International Computer Music Conference 2003: Paper Sessions (review)

The 29th International Computer Music Conference (ICMC2003) was organized by Ho Chee Kong, Mara Helmuth, and Bernard T.G. Tan, with Mr. Tan being the technical committee chair. The outstanding venue for the event was the Centre for the Arts at the National University of Singapore, and the Lion city provided a vibrant backdrop to the occasion. The intimacy of the venue and its distance from the city made for a free flow of formal presentations and informal interaction, with easy access to different concerts and parallel paper sessions.

This year's theme was "Boundary-less Music." The Chair of ICMC2003, Ho Chee Kong, noted on the Web site:

While in the last century we had experienced the benefits of the narrowing of gaps in worldwide communication and the bringing together of world cultures, one of the unexpected results of the process was the creation of barriers. For some, the rapidly changing landscape presented too fast a change in well-established traditions and cultures, and they who live in these societies set up boundaries to stem the erosion of their way of life. Though there are valid reasons to believe so, it need not be the case, especially in music. . . . This year's conference theme, "Boundaryless Music," celebrates music without barriers of cultures or genres, without prejudice of the traditional or the contemporary perspective, without discrimination against the old or the young. We cannot totally remove all barriers, but we can make them more permeable to the flow of information, ideas, resources and energy. Celebrate an open and sharing environment, experiment with new processes and technologies, and cultivate new approaches to learning and teaching; all of which involve interconnected processes instead of isolated ideals.

In response to the call, Mr. Tan notes in the Conference and Concert Program (p. 6) that:

103 full papers in 20 pre-determined conference categories were submitted online. . . . This resulted in a total of 77 full papers, 6 demos, and 6 posters being accepted. . . . All papers receiving a minimum of two "C" Grades were short-listed for acceptance.

The move toward reviewing full papers, together with the SARS scare, may have resulted in a smaller number of paper submissions in comparison to the 193 made (reduced to 121 acceptances) at ICMC2002 in Sweden. However, one is left with the sense of few weak papers, and a solid collection of work that ranges from the speculative to the concrete, with a balance of contributions that might differ if the event were held in America or Europe.

The Conference Proceedings (available from www.computermusic.org) are the main focus of this review, along with the various sessions I was able to attend at the event.

The central theme of "Boundaryless Music" held out great promise for a cohesive set of submissions, but the opening plenary session seemed to largely carry on with an ICMC technical "business as usual" approach. The session included "Signal-based Music Structure Discovery for Music Audio Summary Generation" by Geoffroy Peeters and Xavier Rodet from IRCAM. "Wavetable Matching of Pitched Inharmonic Instrument Tones" by Clifford So, and "Polyphonic Audio Matching for Score Following and Intelligent Audio Editors" by Roger Dannenberg, followed.

The largest group of papers under a single heading belonged to the sessions on Computer, AI Music Grammars, and Languages, although there were a number of papers not presented that appear in the proceedings, and the quality was at times uneven. Johanna Devaney presented "An Algorithmic Approach to Composing for Flexible Intonation Ensembles," followed by an imaginative paper called "ChucK: A Concurrent, On-the-fly, Audio Programming Language," by Ge Wang. The obligatory automation area was covered in "Algorithmic Composition in Contrasting Music Styles" by Tristan McAuley and Phillip Hingston, and "New Strategies for Computer-Assisted Composition Software: A Perspective" by Kevin Dahan, Guy Brown, and Barry Eaglestone. Also included was "Some Box Design Issues in PWGL" by Mikael Laurson and Mika Kuushankare. An interesting addition was "Emergent Behavior from Idiosyncratic Feedback Networks" by Christopher Burns...