

The present authors share the characteristic of a significant participation in R&D projects for designing and implementing interactive systems in the field of digital music: tools for computer-based assistance to browsing sound and music data, assisted analysis and commenting systems for musical works, or assisted interactive environments for the creation of interactive virtual works. In spite of the diversity of their experience and practice, the authors are aiming at renewing the theoretical framework of musicology, which is working in the background of their creation or engineering activities, since a massive digital inscription of music allows its objects to be handled by programs, or even to be transformed into programs executable by other programs. Such a framework is only a model, which functions only if it allows us to interpret artefacts and phenomena, producing at the same moment a consistent musicological language, a space for the categorisation and evaluation of realisations, as well as a number of objectives for technological deployment and theoretical evolution. But, within a research teams, we also require that these models could provide capitalisation structures for experience, know-how and acquired knowledge.