Music

Washington, D.C.
I got back a little late from today's lunch, and missed most of the first couple of papers in the next session here at Creativity & Cognition 2007. The paper by Kirsty Beilharz and Sam Ferguson is already in progress; they enhanced a Japanese flute, the shakahachi, with a variety of extra-instrumental sensors which drive a generative music system, creating a hyper-instrument, or a creative environment for the instrument. The environment senses the player's physical gestures while plying the instrument; some such gestures already exist as part of the normal process of playing the shakahachi, and the environment therefore enhances and builds on the often unconscious movements of the player, enabling them to exploit techniques they already have. Additionally, qualities of the instrument tone itself (breathiness, noisiness, and other qualities) are also monitored and harnessed.

Boston.
Other than during the MiT5 conference, I realise I haven't really blogged that much from Boston yet - I think I'm still getting over the jetlag from the flight here... It's certainly not as if there wasn't plenty to talk about. This is my third time in Boston, although the last couple of times I was here only for a few days and a few hours, respectively - but at least, I already have something of a general idea where things are and how I get there. It will still take me a while to find my way around MIT, though - if QUT's campuses occasionally seem maze-like, they've got nothing on MIT's sprawling expanse, even if some of the architecture here hadn't been built deliberately in flagrant disregard for architectural orthodoxy.

Boston.
(I'm afraid I accidentally deleted a couple of comments here last night - please repost them if you can!)

It's the last day of MiT5, and we're in the first session of the day. Mary Madden from the Pew Center is the first speaker, on Socially-Driven Music Sharing and the Adoption of Participatory Media Applications. She notes that the term Web2.0 is imperfect but convenient for summarising many of the current developments in the online world. Tom O'Reilly defines Web2.0 as harnessing social effects; it may not be a revolution, but there have been important changes. We now need to think critically about how and why it emerged as a major force in the first place.

Boston.
The last MiT5 plenary session for today is on Learning through Remixing, and Henry Jenkins introduces it through examples of remixing as pedagogical practice in earlier times. This can perhaps be described as a process of taking culture apart and putting it together again, in order to better understand how it works.

The first speaker on the panel is Erik Blankinship, of Media Modifications, who build tools for exposing and enhancing the structure of media in order to make them more understandable to all (and he demonstrates this now by using a few redacted clips from Star Trek: TNG). Some of these which will also be online soon at adapt.tv, and another example for this is showing clips from The Fellowship of the Ring (the movie) next to the text of The Fellowship of the Ring (the book), and even a comparison of the Zeffirelli and Luhrman versions of Romeo & Juliet with the original Shakespeare text (which allows the viewer to compare how differently the two directors interpreted the text, and even to created hybrid versions with the 1996 Juliet and the 1968 Romeo interacting with one another). Fascinating stuff!