Mushroom: An Oracular Sound Processor

Composers of digital music today have a bewildering variety of sound-processing tools and techniques at their disposal. At their best, these tools allow composers to hone a sound to perfection. However, they can also lead us into a routine which bypasses avenues of experimentation, simply because the known tools work so well and their sonic output is so attractive. An alternative strategy is oracular sound processing. An oracular sound processor creates a derived version of its input whose characteristics could not have been fully predicted, while affording the user little or no parametric control over the process.

Tongue-tied?: An Active Analysis of Brian Friel's Translations

This article has arisen from a research-led production of Translations by Brian Friel for Queen’s University’s Tyrone Guthrie Society in February 2010. Drawing partly on a review of the existing critical literature and also from questions left unresolved by a previous experience of directing the play, the production sought to address through ‘active analysis’ (Merlin 2001) a number of research questions relating to the embodied nature of the rehearsal process and the historicity of Friel’s play. The analysis invokes Bergson (1910), Lefebvre (1991) and Worthern (2006) in establishing a performative correlative for insightful but more literary studies by Connolly (1993), Lojek (1994) and McGrath (1989 & 1999). A detailed account of the rehearsal process helps reveal the extent to which the idea of failure of communication is embedded in the text and embodied in performance, while an experiment with the partial use of the Irish language casts further light on Friel’s extraordinary device of rendering two languages through the medium of one. The use of music to counterpoint, rather than underscore the action, together with an achronological sequence of projected historical images inspired by Andrews (1983) provided me as director a means to challenge the audience’s presuppositions about the play. The sense of palimpsest, of the layered histories, that this evoked also served to highlight Friel’s use of the wider stylistic palette of Anglo-Irish drama, revealing Translations as a forerunner for Stewart Parker’s more explicit formal experiments in Northern Star. In rehearsal and performance Friel’s place in the continuum of the Irish theatrical canon became clear, as stylistic allusions to O’Casey, Shaw, Wilde and Beckett were embodied by the actors on the rehearsal room floor.

Investigation on localisation accuracy for first and higher order ambisonics reproduced sound sources

Ambisonics and higher order ambisonics (HOA) technologies aim at reproducing sound field either synthesised or previously recorded with dedicated microphones. Based on a spherical harmonic decomposition, the sound field is more precisely described when higher-order components are used. The presented study evaluated the perceptual and objective localisation accuracy of the sound field encoded with four microphones of order one to four and decoded over a ring of loudspeakers. A perceptual test showed an improvement of the localisation with higher order ambisonic microphones. Reproduced localisation indices were estimated for the four microphones and the respective synthetic systems of order one to four. The perceptual and objective analysis revealed the same conclusions. The localisation accuracy depends on the ambisonic order as well as the source incidence. Furthermore, impairments linked to the microphones were highlighted.

Expertise is perceived from both sound and body movement in musical performance

Music is a rich form of nonverbal communication, in which the movements that expert musicians make during performance can influence the perception of expressive and structural features of the music. Whether the actual skill of a musician is perceivable from vision of movement was examined. In Experiment 1, musicians and non-musicians rated performances by novice, intermediate and expert clarinettists from point-light animations of their movements, sound recordings, or both. Performances by clarinettists of more advanced skill level were rated significantly higher from vision of movements, although this effect was stronger when sound was also presented. In Experiment 2, movements and sound from the novice and expert clarinettists' performances were switched for half the presentations, and were matched for the rest. Ratings of novice music were significantly higher when presented with expert movements, although the opposite was not found for expert sound presented with novice movements. No perceptual effect of raters' own level of musicianship was found in either experiment. These results suggest that expertise is perceivable from vision of musicians' body movements, although perception of skill from sound is dominant. The results from Experiment 2 further indicate a cross-modal effect of vision and audition on the perception of musical expertise. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.