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Andrew Hugill: Personal BackgroundSome General Issues in Digital HumanitiesCase Study: Style in Electroacoustic MusicFlow and Embodied Intelligence in MusicTransdisciplinarity: Challenges and BenefitsCreative Computing’Pataphysics and the Digital Humanities

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De Montfort University, Leicester:1995, Music, Technology and Innovation1999, Centre for Technology and the Arts

Included Centre for Textual Studies2005, Institute of Creative Technologies

Bath Spa University2013, Centre for Creative Computing

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Hugill, A. (2008) The Digital Musician (New York: Routledge)

Hugill, A and Amelides, P (2016) 'Audio-only computer games: 'Papa Sangre'.' In: Emmerson, S and Landy, L, eds. Expanding the horizon of electroacoustic music analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 355-375. ISBN 9781107118324

Hugill, A. (2015) ‘Percy Grainger: Pioneer of Electronic Music’. In ed. Dreyfus, K. and Robinson, S. Grainger the Modernist. (Farnham: Ashgate) pp. 231-253. ISBN 9781472420220

Hugill, A. (2012) 'Musicianship in the Digital Age' in Brown, A. ed. Sound Musicianship: Understanding the Crafts of Music. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing) pp. 52-61.

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Hugill, A. & Rieser, M. (2014) Rossum's Universal Replicants, mini online opera,

commissioned by CROMT, University of Sussex, and Glyndebourne.

Hugill, A., Lawrence, J. & Scott, L. (2013) Land of Lace, animated online operatic aria,

commissioned by The Opera Group (scored for soprano, flute, celesta, glockenspiel,

cymbals, tam tam, harpsichord, harmonium, harp, organ and piano).

Hugill, A. (2013) The Imaginary Voyage, internet opera. (Unfinished)

Hugill, A. & Rieser, M. (2012) Secret Garden, opera-ballet for multiple iPads. Exhibited

as part of the 'Post-humanist Desire' show, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan, 2013/14 (36,509 visitors).

Hugill, A. (1987) Catalogue de Grenouilles, c. 15'. 'Miniature amphibian opera'

featuring multiple frog calls and piano/ensemble. Premiere: George W. Welch.

Broadcast premiere: BBC Radio 3, February 2nd, 1991. Many other performances around the world.

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Hugill, A and Yang, H (2016) 'PRASCAL: a pataphysical programming language.'

International Journal of Creative Computing, 1 (2/3/4). pp. 133-153. ISSN 2043-8354

Hugill, A. & Yang, H. (2013) 'The Creative Turn: New Challenges for

Computing'. Creative Computing 1 (1): 3-15.

Hendler, J. and Hugill, A. (2011) ‘The Syzygy Surfer: Creative Technology for the World

Wide Web’ in Proceedings of the ACM WebSci'11, June 14-17 2011, Koblenz,

Germany, pp. 1-3.

Zedan, H., Cau, A., Buss, K., Westendorf, S., Hugill, A. & Thomas, S. (2008) ”Mapping

Human Creativity”. In Proceedings of the 12th Serbian Mathematical Congress, Novi

Sad. pp. 1-14.

Graves A., Hand C., & Hugill A., (1997) 'Interactive Visualisation of Musical Form using

VRML' in Proceedings of the Fourth UK VRSIG Conference R. Bowden (Ed.) Brunel

University pp. 98-109. ISBN: 1-8 72166-64-4.

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Hugill, A. (2013) 'Who has been tampering with these pianos?: The surrealist writings of Montagu O'Reilly (Wayne Andrews)'. Papers of Surrealism, 10.

Hugill, A. (2013)’Opposition and Sister Squares: Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett'. tout-fait: The Online Marcel Duchamp Studies Journal.

Hugill, A. (2012) 'Pataphysics: A Useless Guide (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press)

Hale, T. & Hugill, A. (1999) 'Raymond Roussel and Jules Verne: The Science is Fiction' in Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity ed. Smyth, E., University of Liverpool Press.

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Hugill, A. (2005/2015) The Orchestra: A User’s Manual. Available at http://andrewhugill.com/OrchestraManual

Hugill, A. (2005) MusiMOO: A Multi-User Domain for Musicians (now unavailable)

Hugill, A. (2004) Random Round by Percy Grainger. Available at http://andrewhugill.com/rr/randomround.html

Hugill, A. (1994) 'New Impressions of Africa' (a hypertext translation of Cantos I, II & IV of 'Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique' by Raymond Roussel, with introduction). http://andrewhugill.com/nia/introduction.html

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Need for a critical Digital Humanities (Berry & Fagerjord 2017): we must have a deep

but critical understanding of technology

Need for human-centredness = danger of DH being too tech driven

But also, importance of proper use of technology in projects (i.e. project

management and planning)

Big data v. Good data

Physicality of the digital

Crossing levels of abstraction (link with Creative Computing and the SWEBOK)

How do knowledge representation systems represent the knowledge encoded in

performance?

How about the post-digital in music? (And other arts)

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The word ‘style’ is almost never encountered in Electroacoustic Music studies. This is despite the fact that understanding style would presumably tell us much about electroacoustic music practice: its composition, reception, cultural and historical position, in fact all the things that set it apart from other forms of music. Through a focus on style, we would be able to detect the patterns and variations that situate it within various fields, be they artistic, philosophical, historical, geographical, societal, ethnographical and so on. Stylistic analysis would meaningfully expose the artistic fingerprints of individual composers or groups of composers. What are the reasons for this lack, and how may it be addressed (if indeed it needs to be so)? Given that Electroacoustic Music has been thoroughly bound up with the development of computers, one would have thought that the Digital Humanities would have a great deal to say on this topic. And yet, there is a near-total silence. The reasons lie within the history, philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of Electroacoustic Music itself, but also with a critical reluctance of Digital Humanities to engage with an analytical process of an art form that largely rejects traditional musical notation in favour of the manipulation of sounds.

What is e/a music, as distinct from other forms?

Dots vs. sounds. Challenges that presents. No reductive score.

Performance style – BEAST array etc.

Myth of Inclusivity

The myth of inclusivity has profound consequences for electroacoustic music analysis, which has moved away from stylistic considerations in part because it appears that the potential presence of any sound renders the notion of style meaningless. Yet all the analyses that have so far been done are of pieces: bounded objects whose sonic selections negate the myth of inclusivity through their exclusivity.

However, it is not the choice of sounds, but the way that they are treated that constitutes

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the style. When one puts together analyses of several pieces, one observes recurring patterns relating to sounds and their transformations. The same sounds are used time and again. What is different is the way that they are used; in other words, the style. One may consequently speak not just of individual styles, but also of an electroacoustic genre style. One may even assert that electroacoustic music is all style, just as its substance is all sound.

Electroacoustic music is deeply rooted in modernist ideology. Its supreme early example, Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique (1957), was the result of an architectural collaboration with LeCorbusier (via Iannis Xenakis). Both men believed there is a deep and close relationship between music and architecture (Mattis 2006: 310). Le Corbusier defined architecture as ‘visual acoustics’ (LeCorbusier 1956: viii) and declared ‘I am a musician at heart’ (Le Corbusier 1958: 330). Varèse was inspired throughout his life by the architecture of the abbatial church of Saint-Philibert in Tournus, Burgundy (Varèse 1972: 67) and conceived of music as ‘blocks of sound, calculated and balanced against each other’ (Schuller 1965: 34). Le Corbusier’s Modulor set out his vision of universal forms and proposed that ‘music, like architecture, is time and space. Music and architecture are alike a matter of measure’ (Le Corbusier 1954: 330). This sense of universalism is written into the very structure of the film (or, rather, slide sequence) he created for Poème électronique. Varèse’smusic follows this structure carefully. Gary Kendall points out how his architectural approach takes the form of non-motion: juxtaposition of ‘musical ideas that contradict each other and that deny a sense of progress through time’ (Kendall 2006: 159). He asserts that Poème électronique is ‘the bridge between early twentieth-century modernism and electroacoustic music’(ibid.).

What Le Corbusier had earlier identified as a ‘primary sensation’, which is expressed in forms such as the sphere, cube, or cone, may here be musically understood as a sounding element, a pure timbre, or even a ‘sonic object’ (Schaeffer 1966). The cultural or personal significance of such objects are ‘secondary sensations [which vary] with the individual because they depend upon his cultural or hereditary capital’ (Le Corbusier and Ozenfant 2000: 62). Given this foundation, it is easy to see how notions of style may be eradicated from the aesthetic debate. Style is redolent of precisely those secondary sensations which run counter to the modernist project. Universalism implies not only the suppression of personal expression in creativity but also the immanence of collective understanding.

Materiality of music = sound.

The materiality of music is increasingly seen to be embodied not just in ourselves but also in the media by which it is conveyed to us: vinyl, tape, radio, CDs, downloads and so on. A large amount of musicological analysis is now directed towards theorising

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these materials, while neglecting the organised sound and silence that makes up music itself. Defining music by its medium is one way of deferring questions of style, judgement and taste.

Style refers to the way in which things are done. It is a matter of understanding technique: how sonic materials are handled, in a work or a group of works. We may, for example, compare many instances of the sound of water in electroacoustic composition.

A systematic use of computer-based analytical methods would be able to lead to a new stylistic understanding that would consolidate rather than overturn the foundational aspirations of electroacoustic music theory.

The most immediately obvious way to achieve all this would be to deploy Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques. These offer several methods that are clearly useful, such as ‘psychoacoustically grounded causal listening’, ‘time-lag embedded feature representation’, and ‘perceptual similarity clustering’ (Jehan 2005). Audio analysis is capable of detecting spectral similarities and recognizing structural divisions, thanks either to feature vectors built up from ‘low-level feature data to higher level information’ (ibid.: 252) in a ‘bag of frames’ model which disrupts the original order of the events, or by ‘shingling’ which preserves the original order (Casey et al. 2008).

Given the existence of such a flourishing set of techniques, and given that electroacoustic music offers an object for analysis that is likely to have a set of ‘fingerprints’ at every level of thecomposition, why does MIR mostly focus on areas other than electroacoustic music? Park et al. suggest reasons:

One of the reasons for the scarcity in MIR-based research for electroacoustic music may perhap sbe attributed to the need for MIR researchers to be interested and actively be involved in composing or be deeply engaged in electroacoustic music on a musical level. Another reason for this somewhat imbalance may be that the community seems to prioritize resources to the more standard musical repertoire that the general public accesses.(Park et al. 2009: 693)

Critical need, rather than big data scraping!

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Music-AI research has chiefly focused on machines with the ability to 'behave liked

skilled musicians', or that 'exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to

be creative' (Miranda 2000; Colton & Wiggins 2014).

It has favoured machines that perform some analytics and synthesis, such as the

autonomous composition in the style of x (Pachet, 2002; Cope 2007; Rolland and

Ganascia 2001), or some other operation in which the 'machine equals the brain'

(Jefferson 1949).

But embodied intelligence in music is an act-of-being that is embodied within a ‘Flow’

of music experience

Co-operative music-making relies on tacit and epiphenomenological responses and

operates within a social context

The temporal being and operativity of technological media is a fundamental agent in

the relationship between humans and machines

We require new models of understanding consciousness and being in the co-

operative relationship between human, machine, media and code.

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“Transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.” (Nicolescu2002, 44).

Transdisciplinarity tends towards an active engagement and transformative praxis with constructive problem solving. It is sometimes called ‘Mode 2 knowledge’ (Gibbons, Nowotny et al)

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Structural Challenges, such as disciplinary and Faculty boundaries.

Cultural Challenges, such as differing research methodologies.

Linguistic Challenges, such as semantics and nomenclature.

Financial Challenges – finding funding for cross-disciplinary research is especially difficult.

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Quality (“aren’t you lowering the quality of what you are doing?”)

Transgression (especially between science and society)

Accountability (who is responsible for transdisciplinary research?)

Methodologies (which methods to use and how to mix methods)

Warning: just because it is transdisciplinary does not necessarily mean it is good!

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Creative Computing is a new ecosystem for computing that comprises a dynamic cycle of artefact building and critical feedback.This ecosystem relies upon a complete interdependency of human and machine, embedding the one in the other in a progressive and symbiotic relationship.Its processes are divergent, nonlinear, convoluted, recursive and multidimensional. In short, it is not monolithic.Its main functions are novelty and surprise, delivering unexpected outcomes, whether in the form of software, hardware or communications interactions.Creative Computing is about good data rather than big data. It aims to improve human creativity by improving data quality.

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Combinational creativity involves an unfamiliar combination of familiar ideas, and requires a rich store of knowledge. The results are only valued if some link between them is perceived.

Exploratory creativity explores within an established conceptual space. This is more likely to arise from a thorough and persistent search of a well-understood space.

Transformational creativity deliberately transforms a conceptual space. It should involve the rejection of some of the constraints that define this space and some of the assumptions that define the problem itself.

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Imaginary SolutionsExceptions & ContradictionsPataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physicsClinamen (interactivity meets semantics)Syzygy (pataphysical ontology building)Antinomy (the energy of contradiction)Anomaly (the value of surprise)

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Nietzsche: “pure logic is the impossibility that grounds science”How may a computer think illogically?Uboolean Logic in PRASCAL

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When humans meet digital machinesChallenges for DH projects (planning, management, staffing, methodologies, etc.)Big data vs. good dataIf DH = literature alone, then what about the rest of the humanities? What about Life Sciences?

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