Array, the journal of the International Computer Music Association
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About When We Collide: A Generative and Collaborative Sound Installation
Get PDFThe idea for When We Collide sprang from Douglas Hofstader’s metaphor of creativity as the meeting between records and record players, appearing in his 1979 book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". In our case, the records are soundfiles, whilst the record player is a generative system. The player analyses, selects, mixes, transforms, and spatialises the material created by the composers (monophonic and quadraphonic soundfiles). The system negotiates between algorithms that tend towards monotony (in terms of loudness, spatialisation, and frequency spectrum) and algorithms that tend towards variability (in terms of soundfiles, transformations, and scenes). In a nutshell, the installation is a space where sonic ideas collide and co-exist
CD Reviews
Get PDFMaria Panayotova-Martin, Natasha Barrett: IsostasieIvica Ico Bukvic, Eric Chasalow: Left to His Own DevicesRobert Denham, Elizabeth McNutt: Pipewrenc
Book Review
Get PDFJoseph W. Hupchick: Arun Chandra, ed. When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün
The Language of Dance: Testing a Model of Cross-Modal Communication in the Performing Arts
Get PDFIntegration between the senses is an intrinsic part of the human condition. Many forms of artistic expression make use of these sensory alliances, for example, the expression of rhythm and melody in dance. To test whether performers can effectively communicate information from one sensory modality (hearing) into another (vision), we asked one experienced dancer to perform dance-motions to the sounds of meaningless speech, and asked junior dancers to guess which dance motions were produced in response to which sounds. The junior dancers were substantially better than chance in the guessing task, suggesting that the dance performer successfully captured acoustic information about the identity of the speech sounds in her motions.
We also found that dance experience did not predict performance in the task, suggesting that sensory congruence may not be learned through practice, but may be shared among the general population. However, a subset of dancers were much better than the main group, suggesting that sensory congruence may be differentially distributed through the population. This fits well with a model in which the strength of sensory connectivity differs across the population, and in which the creative arts attracts those individuals for whom the intrinsic links between the senses are experienced more powerfully
An Implicit Association Test on Audio-Visual Cross-Modal Correspondences
Get PDFAutomatic connections between sounds and visual shapes have been documented for some time (c.f., Spence, 2011). We replicated audiovisual correspondences with simple linguistic sounds /i/ and /u/, this time produced in the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, using a modified version of the implicit association test (IAT). Although congruent blocks were significantly faster than incongruent ones (p < .001), no effect of tone congruence was observed. Since tone was an unattended stimulus dimension, we argue that attention modulates sensory congruence in implicit association tasks of this nature. 
Colors in Silence – The Journey of a Synesthete in Understanding the Senses
Get PDFThis paper will explore how a synesthete, RC, perceives colors, shapes, and textures in silence. RC has sound-to-color synesthesia, where at least one color is associated with each pitch on the Western music scale. Listening to silence strips all sound down to the bare minimum in terms of color or texture. As discovered through weekly meditation in a “Deep Listening” class, RC places a pitch to everything at least audible when plunged into silence, trying hard to capture the colors of every available sound. The silence also forces a more pronounced tactile sense that RC tries to grasp together with the colors. Every experience with the sound however, is present but muddled, and difficult to understand. Silence becomes an uncomfortable world of uncertainty and it becomes vital to grasp the visual and tactile nuances that are a part of it. This paper reflects RC’s progression through silence towards an understanding of her senses. What is silence? And how does the synesthete grapple with it