Listening Machines is an annual concert series organized by the Music Technology and Digital Media programs at Georgia Tech. The event showcases music and art projects that explore the creative space of human-machine interaction.

TIME UPDATE: 8pm EXHIBITION, 9pm PERFORMANCE

Performances:

Slow Theka is a piece for sarod and interactive electronics. The electronic sound is generated in realtime based on the rhythmic and timbral characteristics of the sarod improvisation. The piece is based on the feel of vlambit tintal, a distinctive rhythmic framework used in North Indian classical music.

Flou (pronounced "flew") is not exactly a game; there is a ship flying through space, but it does not shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as the ship navigates through a 3D world and zooms through objects in space, loops are added and effects applied to an ever-evolving musical mix. Originally developed as a web application, Flou is presented here as an interactive performance piece.

Flou is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney general at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
[http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/flou/]

Traditionally, gestures have always been an integral part of music as a form of expression; gestures give music that human touch. We see the importance of gestures in games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which demonstrate how gestures alone can create fulfilling musical experiences.

MusiKal is inspired by two fields -- music and calligraphy. Calligraphy is defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner". MusiKal uses physical gestures to produce correlated musical effects.

The piece involves 4 to 5 human performers equipped with accelerometer-based devices, which enable us to detect the performers' gestures. This data is then mapped to either a visual object or an auditory trigger, or both. At any point during the performance, a player can also undo actions that he has triggered in the past, like a visual object, an audio sample or a recent audio effect.

In this piece, the computer listens to a musician playing Mridangam, a traditional South Indian drum, and replies with its own percussive sounds. It is capable of understanding and responding in an intelligent manner, following the musical form of a traditional percussion duet and improvising within that structure. While the system has been designed to respond to real musical input in a meaningful way, it is not simply an emulation of a human player; at times it may play things that would be improbable or even impossible for a human player. The result is a new musical experience, both based in tradition and extending into novel areas of interaction, sound, and machine musicianship.

Keyboard Band is a piece of live performance software which simulates a typical pop band setup. It includes guitar, bass and drums. All of these instruments are performed by players via computer keyboard and then synthesized by the computer. This piece of software provides functions such as auto chord, pitch bend and string strumming which make guitar playing much easier. The first Georgia Tech keyboard band will perform the classic rock tune "Hotel California".

Installations:

Tables are artifacts around which people gather. They become organized spaces of exchange and consumption. Kitchens are organized around the dining table; meeting rooms are organized around the conference table; living spaces are organized around the coffee table. Tables perform two complementary and simultaneous tasks: bringing people together to promote intimacy and holding them just enough apart to provide security. As technology becomes a vehicle for tangible interactions, tables establish the framework for social interaction instances. The Story Table is a symbiosis of two social spaces: story and table collapsed onto one another. Created through a process of co-construction of digital and physical media, the Story Table is an interactive installation that encompasses shared engagement in cinematically-inspired narrative expressions that unfold on its surface and space.

Project Directors - Ali Mazalek, Tristan Al-Haddad, Claudia Winegarden
Project Managers - Susan Robinson, Andy Wu, Hyungsin Kim
Artists/Researchers - Martin Bednar, Mehdi Ben Yahmed, Jin Ah Chon, Jakob Crowder, Daniel Gibson, Sergio Goldenberg, April Headen, Chih-Chieh Hsu, Emily Kiel, Amelia Mendez, Jacob Porter, Ritesh Rathi, Martin Rojas, Joy Salter, Stephanie Sellers, Yang Ting Shen, Jasjit Singh, Kurt Stilwell, Jacob Tompkins, Joshua Tuminella, Theodore Ullrich, Cooper Welch, Sarah Williams, Crystal Wrenn, Stephanie Yang, Arseni Zaitsev

The spaces we live in inform our experience. We project our view of the world into every room we live in, forming the silent backdrops to our everyday lives. Given modern technology, every action we make is recorded and archived somewhere, probably never to be seen by human eyes again. We are gradually becoming accustomed to the data we generate and allow it to happen behind the scenes. What happens if we were able to hear the bits and pieces of information we leave behind? Free Field is a playful exploration of these themes, picking up pieces of people's conversation and noises to play back in unique ways. Every sound that happens within its walls is recorded and analyzed, allowing participants to interact with the system in unexpected ways.

WiiArts is an experimental video, audio and image processing art project that invites viewers into a collaborative and expressive art experience. It makes use of pre-existing sensing technologies provided by Nintendo's WiiRemotes and a wireless Sensor Bar. In its current form, three interactors work together to create and compose images and sounds. Illumination, a piece created under the WiiArts theme, is a real-time video art piece in which drawings are created with fluid candlelight traces. The projection screen becomes a shared drawing canvas, and up to three participants can draw simultaneously with their own WiiRemotes. The candlelight source imagery is captured from three burning candles in real-time, and the candlelight traces made by participants jointly compose a dynamic drawing. This process of drawing from light in a dark space provides a contemplative aesthetic experience.

This listening kiosk features music created in the Computer Music Composition course at Georgia Tech. Musique concrete works draw musical inspiration from cash registers, sewing machines, kitchen utensils, and more, while algorithmic compositions use custom software to generate sound via process.

Simon is a music listening agent that listens and responds to what you play. With the help of the two major modules, music analysis and behavioral systems, your music can drive the behaviors and expressions of Simon. Music analysis includes beat detection, analysis of timbre, and measuring consonance and dissonance. The behavioral system, with the help of these features, makes the agent render expressive facial gestures that include head nods, eyebrow expressions and gazes. A part of the goal is to make the agent perform these actions while making it appear as lifelike as possible by using variations in behavior. A future goal of this project is to develop a robotic musician that will create meaningful and inspiring musical interactions with humans, leading to novel musical experiences and outcomes.