News

Seamus 2012

The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) held its annual conference 9–11 February 2012 at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. The event included 13 concerts of work by nearly 100 composers. Three paper sessions provided a forum for discussion of topics such as musical robots, new musical hardware and software, and interactive performance practice. A panel session presented discussion on the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments software for people with disabilities and on electroacoustic music composition with pre-college students. Several installations also appeared at the festival. One installation, Nathan Bowen’s 4Quarters, incorporated participation by SEAMUS attendees, who were able to control the sound using their iPhones and iPods.

In collaboration with Frances Richard and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), SEAMUS also held a Student Commission Competition open to students at any level, from high school to doctoral studies. Eli Fieldsteel won first place in the competition with his composition Fractus I. Christopher Chandler won second place for the resonance after. . . . Both Fieldsteel and Chandler received commissions for new electroacoustic works to be performed at SEAMUS 2013. Two finalists were also named: Erik DeLuca, for Six Days of Summer, and Lanier Sammons, for Lullaby for Newborn Stars.

Web: blogs.lawrence.edu/seamus2012

Network Music Festival

The first-ever Network Music Festival took place 27–29 January 2012 at locations throughout Birmingham, UK (see Figure 1). The festival focused broadly on composing, performing, and listening to music where networking is central to the aesthetics, creation, or performance practice. Over 70 artists from the UK and around the world participated in the event’s five concerts, five installations, and five talk sessions. Laptop performance, live coding, online collaborative improvisation, home-made musical gadgets, and interactive sound installations were all featured at the event. The festival also included a two-day workshop on collaborative live-coding performance and stochastic composition and synthesis.

Web: networkmusicfestival.org

ACM MM

The 19th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Multimedia (MM) was held 28 November–1 December 2011 in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. ACM MM is the flagship conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia, and it showcases both scientific research and industrial multimedia technologies.

The conference included the day-long International ACM Workshop on Music Information Retrieval with User-Centered and Multimodal Strategies (MIRUM), which took place 30 November. Attendees from Asia, Europe, and North America presented nine papers whose topics included music search engines, affect analysis, multimodal music information retrieval, and novel features and algorithms for music analysis. Roeland Ordelman of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the University of Twente presented a workshop keynote address titled “Audiovisual Archive Exploitation in the Networked Information Society.” The workshop also included a poster session and a panel discussion on the topic of “Bridging Opportunities for the Music and Multimedia Domains.”

The larger ACM MM conference included a few other music-specific events. Gaël Richard of Telecom ParisTech led a half-day tutorial on music signal processing. The main conference paper tracks also presented research on music visualization, music search and information retrieval, the OpenMusic programming environment, and musical audio manipulation.

Web: www.acmmm11.org

12 Nights in Miami

The 12 Nights Festival of Electronic Music, Art, and Performance took place 1–3 December 2011 in Miami, Florida, USA. Each day of the festival featured an installation exhibition and a concert. On 1 December, the Mobile Performance Group—a portable electronic ensemble—played alongside electronics musician Jose Hernandez Sanchez. The 2 December concert featured live electronics performances by several musicians along with a performance by the Florida International University Electroacoustic Music Ensemble. The 3 December concert presented additional works for live electronics as well as interactive dance, acoustic instruments, and the Expressive Machines Musical Instruments (EMMI) ensemble of musical robots.

December’s three-day festival constituted the last of twelve events in the larger 12 Nights Miami concert series, which began its 2011 season in February. Earlier concerts in the season featured electroacoustic music, audiovisual works, sound-centric performance art, live performances with custom electronic instruments, circuit-bending, and works for acoustic instruments with electronics. The...