EvoMUSART 2009 is the seventh workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2009 is to bring together researchers who are using biologically inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in this area.

Accepted papers will be presented orally at the workshop and included in the EvoWorkshops proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The papers should concern the use of bio-inspired techniques - e.g. Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Life, Artificial Neural
Networks, Swarm Intelligence, etc. - in the scope of the generation, analysis and interpretation of art, music, design, architecture and other artistic fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Generation

o Biologically Inspired Design and Art-Systems that create drawings, images, animations, sculptures, poetry, text, objects, designs, webpages, buildings, etc.;
o Biologically Inspired Sound and Music - Systems that create music, sounds, instruments, voices, sound effects, sound analysis, etc.;
o Robotic Based Evolutionary Art and Music;
o Other related generative techniques;

- Theory

o Computational Aesthetics, Emotional Response, Surprise, Novelty;
o Representation techniques;
o Surveys of the state-of-the-art in the area; identification of weaknesses and strengths; comparative analysis and classification;
o Validation methodologies;
o Studies on the applicability of these techniques to related areas;
o New models designed to promote the creative potential of biologically inspired computation;

- Computer Aided Creativity

o Systems in which biologically inspired computation is used to promote the creativity of a human user;
o New ways of integrating the user in the evolutionary cycle;
o Analysis and evaluation of: the artistic potential of biologically inspired art and music; the artistic processes inherent to these approaches; the resulting artifacts;
o Collaborative distributed artificial art environments;

- Automation

o Techniques for automated fitness assignment;
o Systems in which an analysis or interpretation of the artworks is used in conjunction with biologically inspired techniques to produce novel objects;
o Systems that exploit biologically inspired computation to perform the analysis of image, music, sound, sculpture, or some other types of artistic object;

More >>

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his ears inwards: His new work LABYRINTHITIS is an interactive sound piece that consists entirely of sounds generated in the artist’s auditory organs – and will cause audible responses in those of the audience. LABYRINTHITIS relies on a principle employed both in medical science and musical practice: When two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, additional vibrations in the inner ear will produce a third frequency. This frequency is generated by the ear itself: a so-called “distortion product otoacoustic emission” (DPOAE), also referred to in musicology as “Tartini tone”.

By arranging the tones from his ears in a composition and playing them to an audience, the artist evokes further distortion effects in the ears of his listeners. At first, each new tone can only be perceived “intersubjectively”: inside the head of each one in the audience. Kirkegaard artificially reproduces this tone and introduces it, “objectively”, into his composition. When combined with another distorting frequency, it will create another tone… until, step by step, a pattern of descending tonal structure emerges whose spiral form mirrors the composition of resonant spectra in the human cochlea.

(The effect in your ears will not appear when listening to the sound file)

Paradoxical as it may sound: we can listen to our own ears. The human hearing organ – still often perceived as a passive unidirectional medium – does not only receive sounds from the outside, it also generates its own sound from within itself. As a matter of fact, it can even be “played on”, just like an acoustic instrument.

This is Jacob Kirkegaard’s 3rd album for Touch, after ‘Eldfjall’ [Touch # T33.20, 2005] and ‘4 Rooms’ [Touch # Tone 26, 2006]

Jacob Kirkegaard is an artist with an interest in the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time and hearing. His performances, audio/visual installations and compositions deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain inaccessible to sense perception. With the use of unorthodox recording tools such as accelerometers, hydrophones or home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard manages to capture and explore “secret sounds” - distortions, interferences, vibrations, ambiences - from within a variety of environments: volcanic earth, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, crystals, ice… and the human inner ear itself.

A graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, Kirkegaard has given workshops and lectures in academic institutions such as the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen and the Art Institute of Chicago. During the last ten years, he has been presenting exhibitions and touring festivals and conferences throughout the world. Among his numerous collaborators are JG Thirlwell, Ann Lislegaard, CM von Hausswolff, Philip Jeck and Lydia Lunch. He is a member of freq_out. You can find out more on his website and you can order this release from the TouchShop.

Searching for a more simplified way to represent the complex library of information inherent in gene expression, Alterovitz decided to represent those changes with music. He hopes that doctors will one day be able to use his music to detect health-related changes in gene expression early via a musical slip into discord, potentially improving a patient’s outcome. From Technology Review

For more, go here.

Or see an earlier similar effort, in which two doctors convert actual heart rate data to musical notes. http://www.sacredbalance.com/web/flashplayer.html?id=heartsongs You can read about the scientific concepts behind the heartsongs demonstration on the Heartsongs page on
ReyLab.

For three nights, big pogo-ing robots will come to punk gigs in the ICA theatre, and we will question how learning develops through the empathetic responses of the brain. Artist Fiddian Warman has played the punk records he collected as a young man to his robots, ‘programming’ them to become punks just like he was. Each night they will be tested - will the mechanical moshpit react with pleasure to the live music they’ve been brought up to love? How is taste embodied in human neurons and artificial neural networks? Fiddian fronts the band Neurotic and the PVCs with tracks written especially for the robots. Support bands during the three nights include Fumadores, Gertrude, The Red Eyes, Viva Las Vegas, Scrotum Clamp and The Devil’s Hotpants. The scientific and cultural issues related to Neurotic will be explored on a website and open forum before, during and after the performances at www.fiddian.com. Supported by the Wellcome Trust.

Featured bands will be:

July 3: Fumadors, followed by Gertrude, followed by Neurotic and the PVCs.
July 4: The Red Eyes, Viva Las Vegas, Neurotic and the PVCs.
July 5: Scrotum Clamp, The Devil’s Hotpants, Neurotic and the PVCs.

To book, please call ICA Box Office 020 7930 3647 or via the ICA website.

Nearest underground stations are Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus.

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

Part of a graphical depiction of the mole­cular vibrations. (Courtesy Max Planck Inst. for Nuclear Physics)

The report, which can be found in the February 6, 2008 edition of World Science News, says that physicists have recorded “tiny vibrations of individual molecules, that could be called sounds.”

The sounds created from these vibrations are bell-like tones. Too fast and too small to hear in their original form, they none-the-less fit the standard dictionary description of what makes a sound. Their vibrations produce vibrations in neighboring molecules, which in turn excite vibrations in their neighbors, and so on, spreading the vibrations (oscillations) outward.

According to world.science.net, “Uwe Thumm, one of the researchers, said he ‘prefers not to call the effects of a single molecule’s vibration sound.’ But that, he went on to say, is “a matter of what you define as ‘sound,’.” In the end, all the researchers would agree, it’s a pretty safe conclusion that no one can hear a molecule.

Making the molecules’ vibrations audible is simply a matter of playing them back much slower and louder by recording them to a lower pitch and giving their volume a boost. Thumm and his colleagues used hydrogen atoms, striking them with short intense laser pulses.

You can listen to the sound here. Windows Media Video (WMV) needed.

Thumm said researchers hope to be able to do the same thing for more complex molecules like water or methane, which will have their own unique sound.

For more information on the sound of individual molecules, read world.science.net’s article, and yahoo.news

Stanza is a UK based artist who specialises in net art, multimedia, and electronic music. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world, and Stanza also travels extensively to present his net art, giving performances of his audiovisual interactions, and making exhibitions. Stanza is interested in the engagement of the public/audience as a creative user across a variety of formats, from the web to cd rom and gallery installation.

Drawing on Sobell’s experimentation with EEG feedback, which dates back to her residency at the VA Neuropsychology Lab, Sepulveda, CA in the early 1970s — Brainwave Drawing (1973) — the team used IBVA software to translate the brain wave data into sound, via a MIDI bridge. The sounds corresponded to the frequency and amplitude of the peak wave, creating a musical baseline that was accompanied by live musicians. The sounds were mixed live to form an ongoing soundscape, and transmitted to a live audience on the web. During all performances a live audio and video feed allowed the online audience to experience the process in real-time. Related: Brain Avatar.