"Multidisciplinary Research on Digital Musical Instruments"
18 Nov. // 10:30 - 12:00
Where: De Bijloke Music Center
In this talk I will discuss the design of novel digital musical instruments (DMIs) at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL), a Music Technology lab at McGill University. I will mainly focus on three highly multidisciplinary projects:
- The development of novel force (touch) sensors based on conductive paper. This project, in collaboration with the Pulp and Paper Research Centre at McGill, aims at proposing novel inexpensive and ecological sensors that can be used inDMIs as well as in any application where contact force sensing is required.
- The design of fMRI compatible digital musical instruments. It is a collaboration with the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Department of Psychology, Concordia University, with the goal of providing psychologists and neuroscientists with fully functioning musical controllers (and associated sounds) that can be performed inside FMRI scanners.
- The McGill Digital Orchestra project, dealing with the long-term technological development, composition and performance practice with DMIs. It is a collaboration with McGill's Digital Composition Studio and gathered a group of technologists, performers and composers collaboratively working on novel DMIs.
In all the above projects, I will highlight the various positive aspects of multidisciplinary research, as well as many of its challenges.
"Music as communicative behaviour "
19 Nov. // 11:00 - 12:30
Where: De Bijloke Music Center
Music in western societies appears to be a commodity of which the value is either aesthetic or entertainment. But when we explore many traditional societies, those phenomena that are analogous to the western concept of music are universally accessible, manifestly interactive and fundamentally constitutive of the social world, features that are evident when we turn back to explore, in any detail, the workings of music in western cultures. In this paper, I shall start by asking what types of social realities music can create before exploring the attributes through which music achieves these ends. Underlying the approach that I am adopting here are two hypotheses: that while we all exist in cultures that bind us to, and separate us from, each other, our fullest and most likely biological—scientifically comprehensible—social commonality is that we all have a capacity for culture; and that the capacity for musicality lies at the root of the capacity for culture, not least because of its powers of realising, and of exploiting, a sense of embodied intersubjectivity.
In this paper, I shall draw on ethnographic evidence to support the idea that music should be interpreted as constituting a medium for non-conflictual interaction, a medium which foregrounds processes of entrainment yet facilitates individual and diverse significances. Music can thus be construed as particularly suited to social contexts in which non-conflictual interaction is a prerequisite: in effect, situations of social uncertainty, where the achievement of joint intentionality (or at least a sense of joint intentionality) is a primary goal. I shall also explore music's relationship with language, suggesting that music and language are best distinguished in terms of social functionality: language is efficacious in mobilising joint intentionality for goal-directed behaviour, while music is efficacious in mobilising joint intentionality. The study of language can inform our understanding of music, in that pragmatic processes and constructs—manifested in language through prosody—are also evident in music when music is examined as an interactive medium. But the study of music can inform our understanding of language, in particular in respect of the foundational role that increasingly appears to be fulfilled in human communicative interaction by processes of entrainment.
I shall suggest that underlying music's efficacy in situations of social uncertainty are features of music that are shared with the communication systems of other species as well as features that are specific to humans and that make use of features that are shared with language. Hence music and language constitute complementary manifestations of a more general human communicative capacity.