(Canceled) Digital Culture Speaker Series: Listening to Data as Complex Networks - The Hearing of Information
This event has been canceled.
As a member of the HUB, Scott Gresham-Lancaster is an early pioneer of networked computer music and has developed many "cellphone operas." He has created a series of co-located international Internet performances with Pauline Oliveros and others. He has worked developing audio and music for several games and interactive products. The focus of his current research is on the unrealized potential of "Listening to Data” or sonification. He has decades of experience as a designer of both hardware and software for innovative new music and sound devices and techniques. At Interval Research, he was a designer of new interactive sound software-driven hardware. He worked on innovations in game audio design at several gaming companies including Sega, Maxim and Electronic Arts. He has been a design consultant and collaborator with some of the top contemporary artists.
The talk given by Scott Gresham-Lancaster will be focusing on the general topic of sonification and “Ways of Listening for Information.” I will be focusing on the non-data aspect of the sort of listening needed with the studies of acoustic ecology. The many types of listening.
My latest work has been focused around the creation of acoustic ecologies from data. Audio virtual realities can be created where the soundscape is generated by some data set, most commonly a complex network.
For decades, with the ZKM Gigahertz prize-winning computer music ensemble the HUB, we have been creating soundscapes and music from the specific architecture with interactive network structures built from recipes and agreements, but they get called compositions. There is often some confusion, even among those of us performing the music, between process and improvisation. The process of the network in this context is unlike any other musical performance genre. We react to the behavior of the network as a construct in the musical flow. Listening between the result of the interaction and the emergence of new auditory moments.
This is done using computer network music techniques that will be discussed and requires the types of listening that are needed to understand any acoustic ecology. In this way, the interaction with this new "sonic network” which is created by these processes, makes a way of hearing the dynamics of the whole data set by "Listening to Data as Complex Networks."