Paper for 2024 ICSC

[gogins]

Possible topics:

• [x] cloud-5. About half complete.
• [x] Chord spaces. Not doing.
• [x] Using Csound with VST3 plugins. Not doing, maybe another venue.
• [x] Metamathematics of composition. Not doing, but revisit this.

To finish:

• [x] Add author information.
• [x] Consider suggestions by reviewer:
  • [x] 1. Abstract is too long, shorten it and add to the introduction.
  • [x] 2. Clarify that I know the Web audio standards are not new, but I think they are under-used for disseminating serious music. No need.
  • [x] 3. Expand a very short review of past and present communities (maybe not) and discuss what is new here. No need.
  • [x] 4. I believe the reviewer is wrong, but I can moderate my claim to just the facts, ma'am.
  • [x] 5. The reviewer missed that cloud-5 supports both visual music and music visualization. Perhaps the reviewer does not know what "visual music" is in the context of electroacoustic music, the reviewer is referring to visual art inspired by music. If the reviewer is right, I need a better term for what I am doing. The reviewer is right, "visual music" is more commonly used to refer to what I call "music visualization". ChatGPT suggests "image sonification," "visual music composition," "data-driven composition," or just "algorithmic composition" understood to generate both visuals and music. What I am doing is "music visualization" and "animation sonification."
  • [x] 6. Make sure to reference the figure in the text.
  • [x] 7. See if I need to clarify what addons are. I think it's OK now.
  • [x] 8. Clarify that every cloud-5 piece requires assembly.
  • [x] 9. The reviewer is right in the context of a finished Web site, but wrong in the context of a system for composing (clarified, I hope).
  • [x] 10. Do I need a conclusion?
• [x] Submit camera-ready copy.

[gogins]

I need to add references and I can only do this using online references. I will try just using Google Scholar and looking for things that I can actually read so my references aren't just bogus.

[gogins]

Submitted the paper -- attached cloud-5.pdf here.

[gogins]

This paper was accepted. The reviewer suggested a number of changes to the paper. I will implement those that seem right.

1: (weak accept) I think this system and paper would be interesting to attendees of the conference, but I find a number of aspects of the paper to be problematic and would like to see them addressed. I list them below:

1. The abstract is overly long; some of the content can be moved into the introduction to make this section a shorter summary of the paper.

2. The introduction suggests that this technology as well as the standards mentioned in the paper are, at the time of writing, new. Browser-based musical and multimedia works with the same mentioned standards have been around for quite some time at this point (the earliest paper on Webaudio Csound was in 2014; webGL has been around since 2011). While the standards continued to advance over years, the paper is not explicitly discussing any particular recent advancement that would merit making claims of something new happening that this paper addresses.

3. Related to point 2 above, there's no acknowledgement of other communities that have been working in the area of advancing browser-based music and multimedia work. For example, the Web Audio Conference (since 2015), Internet of Sounds Conference (since 2019), UbiMus (Ubiquitous Music) Symposiums, and Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT). These conferences and communities have been discussing, exploring, and advancing the same technologies and standards mentioned in this paper for years.

4. Section 2: "That makes cloud-5 far and away the easiest computer music system of comparable power to install and configure" - very arguable point that I don't think can be definitively made.

5. Section 2: "Visual Music" - this term has a very well-known definition regarding an visual art form that was inspired by music. It's not clear the author is referring to this art form in this context. Something like "Visual Sonfication" seems much more appropraiate to use; it avoids confusion and balances with the term "Music Visualization" mentioned prior.

6. Fig.1: The figure is not referenced in the text, and should be. (i.e., "As shown in Fig. 1..." or "...(see Fig. 1)")

7. Section 3 is a bit confusing to me. It's unclear what the addon's are. The text says "...and names ending in addon denote things that the user must or may provide" which doesn't make sense (it's either required or optional, not both). Reading through the elements and addons listed, it's not clear how these work from the description. It seems that custom elements refer to HTML elements, and addons are set using JS code? (Inferring this from section 4.) I think this section needs rewriting to clarify these points. The descriptions of each element/addon could be reduced to major elements with shorter descriptions, then perhaps give a few examples of addons. Some kind of figure with skeleton code would also clarify this section as I left reading the paper without a good idea of what a typical cloud-5 project looks like.

8. Section 4 mentions "may be assembled". It's not clear if every cloud-5 project requires an assembly step or not.

9. I found the Section 5 recommendations for best practice actually quite limiting. I understand the idea behind it, but IMO bullet points 2 and 3 in this section favors durability over convenient organization of code, especially important in large projects. Considering most modern web applications are built using tools that produce a final enduring build, I think the system design of cloud-5 ends up being a walled-garden that doesn't integrate well with the large ecosystem of multimedia libraries available for the browser. (This also raises questions as to how extensible is cloud-5 by the user, something that would be good to mention for potential users of this system.)

10. There is no conclusion section, which I think really should be present.

[gogins]

Summary of suggestions:

• [ ] 1. Abstract is too long, shorten it and add to the introduction.
• [ ] 2. Clarify that I know the Web audio standards are not new, but I think they are under-used for disseminating serious music.
• [ ] 3. Expand a very short review of past and present communities and discuss what is new here.
• [ ] 4. I believe the reviewer is wrong, but I can moderate my claim to just the facts, ma'am.
• [ ] 5. The reviewer missed that cloud-5 supports both visual music and music visualization. Perhaps the reviewer does not know what "visual music" is in the context of electroacoustic music, the reviewer is referring to visual art inspired by music. If the reviewer is right, I need a better term for what I am doing.
• [ ] 6. Make sure to reference the figure in the text.
• [ ] 7. See if I can clarify what addons are.
• [ ] 8. Clarify that every cloud-5 piece requires assembly.
• [ ] 9. The reviewer is right in the context of a finished Web site, but wrong in the context of a system for composing.
• [ ] 10. Do I need a conclusion?