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code-warrior / uis-proposal

A grant proposal to teach a NIME-like course at The University of Hartford by Spencer Bambrick (The Hartt School [Music]) and Roy Vanegas (College of Arts & Sciences [Computing Sciences]).
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Disciplinary Contributions #3

Open code-warrior opened 4 years ago

sbambrick1217 commented 4 years ago

Thoughts for interdisciplinary contributions:

sbambrick1217 commented 4 years ago

Specific Questions to Answer:

  1. What disciplines will contribute to this course?
  2. In what specific ways will the course draw on those disciplinary perspectives?
  3. What assumptions, methodologies, concepts, or knowledge from those disciplines will be emphasized in the course?
  4. What similarities and differences among those disciplines make for effective contributions to the course?

(Answers Posted Below)

sbambrick1217 commented 4 years ago

  1. This course will involve many contributive disciplines. According to a 2017 paper detailing the state of the NIME course taught at Stanford (which we will use as a starting point for our own course outline) there are five areas of interdisciplinary, interdependent subject matter: 

    1. Electronics (electronic hardware and sensors)
2. Computer Coding (Arduino, Max/Jitter, Processing)
3. Sound Design (synthesis, audio effects, and audio signal flow)
4. Fabrication (materials and strategies for robust physical design)
5. Product Design (designing instruments that engage significant questions of interaction design                              
       within the realm of musical instruments).

This course taught at Stanford is however a 10-week course, and ours will be 14 weeks. Therefore we have the bandwidth to add on a number of useful elements to this course. We will add two more disciplines to that factor into the course:

    6. Electronic Music Composition (compositional techniques for electronic music, and structure
            and form analysis)
    7. Graphic Scores (creation and notation)
    8. Documentation

We believe these added disciplines will make this course even more applicable to the professional and artistic lives of the students that take it.

  1. We’ll take each discipline in turn:

    1. Electronics - this course will begin with a theoretical and practical foundation in hardware electronics. The focus will mostly be on the Arduino microprocessor and a variety of sensors, but can be expanded to include existing hardware such as the Xbox Kinect, Playstation Move, and Wii Controllers. Simple circuitry will be taught using breadboards and eventually students will move onto soldering their own circuits.
    2. Computer Coding - the course will require basic computer coding. There course will be open to any language that will best suit the needs of each student, but the most logical starting points will be Arduino, Processing, and Max. Arduino is an open-source platform for electronics, with a relatively quick learning curve. Students will use Arduino to build the basic electronic components of their NIME (I.e. sensors and LEDs, etc.). Processing is an open-source programming language built for artists and musicians. Processing will be used to send and receive data from Arduino sensors, and to add interactivity to each student’s project. Max is a visual object oriented language with a focus on A/V interactivity. Max can be used for the same things that Processing can, but because it is built for A/V workflows it will most likely be used primarily as a sound engine for the NIMEs, and for real-time interactive DSP (digital signal processing).
    3. Sound Design - sound design is a broad discipline, but to put it narrowly we will cover topics in sound design to teach students how to shape the sound that will be produced by their NIME. More importantly, this discipline will allow students to create sound from scratch, and make it musically expressive, which is the goal with every NIME.
    4. Fabrication - this discipline will be drawn on as a “catch-all” for logistical issues encountered during the process of creating a physical design for a NIME. For example a student might have a hard time fitting the necessary wires into a particular component of their desired interface. These types of problems require solutions that at once creative and technical.
    5. Product Design - where “Fabrication” is more logistics oriented, product design will be used to teach students about engagement and ergonomics of their musical interfaces. Whatever their final product may be, it has to be intractable and expressive. Questions of product design will be used to keep students in check, and on point with this ultimate goal.
    6. Electronic Music Composition - The goal of creating a NIME is not just to invent something that makes a cool sound. The goal is to invent something that has enough sonic depth to be an expressive musical instrument, capable of performing contemporary works. Ergo, contemporary electronic music will be listened to, discussed, and analyzed. Emphasis will be placed on macro-techniques such as form and timbre, as these in particular inform the way electronic music is composed. Students will be using their NIMEs to perform an original electronic composition for their final project, so a significant portion of this course will be dedicated to imparting compositional skills.
    7. Graphic Scores - Ideally, students will walk away with not only a NIME, but a performance and recording of their own composition. The next step professionally is to create a score which will allow students to publish their music in a format this is reproducible to other composers and musicians. Various contemporary graphic scores will be studied, and the logistics and nuances of nonstandard notation will be covered.
    8. Documentation - this goes hand in hand with the discipline of graphic scores. Students’ compositions should be reproducible, as should their NIMEs. The only way to accomplish this is to diligently document the process. Various methods will be taught, inlacing GitHub for documentation.

  2. These disciplines are very broad and, to put it simply, we will draw only the elements necessary for creating a NIME from them. In regards to electronics and computer coding, the focus will primarily be on sound creation through various sensors because theoretically the human body will be interacting with these NIMEs in some way. Coding skills will be limited to the basics (data types, loops, etc.) and will lead into drawing Serial Data from hardware to connect them to a variety of sound-producing elements in Max or Processing.The elements of sound design that will be mentioned will be those that aid in building synthetic sound from scratch. The data drawn from the hardware sensors must go somewhere… and by learning to create sounds from scratch that are dynamic and flexible, the data can be used for just about anything. Fabrication and production design, as mentioned above, are two sides of the same coin. The elements emphasized from these two disciplines will be design fundamentals that make interactions expressive as well as logistically possible.

Electronic Music Composition will enjoy a rather broad emphasis so that students can be free to create music with their NIME in a variety of style without being limited. That said, techniques in developing structure and dynamic textures will be heavily employed. NIME’s must have a broad range of sonic possibilities to be musically expressive, so a limited sense of traditional music theory will be covered, but a heavy emphasis will be placed on non-traditional composition.

Finally, graphic scores and documentation are straightforward. Graphic scores and non-traditional notation is a niche discipline already, but the focus will be on guiding principles. Every NIME is unique, so an exhaustive prescriptive method for notation is virtually useless. Guiding principles give students a framework to start with, and allow them to change and experiment on their own based on their own project needs. Documentation will be covered throughout the course with an emphasis on clear, intelligible writing which could allow anyone else to pick up the directions and follow it successfully.

  1. These disciplines are interrelated in many ways (electronics and coding, and electronic composition and graphic scores for example). However their differences are really what make this course unique. While electronics, coding, and documentation require mostly technical and problem-solving skills, electronic music composition and graphic scores require a highly creative mind. Bridging the gap between technical skills and creativity is exactly what makes NIME courses special and important. The disciplines of fabrication and product design require a bit of technical know-how as well as some creativity, so these two disciplines make the results of this course practical and tangible. Each discipline has a very distinct, and important role to play.

Notes for Prof. Vanegas

sbambrick1217 commented 4 years ago

Condensed version:

We will draw from many disciplines for this course including electronics, computer coding, sound design, fabrication, product design, electronic music composition and notation, and documentation. These disciplines fall in roughly three categories: 1) Electronics and computer technology, 2) music and sound creation and composition, and 3) product design and user experience. The course will employ these disciplines to teach the theory and skills necessary for students to create a New Interface for Musical Expression (NIME), and subsequently use it to perform an original composition for the UHart community.

Electronics and computer technology will be emphasized heavily in this course to give students the requisite foundation for hardware, sensors, and computer coding necessary to take human gestures and map them to an electronic interface. Electronic music composition and notation will be taught so that the resulting interfaces are dynamic and sophisticated enough to be capable of expressive (and repeatable) performances. The final category, design, will be the link between the technical computer skills and the more creatively focused theory of electronic music composition.

These disciplines are on opposite ends of the skill spectrum in some ways. Electronics and computer coding are almost entirely hard-skills, while music is more subjective and open-ended. A foundation of electronics and technology will be necessary to create the interface itself, while a strong sensibility about musical timbre, structure, and development will actually make the NIMEs artistically expressive. Drawing from a discipline of product design and fabrication will serve as a link between the other two disciplines by forcing students to look at these endeavors from a logistical standpoint. It will also make for effective human interfacing and mapping by emphasizing user experience. Although these are disparate fields, they all are inter-related and integral to the creation of NIMEs.

sbambrick1217 commented 4 years ago

@code-warrior just condensed the disciplinary write-up. Let me know what you think!

code-warrior commented 4 years ago

Here’s a more succinct version, @sbambrick1217 :

Our course will draw from the disciplines of electronics, computer programming, sound design, hardware design and fabrication, and electronic music composition and notation. Generally speaking, these disciplines fall into three categories: Hardware and software; music/sound creation/composition, and notation; and, design.

Hardware and software will be emphasized to give students the foundation required to map human gestures and the environment to sound. Electronic music composition and notation will be taught so that the resulting interfaces are dynamic and sophisticated enough to be capable of expressive and repeatable performances. And, design will be the link between the technical computer skills and the more creatively focused theory of electronic music composition. The amalgam of these disciplines is a New Interface for Musical Expression, or NIME.

Our course will follow much of the same ideas covered in similar courses at Stanford, Princeton, and NYU. The semester will culminate in a performance of students’ NIMEs, complete with score and documentation, at The Hartt School.

Thoughts?

sbambrick1217 commented 4 years ago

This looks great! I just have two tiny points that might need to be revised.

  1. I think the last sentence of the first paragraph should be the first sentence of paragraph 2:

Hardware and software will be emphasized to give students the foundation required to map human gestures and the environment to sound. Electronic music composition and notation will be taught so that the resulting interfaces are dynamic and sophisticated enough to be capable of expressive and repeatable performances... etc.

and 2. the word "generally" twice is redundant. We could just make it:

"Generally speaking, these disciplines fall into three categories: Hardware and software..."

Other than that I would say we're good to go!

code-warrior commented 4 years ago

Description updated, per @sbambrick1217’s suggestions. A 👍🏽 added.