1,354,516 research outputs found
Aural Diversity: General Introduction
No full textThis introductory chapter sets out the scope of Aural Diversity, with reference to acoustic environments and soundscape, music, and musicology. It challenges the tacit assumptions of normal hearing that underpin the majority of sound-related disciplines. It surveys existing literature in a range of sound-based disciplines. It describes the Aural Diversity project and summarises the various parts and chapters of this book. It proposes Aural Diversity as a paradigmatic shift, asking the question: whose ear has primacy
The orchestra: a user's manual
No full textThe Orchestra: A User's Manual is one element of The Sound Exchange, a pioneering web development by the Philharmonia Orchestra. The aim of the user's manual is to provide information about the orchestra, orchestration, composition and instruments, for the benefit of anybody with an interest in the subject. Unlike conventional text-based orchestration manuals, this features movies of players explaining relevant aspects of their instruments and technique, audio clips and samples of the instruments, and illustrative music from the repertoire drawn from the Philharmonia's postwar recorded archive. The Philharmonia is the most recorded orchestra in history and from its birth in 1945 has been associated with new technologies. This use of the internet to convey information is entirely consistent with its desire to open up access to all areas of orchestral life and music-making.
The User's Manual will be useful to anyone with an interest in orchestras and orchestral music. It will also have a specific relevance to composers, orchestrators, students, and anyone learning to play an instrument. By asking players themselves to explain the nature and technical limitations of their instruments it is intended that a realistic picture of the orchestra will emerge. A recurring feature of the video clips is that, while certain techniques are a theoretical possibility, in practice they are often limited or even unsatisfactory. By acquainting the orchestrator with these, it is hoped that much time-wasting in rehearsal can be avoided! In addition, illustrative clips from the archive give actual sounding examples of good practice in orchestration
Adventures in creative computing
No full textIn this lecture, Professor Hugill will explore a wide range of topics within Creative Computing: from audio-only gaming to pataphysical programming, from machine consciousness to digital opera
Secret Garden
No full textSecret Garden is an interactive iPad Opera/Ballet, recreating a contemporary version of the Eden myth in an urban environment. The work was conceived and developed by Martin Rieser and Andrew Hugill, from original poems by Rieser set to music by Hugill. The interactive installation was a collaboration between Rieser, Hugill, Lee Scott and a company of dancers (Barnes and Hansford), animators (Tillingate and Shaw), programmers (Tatham) and technicians (Howell).
The physical installation comprises eleven iPads mounted in a circle, acting as virtual viewports into the 'secret garden' (notionally Eden). Changing real-time 3D panoramic landscapes are combined with motion-captured avatars. The viewer’s interaction with the screens triggers songs and dance. The viewports may be seen in any order, and users experience 3D perspective with parallax vision-shift through a manipulation of the native face-tracking features of the iPad which software detects head movements and adjusts the scene’s field of view in real-time
Ways Through a Field: 13 Lyrics
No full textPiers Hugill's beautiful and poignant rewriting of the lines of field, poetry and process. Both surprising and densely material, this is a text that encounters within its own processes the performance of field as both place and concept. This is the first in a new series of Veer publications emphasising a responsiveness and an immediacy of samizdat reportage
Il Canzoniere: a Book of Songs I-V
No full textPiers Hugill’s sonnets work their way up from one- to two- to three- to four- to five-word lines. This complexly incremental poetry makes the form strange, unbinding its energy by bringing to the surface the spectral ordering and ranking that goes on, concealed, inside the consecrated forms of poetry. These poems give a contemporary energy to the sonnet form
Percy Grainger: pioneer of electronic music
No full textHugill explains the scope of Grainger’s quest to realize a music free from limitations such as the tempered scale and, at the same time, from the necessity of the performer as interpreter. He depicts Grainger as an artisan, determined to build the necessary machinery by hand, and as an unrepentant melodist, albeit one who prescribed a music of continuously gliding tones. As modest as many of Grainger’s inventions were – and they varied in complexity from a set of swanee whistles to a collection of sine wave oscillators – Hugill finds that he anticipated such modern devices as multitrack recording, sequencing and timbral synthesis. Although Grainger had little contact with likeminded composers such as Varèse and seemed to prefer to work in isolation, a clear line can be drawn from his experiments through the work of Xenakis to the hacker working at a domestic computer today
Pataphysics: a useless guide
No full textOf all the French cultural exports over the last 150 years or so, 'pataphysics--the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions--has proven to be one of the most durable. Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, 'pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of 'pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously. Drawing on more than twenty-five years' research, Hugill maps the 'pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects 'pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of 'pataphysical history. In a Jarryesque touch, he provides these in reverse chronological order, beginning with a survey of 'pataphysics in the digital age and working backward to Jarry and beyond. He looks specifically at the work of Jean Baudrillard, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, J. G. Ballard, Asger Jorn, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Prevert, Antonin Artaud, Rene Clair, the Marx Brothers, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and many others
Pataphysics: A Useless Guide
No full textOf all the French cultural exports over the last 150 years or so, ‘pataphysics--the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions--has proven to be one of the most durable. Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, ‘pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of ‘pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously.
Drawing on more than twenty-five years’ research, Hugill maps the ‘pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects ‘pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of ‘pataphysical history. In a Jarryesque touch, he provides these in reverse chronological order, beginning with a survey of ‘pataphysics in the digital age and working backward to Jarry and beyond. He looks specifically at the work of Jean Baudrillard, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, J. G. Ballard, Asger Jorn, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Prévert, Antonin Artaud, René Clair, the Marx Brothers, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and many others
The Imaginary Voyage (web opera)
No full text'The Imaginary Voyage' is an interactive opera, conceived for the web. It was created during KTP (funded by the TSB) with The Opera Group. The Associate was Lee Scott (supervised by Hugill).
The opera deploys a new technology called The Syzygy Surfer (Hugill, A & Hendler, J 2013) that navigates 'creatively' repositories of Image (still and moving), sound, and text according to principles of both The Semantic Web and Pataphysics.
This was subsequently built by a team headed by Hugill, with Professor Hongji Yang and three PhD students.
The opera was conceived as a series of ‘islands’ that may be visited by the user. The narrative derives from the navigation “from Paris to Paris by sea” in Alfred Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, pataphysician (1911). It is expandable: new islands may be added over time. Five islands have so far been made
- …
