Music Colloquium: Interdisciplinary research as musical experimentation

Interdisciplinary research as musical experimentation: Fostering musical pluralism in a practice-led technology project The speaker is Dr Owen Green (University of Huddersfield)

Abstract

In this colloquium I will present early results from the first year of a five-year European Research Council-funded project, ‘Fluid Corpus Manipulation’. This project seeks to make available to ‘creative-coding’ musicians a range of techniques for decomposing sounds, and composing with large collections of sound in Max/Supercollider.

I will focus on what are emerging as core methodological and epistemological questions:

• Can one design tools that actively foster musical pluralism?
• What model of interdisciplinarity might capture how artistic and engineering researchers could make this happen?
• Can/should we distance ourselves from designing for users, and instead design for people?
• Can we/should we excise our own aesthetic baggage from such a project?
• Could there be such a thing as practice-led design, and might this be it?

Besides all this, I will have some early results to share, in the form of technologies for disassembling sounds, and from people’s early encounters with these tools at a project plenary in September 2018.

About the speaker

Owen Green (University of Huddersfield) is a composer, improviser and creative coder. Until 2017 he was based at the University of Edinburgh, working alongside Martin Parker on the MSc Sound Design. In 2017 he was appointed Research Fellow in Creative Coding at the University of Huddersfield.

He enjoys making soundful systems that breathe and try, playfully, to adapt to their surroundings. Much of what he does involves making such system-compositions as a territory/provocation/instrument for improvising players (usually Owen plus chums).