Media Arts and Technology, UC Santa Barbara

Events

GDJ: A Tempo Synchronized Granulator, a Masters presentation by Jack Kilgore. Wednesday, June 14th, 2023 at 3pm PDT, location TBD.

GDJ: A Tempo Synchronized Granulator

Abstract

Music technology has opened up possibilities for highly sophisticated sound design and composition. Composers are able to build temporally dense and sonically eclectic phrases that are not feasible for humans to play in real time. How do we blend the world of offline, complex composition and performance? I look towards the paradigm of a DJ, where one becomes an expert at taking composed, static (typically grid-based) music and recontextualizing it in a live setting via chopping, filtering, remixing, etc. This idea can be taken a step further through deconstructing composed music via granulation. My contribution is the GDJ (Granular DJ); a granular synthesis tool with guard rails to keep sonic output on tempo, allowing for the liquid sound design associated with granulation while constraining it to a grid used in popular songwriting and dance music. The GDJ leverages the granular tool kit to completely transform source material, while also using systems of staying in time and key, as seen in DJ workflows, to keep the tool constrained enough for solo or multi-performer contexts. GDJ is written in Max/MSP and is currently being used in a live performance system with the author and friend.

Equivalence: An analysis of artists’ roles collaborating with Image Generative AI from the perspective of Conceptual Art through an interactive installation design practice, a Masters presentation by Yixuan Li. Thursday, June 15, 2023, 10:30am - 12pm PDT, Experimental Visualization lab (Room 2611, Elings Hall) and via Zoom.

Equivalence: An analysis of artists’ roles collaborating with Image Generative AI from the perspective of Conceptual Art through an interactive installation design practice.

Throughout the past year, the public has witnessed a multitude of high-performance text-to-image Generative AI models pushing the boundaries of image synthesis. These advancements have reshaped the art domain and sparked a great debate surrounding the role of artists and the nature of creativity in artwork created with Image Generative AI. This master's project aims to analyze artists' roles and their relationship with machines when creating artwork with Image Generative AI. Drawing inspiration from Rhodes' 4P model of creativity, an analytical framework of 5P+E (Purpose, People, Process, Product, Press, and Evaluation) has been developed to compare the art-creating processes of Conceptual Art and Image Generative AI. To exemplify this framework, a practical case study titled "Equivalence" has been conducted. Equivalence is a multi-screen interactive installation that converts users' speech input into continuously evolving paintings constructed with Natural Language Processing Algorithms and Stable Diffusion Model. Instead of just using users' text prompts, this installation analyzes the emotion, grammar structure, and word choice, converting this information into architectural structures to investigate the relationship between language and image. Through comprehensive analysis and the execution of the case study, this master's project aims to broaden the understanding of artists' roles and foster a deeper appreciation for the creative aspects inherent in artwork created with Image Generative AI.

Developing Audio Plugins, a Masters presentation by Nathan Blair. Thursday, June 15, 2023, 2-4pm PDT via Zoom.

Developing Audio Plugins

Abstract

Since the beginning of 2022 I have developed four audio plugins using the C++ framework JUCE. In doing so, I accumulated various strategies for enhancing the dependability and efficiency of my programs; for example, I learned to avoid memory allocation in the audio thread, refuse third party libraries, and refrain from invoking system calls. However, I also discovered specific circumstances where each of these principles was no longer desirable. Rather than relying on rules of thumb and general guidelines, I sought to develop a set of first principles for developing production-level audio software.

I argue that many good audio programming practices can be derived from the following fact: audio plugins are multi-threaded programs subject to a firm real-time constraint. With this framing in mind, I present The Template Plugin: a starting point for new plugin projects that integrates the best practices and creative solutions I have implemented in my own work. I justify the design of The Template Plugin by discussing effective strategies for thread synchronization, optimization, program state management, user interfaces, and build systems within the context of multi-threaded and real-time applications.

News

Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin gave a talk titled "The Multi-Modality of Complex Systems - Special-Temporal Exploration", at ACM SIGGRAPH DAC SPARKS - The Art of Scientific Visualization: Perceiving the Imperceptible, on April 28, 2023.

Abstract

Complex systems in nature unfold over many spatial and temporal dimensions. Those systems easy for us to perceive as the world around us are limited by what we can see, hear, and interact with. But what about complex systems that we cannot perceive, those systems that exist at the atomic or sub-atomic? Can we bring these systems to human scale and view this data just as we do in viewing real-world phenomena? As a composer working with sound on many spatial temporal dimensions, shape and form comes to life through sound transformation. What seems to be visually imperceptible becomes real and visually perceptible in the composer’s mind. As media artists we can now take these transformational structures from the auditory to the visual and interactive domain through frequency transformation. Can we apply these transformations to complex imperceptible scientific models to see, hear, and interact with these systems bringing them to human scale?

About the SPARKS session:

Our understanding of the world is limited by the capacity of our senses to ingest information and also by our brain’s ability to interpret it. Through the use of technology, we know that the universe we live in is far more complex and rich with information than what can be perceived by humanity. From microscopic to cosmic, information that transcends our lived experiences is difficult to comprehend. Our ability to augment our senses with technology has resulted in an accumulation of vast amounts of data, often in a form that needs to be translated to be understood. This SPARKS session explores the conceptual and creative aspects of scientific visualization.

https://dac.siggraph.org/the-art-of-scientific-visualization-perceiving-the-imperceptible.

DAC SPARKS - The Art of Scientific Visualization: Perceiving the Imperceptible - April 28, 2023.

Xenos, a new virtual instrument plug-in that implements and extends the Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis (DSS) algorithm, has been released. Developed by MAT alumni Raphael Radna as part of his Masters degree, Xenos implements DSS with modifications and extensions that enhance its suitability for general composition.

Released in March 2023, Xenos is a virtual instrument plug-in that implements and extends the Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis (DSS) algorithm invented by Iannis Xenakis and notably employed in the 1991 composition GENDY3. DSS produces a wave of variable periodicity through regular stochastic variation of its wave cycle, resulting in emergent pitch and timbral features. While high-level parametric control of the algorithm enables a variety of musical behaviors, composing with DSS is difficult because its parameters lack basis in perceptual qualities.

Xenos thus implements DSS with modifications and extensions that enhance its suitability for general composition. Written in C++ using the JUCE framework, Xenos offers DSS in a convenient, efficient, and widely compatible polyphonic synthesizer that facilitates composition and performance through host-software features, including MIDI input and parameter automation. Xenos also introduces a pitch-quantization feature that tunes each period of the wave to the nearest frequency in an arbitrary scale. Custom scales can be loaded via the Scala tuning standard, enabling both xenharmonic composition at the mesostructural level and investigation of the timbral effects of microtonal pitch sets on the microsound timescale.

A good review of Xenos can be found at Music Radar: www.musicradar.com/news/fantastic-free-synths-xenos.

Xenos GitHub page: github.com/raphaelradna/xenos.

There is also an introductory YouTube video:

Raphael completed his Masters degree from Media Arts and Technology in the Fall of 2022, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition at UCSB.

MAT congratulates the six alumni that were selected to present their work at ISEA 2023, May 16 - 21, 2023 in Paris, France.

The MAT alumni that were selected to participate are:

Yoon Chung Han
Solen KIratli
Hannen E. Wolfe
Yin Yu
Weidi Zhang
Rodger (Jieliang) Luo

The International Symposium on Electronic Art is one of the world’s most prominent international arts and technology events, bringing together scholarly, artistic, and scientific domains in an interdisciplinary discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in art, interactivity, and electronic and digital media.

isea2023.isea-international.org

MAT alumni Andres Burbano has been selected as chair of the 51st annual ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 conference.

ACM SIGGRAPH is the premier conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques. This year they celebrate their 50th conference and reflect on half a century of discovery and advancement while charting a course for the bold and limitless future ahead.

Burbano is a native of Pasto, Colombia and an associate professor in Universidad de los Andes’s School of Architecture and Design. As a contributor to the conference, Burbano has presented research within the Art Papers program (in 2017), and as a volunteer, has served on the SIGGRAPH 2018, 2020, and 2021 conference committees. Most recently, Burbano served as the first-ever chair of the Retrospective Program in 2021, which honored the history of computer graphics and interactive techniques. Andres received his PhD from Media Arts and Technology in 2013.

Read more from the ACM SIGGRAPH's website and this article on the ACMSIGGRAPH Blog.

The next ACM SIGGRAPH conference is in August 2023 and will be held in Los Angeles, California s2023.siggraph.org.

The Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) has released a new software app for sound granulation: EmissionControl2 for MacOSX, Linux, and Windows.

EmissionControl2 is a granular sound synthesizer. The theory of granular synthesis is described in the book Microsound (Curtis Roads, 2001, MIT Press).

Released in October 2020, the new app was developed by a team consisting of Professor Curtis Roads acting as project manager, with software developers Jack Kilgore and Rodney Duplessis. Kilgore is a computer science major at UCSB. Duplessis is a PhD student in music composition at UCSB and is also pursuing a Masters degree in the Media Arts and Technology graduate program.

EmissionControl2 is free and open-source software available at: github.com/jackkilgore/EmissionControl2/releases/latest

The project was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the UCSB Academic Senate.

Past News

About MAT

Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at UCSB is a transdisciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. Created by faculty in both the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science, MAT offers an unparalleled opportunity for working at the frontiers of art, science, and technology, where new art forms are born and new expressive media are invented.

In MAT, we seek to define and to create the future of media art and media technology. Our research explores the limits of what is possible in technologically sophisticated art and media, both from an artistic and an engineering viewpoint. Combining art, science, engineering, and theory, MAT graduate studies provide students with a combination of critical and technical tools that prepare them for leadership roles in artistic, engineering, production/direction, educational, and research contexts.

The program offers Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Technology. MAT students may focus on an area of emphasis (multimedia engineering, electronic music and sound design, or visual and spatial arts), but all students should strive to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and work with other students and faculty in collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects and courses.

Alumni Testimonials

"With a deep interest in exploring sound, not only creatively, but technically and scientifically, I began my studies at MAT at UCSB. It was here, through academic discipline and perseverance, alongside professors and colleagues, that I was able to hone my skills and begin my successful career.

Years later, I am leading development of game audio and augmented reality technology at Apple.

The strong academic foundations that I gained in spatial audio, sound synthesis, and audio engine architecture have allowed me to achieve even greater success in my career. I will always be grateful to those who helped me take those first steps to success!"

David Thall
Lead Audio Programmer
Game and Augmented Reality Technology
Apple
"As a UCSB MAT Master's student (2002-2004), I benefited greatly from the required and elective courses taught by professional leaders with broad perspectives, both technical and humanistic. This helped me to improve my research skills, and to refine my academic vision, which culminated in a PhD (2009) from UCSB Electrical and Computer Engineering specializing in Digital Signal Processing. Since that time I have been employed at several academic institutions around Europe, where my broad technical and humanistic perspective has been unique and advantageous."

Bob L. Sturm, Associate Professor
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Royal Institute of Technology KTH
Stockholm, Sweden
"As one of the first graduates of the Media Arts and Technology PhD program, I have found the experiences provided by the MAT community invaluable to both my professional development and personal enjoyment of creating technology-based experiences, throughout life. I have been employed for more than 10 years now in the department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University Copenhagen, where I teach both interaction design and real-time signal processing for audio and music performance. As Associate Professor, I guide students to create their own software and hardware tools, concepts, and practices for creating new sonic and embodied interactions, as well as running the Augmented Performance Lab. Together with my colleagues, I helped start the Sound and Music Computing masters program in 2014, and co-chaired the international New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in 2017."

Dan Overholt
Associate Professor
Aalborg Univeristy, Copenhagen
Denmark
"MAT is a rare graduate program in that it operates more like an creative ecosystem -- your work as a researcher is significant and connects to others. People care a lot about what you are doing, and invest thought into your own thinking. Throughout my eight years of study, from 2007 to 2015, and as a postdoctoral student afterwards, this supportive environment provided the technological, financial, and intellectual resources necessary for me to take risks in my work. As a result, I was able to dive deep into subjects I thought were off limits to my cognitive function, and achieve the great satisfaction of learning how to learn better. It is a testament to the culture fostered there that an experimental filmmaker such as myself entering the program with very basic programming skills can now make regular contributions to mathematics journals, work as a real-time computer graphics programmer in the DTLA arts district, be asked to consult on science fiction television dramas, and innovate novel geometrical algorithms of use in architecture. I think the MAT program at UCSB is a hidden gem -- you enter it with one direction in mind, and come out brilliantly refracted into a spectrum of possibilities."

Pablo Colapinto
Oblong Industries Inc & Independent Artist
Los Angeles
"The education and mentorship I received as an MAT student gave me the skills to discuss my work critically and in the context of the rich history of media arts; and has been pivotal in having my work accepted in exhibitions around the world, including Dubai, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, New York and cities throughout the US. Further, my PhD in MAT was instrumental in securing my position as Curator of Interactive Media for MOXI, the Wolf Museum of Exploration and Innovation. In that capacity, almost half of the artists I have curated into MOXI have been MAT alumni, MAT faculty, MAT students, and distinguished media artists who I met as part of my work in the MAT program. My collaborations with MAT students and alumni are ongoing, and I continue to be grateful for the education, mentorship and community of the UCSB MAT program."

Marco Pinter
Computational Artist
Curator of Interactive Media, MOXI (The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation)
Director of Software Innovation, InTouch Health

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