News

NIME

The New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) was held 4–6 June 2009 at the Carnegie Mellon School of Music in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (see Figure 1). The focal theme for the conference this year was Tradition and Innovation. Paul DeMarinis delivered the keynote address, entitled "Buried in Noise," and a teleconferencing panel session was held with computer music pioneers John Chowning, Roger Linn, and Max Mathews.

The conference hosted paper, poster, and demo sessions. Categories of presentations included Robotics, Haptics, Sensing and Conducting, Control Strategies, and Mobile Music. An exhibition of interactive sound installations included Artificial Analog Neural Network, a sculptural piece by Phillip Stearns of 45 interconnected analog components that responded with sound and light to speech and to shadows cast by the audience, and Pendaphonics, by Dan Overholt, Byron Lahey, Anne-Marie Skriver Hansen, Winslow Burleson, and Camilla N. Jensen, where participants interact with eight sonic pendulums whose position and motion influence a spatialized soundscape.

Web: nime2009.org

Figure 1.

Robotic bagpiper "McBlare" heralded the opening of the NIME 2009 conference, held at Carnegie Mellon University. A tribute to the university's Scottish heritage, McBlare plays a set of bagpipes using an air compressor and electromagnetic devices to power its "fingers," which open and close tone holes to determine musical pitch. The robot was developed in 2004 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. (Photo: Alex Geis.)

EMS

The Electroacoustic Music Studies Network annual conference (EMS09) was hosted by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Centro Cultural Borges, in Buenos Aires, Argentina 22–25 June 2009 (see Figure 2). The theme for the conference was Heritage and Future. The Heritage theme was manifest in many of the talks such as "Electronic Music in Iran: Tradition and Modernity" by Alireza Farhang, and "New Means, Old Meanings" by Flo Menezes. Daniel Teruggi delivered a keynote talk on the changing environment in which composers work. Emphasizing the "Future" aspect of the conference theme, Leigh Landy conducted a panel discussion entitled "Means of Increasing the Impact of Electroacoustic Music in the Future." An evening concert featured a stage full of analog modular synthesis systems virtuosically performed by Ernesto Romeo along with vocalist Marina Wilensky.

Web: www.ems-network.org/ems09

Figure 2.

(Left to right) Raúl Minsburg, Lonce Wyse, Leigh Landy, and Fernando Iazzetta in an EMS-09 panel session on increasing the impact of electroacoustic music. (Photo: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero.)

Figure 3.

(Left to right) Olivier Tache, Nicolas Castagne, and Claude Cadoz (ACROE-ICA, Grenoble Institute of Technology and French Ministry of Culture), presenters of the ICMC workshop on the new version of the GENESIS software for musical creation by means of physical modeling. (Photo: Lonce Wyse.)

ICMC

The International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) was held in Montreal, Canada, 16–21 August 2009, hosted by the Schulich School of Music of McGill University together with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) (see Figure 3). This year, the conference moved to a single-track structure and hosted over 100 papers, demos, posters, installations, and nine concerts. An all-day workshop, "GENESIS³, Musical Creation by Means of Mass-Interaction Physical Modeling," was held by Claude Cadoz, Nicolas Castagne, and Olivier Tache on opening day. The Journal of New Music Research Best Paper Award went to Juan-Pablo Caceres and Chris Chafe for their paper, "Jack Trip: Under the Hood of an Engine for Network Audio."

Web: www.icmc2009.org

Music Perception

The Society for Music Perception and Cognition convened their biennial conference at Indiana University in Indianapolis, Indiana, 3–6 August 2009. Sandra Trehub delivered one of two keynote addresses. Her talk, "Infancy: A Musical Tour," reflected her lifetime of work on the development of music, speech, and language in infants and young adults. Elaine Chew presented the second keynote address, "Music Computation and Cognition," on mathematical and computational modeling, music visualization, and systems for interpreting and improvising music with live performers. The conference talks and posters covered topics spanning performance, music...