Flying Sonics! is the result of a collaborative effort between the School of Engineering and the Thornton School of Music made possible by an Arts Initiative faculty collaboration grant.

The event will showcase state-of-the-art Immersive Audio technology together with live electro-acoustic performance in real-time human computer interaction. The immersive audio technology is capable of creating and manipulating spatialized sounds for multiple listeners in real-time settings. The compositions featured will use some combination of pre-processed and interactive sounds rendered for 10.2 audio channels. In addition, the performers will combine composed music with free-form improvisations based on the musical contexts generated by the spatialized sounds.

Our goal is to use computers and immersive audio technology in meaningful ways to challenge human musicianship, in composition and in performance, so as to push the limits of the musical possibilities engendered by the immersive audio reality. In this augmented reality, the evolution of the pieces are now dependent on real-time musical decision-making carried out in an expanded decision space -- with the added dimension of immersive space.

The immersive audio rendering technology developed over the past five years at the Integrated Media Systems Center's Immersive Audio Lab has reached a level of maturity that allows it to be used in real-time settings. Software modules using this technology have been developed for industry-standard music mixing and editing applications. The present technology is capable of localizing sound and maneuvering it in space to create the illusion of movement and space using multichannel signal processing. The algorithms produce spatial effects that can be experienced accurately by multiple listeners. This technology was recently used by Herbie Hancock to animate the instruments in a two-channel recording of his piece "The Butterfly" so that the flute solo at the end was transformed into a moving soundstream that circled overhead then flitted away.

The featured compositions in Flying Sonics! will contain pre-processed immersive audio in some pieces and immersive audio rendered in real time in others. All pieces will contained performer improvisations to varying extents within the framework of some music that has been previously composed/sequenced as well as some immersive audio captured and rendered in real-time. The musical styles of the pieces are a blend of classical, contemporary, jazz and popular idioms, and the presentations will be a mix of composed and improvised music. The human performers will be basing their musical decisions on the contexts generated around them, some of the parameters of which will be fixed whilst others will depend on live performance data involving multiple ensemble players generated in real space in real-time. Both humans and computers will be challenged in ways before unknown.

Spatial music is not a new concept. Polychoral music employing multiple choirs in different parts of a cathedral by composers such as Gabrieli date back to the Renaissance period. In Ives' Three Places in New England, he depicts two marching bands approaching each other from different directions playing different pieces. One of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners and Santa Barbara resident, Henry Brant, is one of the pioneers of spatial music in twentieth century America. In his compositions, Brant positions players in different parts of the hall so that music would come from all directions. It is inevitable that with the advent of spatial audio, composers would strive to incorporate such technologies into their new compositions. Most recently, in November 2001, the Department of Music and Center For Research in Electronic Art Technology at UC Santa Barbara produced a concert of Visible Music utilizing an orchestra of loudspeakers.

Interactive music systems are an artefact of the advances in computing power, and can be traced back to the 1970s and early 1980s. Compositions dating back to this time include Barry Vercoe's pioneering works integrating computers and live instruments, and Pierre Boulez's (b. 1925) Repons (1981) for orchestra and computer-generated sound. More recently, Tod Machover's Brain Opera (1996) integrates gesture and sound, with future extensions allowing visitors to blend their favorite music into the evolving composition. Last year, Robert Rowe's Machine Musicianship outlined recent advances in the integration of cognitive models in interactive human-computer systems for composition and performance. We close this synopsis with a quote from Rowe's book (p.5):

"I believe that if computers interact with people in a musically meaningful way, that experience will bolster and extend the musicianship already fostered by traditional forms of music education. Ultimately, the goal must be to enrich and expand human musical culture."

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chew
kyriakakis
thurmond
april 2002