Abstracts

Lectures, essays, works in progress

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Recombinance Makes us Human

The power of our recombinant social networks (and music, language, culture, and other by-products of a promethean style brain) is that they enable us to learn things we have not directly seen for ourselves--to exponentially expand what we can know, remember, and learn and to engage in what philosopher Mark Johnson calls 'distributed cognition'. Human knowledge resides in the entire group rather than in any one single person (a feral child does not develop language or mathematics on their own; this knowledge is in the network). Not only do we possess recombinant-style brains, but we seem driven to extend our recombinant thinking beyond the boundaries of a single brain by trading ideas, knowledge, experiences, & observations, and recombining them with our previous experience to form novel ideas, new ways of looking at things, and new kinds of music.

Slides from Recombinance Makes Us Human, the welcoming address for the First International Kyma Symposium in Barcelona, October 2009.

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Metaphor in Mathematics & Sound

Composers have always drawn inspiration from mathematical ideas and 21st century composers make extensive use of mathematical tools in their work. More interesting, though, are the similarities in musical and mathematical thinking. Mathematicians and composers make use of many of the same metaphors as tools for nonverbal reasoning, communication, discovery, and creation. Philosopher Mark Johnson and cognitive linguist George Lakoff define a _Conceptual Metaphor_ as a cross-domain, inference preserving mapping. In their theory of embodied mind, some concepts are innate, some concepts we learn via the body's recurring patterns of dynamic interaction with the physical world, and the rest we understand communicate by way of analogy to those basic recurring patterns. Lakoff, Nunez and Johnson demonstrate the applicability of this theory to linguistics, mathematics and the visual arts. In this talk, I extend the idea to sound and show that mathematicians and composers use many of the same metaphors when reasoning about and communicating abstract concepts.

Slides from Metaphor in Mathematics and Sound at Matematica e Cultura 2006

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A Sound is a sound is a sound...
The design and implementation of a language for specifying, manipulating, combining and controlling digital audio signals

Kyma is a language for specifying, manipulating, and combining audio signals that can be controlled in real-time by audio inputs, MIDI, or parameter updates from external software. The language is being used for sound design in artistic, scientific, commercial and educational contexts.

Kyma makes use of hardware parallelism, distributed control, and a hierarchical data structure called a Sound to generate, process, and organize the large amounts of data required for real time digital audio synthesis and signal processing.

Kyma has been continuously evolving since its first implementation in 1986 on a Macintosh 512k computer. Intended for an engineering/computer science audience, this talk outlines and illustrates some of the solutions developed and lessons learned during its (ongoing) development.

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The Body in the Sound: Can non-speech audio convey meaning? (and if so, what does it mean?)

It is clear to listeners, sound designers, and composers that sound and music do "mean" something. But it is just as clear that sound and music do not convey the same kind of "logic propositional" meaning as is conveyed by language. An alternative model for meaning comes from a cognitive "data structure" known as an "image schema". They might hold the explanation for why music (literally) moves us and how the sound track of a film or computer game gives it visceral and emotional impact.

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Sounds, Symbols & Cyborgs

Reflections on the function and future of music with computers

Slides from Sounds, Symbols, & Cyborgs from a March 1996 Lecture at Alte Schmiede.

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Random Thoughts