No Diary: No computer music diary this week–your diaries are all done!

The week is a drop-in class for you to develop and refine your final performance with your ensemble. Your tutor will be present to listen to your work and discuss any aspect of the course. It’s important to these classes and to seek feedback from your tutor and peers to make sure that your ensemble performances are ready and will meet our standards.

Your goals for this drop-in is to:

1. show your ensemble your performance
2. rehearse your performance with them to make sure it works (use the HDMI switcher)
3. seek feedback from your ensemble and your tutor

You’ll need an HDMI output from your laptop in this week’s workshop to test out the HDMI switcher!

Idea for the week

The idea for this week is interfaces and expression.

Interface(s) are obviously crucial to performing with your ensemble, but it’s easy to implement interfaces that have a high utility or usability without being very expressive. As an extreme example, you could implement a system where everybody hits one button at the start of the performance and sits back to enjoy the music—it’s very easy to use, but doesn’t provide any musical expression.

It’s worth thinking about how interfaces give your ensemble-mates creative control during a performance. The plan for today is to explore this concept in discussion with your ensemble and make some critical comparisons.

Exercise for the week

• write down the interfaces and modes of expression in your final performance.
• discuss with your group what kinds of interfaces will be in use during your concert.
• Be critical about these interfaces. Understand that the value of a creative interface is not just utility but also expression.
• Find some ways to improve the interfaces in your own performance.
• Test out your laptop with the HDMI switcher as will be used in the final performance.

To meet the goals of this workshop, we need to critically assess the interfaces in our own performances. You’ll help your ensemble do this by splitting utility from expressiveness. Broadly we could define utility as what is being controlled and expressiveness as how it is controlled.

After an introduction and discussion with your tutors, here is the activity to think through your interfaces.

1. One member of the group introduces an interface that will be used during their performance (ideally show/demonstrate how it works)
2. Other members of the group: brainstorm three different sound and music computing concepts that are can be controlled by this interface
3. Rate the “expressiveness” of control for each of the three different SMC concepts from 0-10.
4. Calculate this interface’s expression score by multiplying the three expressiveness values.
5. Do the same for each member of the group: highest score wins!

Questions for group discussions:

• What does the following exercise help us?
• How does it hold us back?
• Can we perform without interfaces?