| Removals, Harry Potter, ladybirds |
[Aug. 1st, 2009|07:16 pm] |
Preparations are going quite quickly for our move to London. We've now booked a date to sign the tenancy agreement and for removal of our stuff from Norwich. Unfortunately they're not the same date, so we'll be paying a few days overlapping rent.
Moving the utilities is all straightforward except for the phone/internet. We have Postoffice phone and ADSL and they're fine about transferring our contract, but their address database and what we think our address is don't quite marry up. It's a Victorian conversion with four (I think) flats in it. The Royal Mail website tells me there are two addresses in the building, the PO Telecomms' database says there are three, each with names that don't even remotely describe our flat (top floor). I'm not quite sure what data they're using if it's not the Postcode Address File. I think I may need to get in touch with Lewisham council.
National Express are having strikes * at the moment. They're on Thursdays and Fridays, last week, next week, and the following week. So I didn't make it into the lab yesterday. Though by the week after next I should be living in London anyway.
We went to see the new Harry Potter film on Wednesday. They seem to get better each time. They're different directors which obviously makes a difference, but also the music isn't John Williams anymore, it's now Nicholas Hooper and, in my opinion, works quite a bit better.
Our new(ish) neighbours organised a house warming party last night so we went along. It was good to meet them, and all the other neighbours who we've never go around to meeting before. Got quite drunk. Went to bed very late. I remember now why I don't like doing that :-/
Nonetheless, we did manage to get up today and planned a day trip to Cromer. When we got off the train, though, we found the place swarming...with ladybirds. They were all over the place, especially on flat surfaces, near rubbish bins, and dead ones piled up in drifts in the gutters. We got as far as the sea front while being constantly bombarded by them and gave up. We got back on the next train and got off in a place call Gunton. So in the end we had a nice country walk (sans ladybirds) to Southrepps and a pub lunch. Apparently a bumper population of aphids brought about by lack of rainfall has caused a sharp increase in the ladybird population. Whatever the reason, it was very unpleasant, almost like something out of a horror film.
The DRHA conference is getting close. I've registered and need to get my paper in order. It's basically about the Purcell Plus task of integrating text data into music datasets. So we're working on methods of asserting relationships between music representations and textual commentaries describing the music, and thinking up some interesting applications of being able to do so. Such as, VREs for musicologists, or automated analyses of musicological vocabularies. |
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| New flat, Colchester Zoo, Emacs goodness |
[Jul. 25th, 2009|07:11 pm] |
My sister was visiting my cousin (who has been living in Norwich for the last year or so) last weekend. So we met up for a day out at Colchester Zoo. The giraffe's were my favourite, closely followed by the orang utans; you can almost see the intelligence in their eyes.
We still haven't seen the new Harry Potter film. We booked tickets for last Saturday night at Vue. But we got there to find that the air conditioning was broken. It was completely unbearable so we got our money back and went back home. Instead, we've planned to watch all the DVDs (borrowed from the library) over the next several days and go and see the new one another time.
The big thing this week was flat hunting. I went to London on Tuesday for another skills session in the morning (the same series as my org-mode presentation last week) about LaTeX graphics, fonts, and making your own classes and commands. And in the afternoon I met Zoe to start viewing some flats. Here is a piece of advice: don't choose all the flats you want to see and try and book viewings of each of them at specific times. This is what I tried to do and it was a near disaster. Instead, book a slot of time (maybe an hour) with the agent offering each of the flats you're interested in and get them to take you round that one and a few others. That way you get to see plenty of flats and you don't have to worry about getting around them yourself. Another thing I found out (and this is pretty obvious now I think about it) is that agents within the same company are in competition with each other. So we went in to one agent and just said we've booked a viewing of such-and-such, and one of them offered to take us to see it. On the way I had a call from one of his colleagues who was outraged that we'd gone to see it with someone else! I didn't think that it would make any difference who we went to see it with, so I didn't bother making any note of who I'd arranged the viewing with on the phone.
Anyway, we did manage to see quite a few in the end. And we found one we liked which we've put a holding deposit on. It's in Lewisham, so handy for shopping and swimming and running and even for College. The next hurdle is getting a removal company. I've been in touch with one who asked me to do my own survey of the furniture, in the hope that he might be able to give us an sooner slot. So measuring the sofa, tables, bookshelves, etc. was actually quite fun.
I went in to the lab again on Thursday to hear Sebastian Ewert's talk on his work on chroma-invariant audio alignment. And also went in to the agent's office to complete the tenancy agreement application form. And I tested the walk from the flat to the lab: 40 minutes, including some green bits.
While I was there, I also tried to convince one of my colleagues to try ElScreen and Wanderlust. I say tried, in fact he's already a keen Emacs user, and was looking for a good Emacs window manager and an Emacs-based mail client, so he didn't really need much convincing.
I definitely think Emacs is the way forward for an all-purpose, desktop environment-like system. I plan to learn to integrate the Emacs Multimedia System into my "work"flow. It'd be nice to be able to rely more on Emacs for Web browsing. Currently, with w3m etc. you miss out on JavaScript and images. I'd also be interested in finding a presence manager which abstracts over jabber.el and ERC (and the like). I currently have some basic elisp functions which I can use to mark myself as away etc. but they're specific to my case, and not very extensible.
I need to settle down to some proper work next week. Especially working on the DRHA paper and my literature review.
Oh yes, and today is the anniversary of my interview at Goldsmiths. |
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| Graduation, org-mode presentation, flat hunting |
[Jul. 18th, 2009|01:01 am] |
Quite a busy week this week.
On Tuesday I gave my presentation on using Emacs and org-mode for Getting Things Done. This was intended for staff and research students in Computing. In the end, only a few people turned up, but they were a good audience; a mixture of Emacs power users and newbies. I think the idea is that this series of tutorials may serve as practice ones and we'll give them again during a busier time of year.
The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) paper has been accepted. So hopefully I'll be going to Dublin in September.
I've bought a new keyboard. It's a nice, light touch, flat, laptop-style keyboard and, but for missing an insert key (which I'm used to using with Shift for paste, avoiding Ctrl+v), it's very nice (though Gtk Emacs will yank from the clipboard anyway). Much more comfortable than my old sluggish, full-size wireless one.
We did lots of baking and cleaning over the weekend in preparation for both sets of parents coming to visit on Wednesday, staying till today. They were here because Zoe and I both graduated on Wednesday, Zoe with a BA in music, and me with an MMus. I was the only person with a bright pink hood. The ceremony seemed to be shorter and a lot less boring than my BA one several years ago. I think then Music was with Biology and we had a guest lecture on calcium. Anyway, the bread and brownies were lovely.
We took the parents on a City Boats tour of Norwich on Thursday which was really nice. It went from Elm Hill all the way down to the Yare with the customary (but still interesting) commentary of local anecdotes. For instance, the original Nosey Parker (Rev'd Thomas Parker) was a Norwich resident. (Incidentally, Google does not verify this; such is boat tour operator sourced information.) Also, when we got to the Colman's factory, there was a fantastic smell of mint (not mustard). We also went on the Bure Valley railway, narrow gauge steam.
We're busy trying to find flats near New Cross. There seems to be quite a lot of choice which I guess is the state of the market at the moment; properties are staying on for a bit longer which allows us a bit more time to look and choose.
So quite a lot of leisure and not much work this week. |
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| Holiday, Edinburgh, org-mode |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|12:07 am] |
Quite a few new things.
I've moved out of my room and London and I'm back in Norwich for the summer. This'll be my last few weeks in Norwich, though, as I'm looking for a flat in London permanently from the end of August. It'll be a shame to leave, but London has it's good sides: St. Paul's, ENO, and it's where my job is.
We went on holiday to Kos (a Greek island) last month. It was very, very hot and sunny. All the time. The island is mostly quite commercialised, which is a shame. But we had a good time. The food was often a bit disappointing. It seems that everything comes with chips. I assume this is to appeal to the hoards of English tourists (which, yes, I understand we were merely adding to). We went for a bike ride one day, forgetting that we were on a small island, which means we're surrounded by sea, which in turn means that the wind never really stops. So that was quite an adventure. We hired a car another day and found some really unspoiled bits in the mountainous region at the north of the island. We also saw the Esklepion (sic) which was Hippocrates's hospital.
We had a good meeting with some of the Purcell Plus consultants at the end of June. One of the aims of the project is to assess the impact of e-Science of musicology. To that end, we're liaising with one of our consultants to produce an online questionnaire which we hope to use to be able to make some empirically credible claims about this impact. I drafted some questions this week.
Related to this, the workshop I organised on e-Science for Musicology took place in Edinburgh last week. I thought it went well. I had 13 speakers altogether including J. Stephen Downie from Illinois and Ichiro Fujinaga from McGill as well as some European and UK speakers. It was hosted at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh which I've been to before.
The idea was to try to attract an audience of musicologists who don't currently use technology to support their research beyond library catalogues and online journal access. In the event, after advertising widely to UK university music departments, only a handful of "proper" musicologists were there. However, they did raise some good discussions and I think we came away with a feeling that there may still be scope for promoting e-Science methods in musicological research.
We might try and get a D-Lib publication out of it.
I've ditched Cocoon from the Britten Thematic Catalogue project. Which is good. It's now running all in CherryPy. Which is even better. It still uses XSLT to generate the HTML, RDF, etc. views. But now all the URL pattern matching and XSLT processing is done in Python with CherryPy and it seems like a more coherent application for it.
We went for a day trip to Ely on Sunday. We heard the girls choir sing the Langlais Messe Solemnelle in the morning and Howells in B minor in the afternoon. They weren't bad. But what was really good was that there was a free concert at lunch time in the Lady Chapel (quite possibly one of the best reverberant acoustics in the country) given by the mixed choral forces of James Maddison University (Virginia). They were amazing. Like most things in America, they take it all really seriously, they put on a proper performance which they expect to go well and it really pays off. They did some fantastic pieces and just performed them stunningly well. Quite possibly the best concert I've been to for a long time. Even better than Philip Glass!
I've started learning to use org-mode properly. I used to use it mainly just for note taking, and marking some notes as TODO in one of my project files. Now I'm trying to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done in it. This is a good idea in itself, but I've also been asked to give a presentation on doing it for staff and research students in Computing at Goldsmiths on Tuesday, so I kind of need to learn to use it.
Anyway, my train is just arriving at Norwich. C-c C-c. C-x b todos RET C-c C-t d RET C-x C-c |
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| Weird Emacs bug |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|05:11 pm] |
I notice this strange little bug every so often. It involves three Emacs modes: Wanderlust (a mail client), ElScreen (a GNU Screen-a-like for managing Emacs window configurations), and ERC (an IRC client).
ElScreen comes with a handy add-on for Wanderlust which includes a feature to allow composing drafts in their own new screen. When you send your message (C-c C-c), the new screen which it opened is killed and it takes you back to the last screen you were looking at.
I've noticed that, if the last screen I was using before sending my email was an ERC buffer containing an IRC channel, when it returns to that screen after sending the message, it makes me /leave the channel. It's not even like ERC's erc-part-from-channel function (bound to C-c C-p); that prompts you for a reason before leaving.
Very weird. |
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| Thesis Corrections and Quotation Systems |
[May. 16th, 2009|12:29 pm] |
I'm just doing my thesis corrections and, apart from a few general typos, one thing my external examiner picked up on was what he described as "inconsistency" in my quoting style; sometimes my punctuation was outside the quote marks and sometimes inside.
Now this is a little system that I thought I had invented and which I knew would probably get me into trouble. It is that, when the punctuation (usually full stops) is from the text I'm quoting it goes inside the quote marks---it's being quoted---and when it's my punctuation it goes outside the quote marks. The stylistically normal method is to put all punctuation inside the quote marks.
I was about to give in and re-format all my quotations to use the conventional style. However, I then found an interesting article by Larry Trask from 1997, then in Informatics at Sussex. He describes exactly the system I've used and describes it as the "logical view", opposing it to the "conventional view", and giving some good examples. He also cites an article by Geoffrey Pullum called Punctuation and human freedom (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2:4, Nov. 1984, pp. 419--425) in which Pullum describes his use of the logical view and his annoyance at copy editors insisting on re-shuffling his carefully quoted punctuation.
As a result my logical punctuation stays. That is how it will appear in the final text deposited in the library. It's a small victory. |
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| Philip Glass in Norwich |
[May. 15th, 2009|11:53 pm] |
For real, we've just seen a concert given by Philip Glass at the Theatre Royal in Norwich! It's important to understand the sheer enormity of this. Glass is one of the most well known American composers of the twentieth century and rarely plays outside the States. He played some of the Metamorphosis, Mad Rush, some of his new Etudes, a few bits of film music and Opening from Glassworks. The audience absolutely loved it. He played two encores and received two standing ovations.
I appreciate his status as a key figure in what critics call minimalism, but I have one overriding impression from this concert: Glass just isn't a performer. He has very little sense of his own stage presence. He rushes and fumbles over notes; there were quite a few very obvious mistakes in his performance tonight. Most of his speed changes didn't make musical sense and were clearly just as a result of his pieces being too hard for him to stay in time. (And these pieces really are hard.)
I still thoroughly enjoyed it, though. Now I can add Philip Glass to my list of towering figures of music I've seen in real life. I think the only other person on that list at the moment is Pierre Boulez, but it's a good start. |
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| MPs Expenses |
[May. 15th, 2009|10:25 am] |
So Harriet Harman said yesterday, "The public who elected us, and whom we represent, expect us to sort it out. As Leader of the House, I want to say--on behalf, I hope, of the whole House--'We get it. We're going to sort it out.' That goes for all of us. We are aware of the scale of anger and outrage. We all believe that the issue needs to be sorted out, and we will work together urgently to do exactly that."
This seems to be quite a common theme in this whole business; MPs saying, we must sort this out because the public don't like it. But I would've thought that they should sort it out because it's wrong, not because of how it influences our opinion of them. It's like they're saying, now that we've been caught we need to stop doing it. Would they still be making dishonest expenses claims now if the Telegraph hadn't published details of it, if the public weren't aware? It seems to me that it's only because of the matter coming to light that they've chosen to try to stamp it out. |
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| National Express fare increases |
[May. 13th, 2009|11:36 am] |
National Express have increased their rail fares from next week.
I regularly travel from London to Norwich for the weekend and my selection of single advanced fares with a Young Persons' Rail Card include: Mythical (£3.95), Cheap and Cheerful (£5.95); Acceptable (£7.90); Annoying (£10.55); Emergency Only (£13.85); and then various Absolute No No prices.
So I bought my tickets for this weekend just now and on Friday Cheap and Cheerful, and Acceptable were quite easy to get which is great. But on Monday they've all vanished and been replaced by a whole load of completely alien prices. It's like when you get into your office and someone has moved all the stuff around on your desk. It's slightly disconcerting.
I'm guessing this is in relation to simplification of ticket naming schemes. In fact, National Express already operated the Anytime, Off-peak, Advanced system so I don't understand why they're changing their ticket prices.
While I'm on the subject, I wish they'd sort out their quiet coach policy. They always say "please avoid using mobile phones, laptops and other audio equipment". In fact, it's people talking which is most annoying in a quiet coach. First Great Western say "please keep noise levels to a minimum" which is much more straightforward.
</rant> |
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| Some cools things I've noticed in Emacs 23 |
[May. 10th, 2009|06:14 pm] |
set-fill-column no longer requires a prefix argument. So where I used to have to do C-u 100 RET C-x f I can now just do C-x f RET 100 RET which is much more semantically pleasing.
Tab completion now fills in blanks where it can unambiguously. So for example, C-x C-f nesc-in TAB will complete to nesc-workshop-invitation.txt.
A slightly weird one is that, for wrapped lines, next-line (C-n or pressing the down arrow) instead of moving the cursor to the next line of the buffer (as it used to) now moves the cursor to the next line on the screen, even if it's within the same line of the buffer. Similarly for previous-line. The result is that Emacs now behaves a bit more like GUI text editors (such as Kate and Gedit). It's quite easy to get used to but was a bit of shock when I first noticed it.
Anti-aliased fonts in Gtk Emacs are very lovely indeed :-) |
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| Passed my MMus viva |
[May. 5th, 2009|03:31 pm] |
Just a quick note to say: I've just passed my viva! So I'll be MMus from 15th July (when it's conferred).
It was really good so sit down and talk about what I'd been researching for two years with two people who actually knew what I was talking about and found it interesting!
Now, on with the Ph.D. |
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| General Update |
[May. 4th, 2009|01:48 pm] |
Long time, no blog. Again.
I've done a few things since I last wrote in here. My Lisp hacking is going better. I've read more of Peter Seibel which is funny and engaging and at the same time very thorough and informative. I've also read some of Paul Graham's introductory book which is very succint and seems to betray a dislike of object oriented programming. Quite handy though, it's a lot smaller than Seibel and includes a useful reference. I also have CLtL2 installed from the Debian package and browsable with w3m mode in Emacs. I find this nicer to use than the Hyperspec. Talking of which, I found the free personal edition of LispWorks and had a quick play with it. To be honest, though, I think I prefer working with SLIME and Emacs.
We went on the Poppy Line of the North Norfolk Railway last weekend. The weather was lovely. See flickr photos. Reminds me of being a kid!
I went to a training event at Aston University in April on the National Grid Service (nothing to do with electricity). It's basically a grid computing service for UK e-Science (technologies for enabling research, also called "cyberinfrastructure" in the US and e-Research in Australia). It all seems quite clever. They use the Globus toolkit which has a dreadful Web portal for job management and a better command line interface. Using a Web interface for managing jobs I found pretty counterintuitive, so the command line interface is definitely my preference. The selection of applications installed on the NGS is heavily biased to science research (bioinformatics, chemical modelling, etc.) though they do have the Weka text mining framework installed and seemed quite amenable to users installing other software.
At the event I met someone called David Woolls who works in computational forensic linguistics. I've invited him to come and give a seminar at Goldsmiths and to show us how his software may be of use in our music literature analysis for Purcell Plus.
I haven't posted since the London snow which turned out to be a grand excuse for everyone to have a day off. I struggled back to London from Norwich, going on the DLR for first time. For some reason, while various tube lines were closed, the DLR seemed to work. Anyway, I got to College to find it was closed which was pretty annoying. There are some pictures on flickr.
I started using Twitter, mainly because there was an Emacs mode. I'm not really sure why it's a good idea. And also, someone is sitting on my nick.
I gave up on KDE after trying KDE 4. 4.0 wasn't ready for general use. 4.1 fixed loads of bugs and 4.2 was quite a bit more complete. But it's scarily reminiscent of Vista. So now I'm doing everything (mail, irc, jabber) except Web browsing in Emacs, using Fluxbox for handy keybindings and putting Emacs in a workspace, and using Conkeror for Web browsing. It means I don't have to deal with the fiddly little mouse on my Acer Aspire One. I've learned enough emacs lisp to be able to write a few handy extensions for things like file association, presence management (irc and jabber), and tinyurl and keep meaning to try using emacs as a scripting language :-)
So that's me for now. Maybe I'll blog more about my Lisp learning and Emacs hacks. |
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| Lisp Learning So Far |
[Dec. 24th, 2008|05:24 pm] |
So I'm still trying to learn Lisp. It's a bit of a mixed experience.
Slime is quite good. I like the syntax prompting and I like having access to REPL commands via key-bindings in a Lisp source buffer in Emacs. So I can compile/evaluate expressions, functions, files easily.
The REPL is nothing special really. We had interactive interpreters in BASIC when we were children. And I regularly use the Python interactive interpreter for debugging, reminding myself of syntax, etc.
I was introduced to clbuild which manages installation and maintenance of Lisp libraries, taking the code directly from the projects' repositories. It's reminiscent of APT in Debian, but without any particular quality control. It tends to adopt a sort of brute force strategy for 'resolving' dependencies.
One thing that n00bs are supposed to find difficult which I've actually got on all right with is using functions as first class objects - passing them as arguments to other functions, storing them in lists, returning them form other functions, etc. I guess this is because I was already used to doing that kind of thing in Python anyway. Though in Common Lisp it's complicated by functions and other things (can you tell I don't really understand it?) occupying different namespaces and to access the function which a symbol represents you have to prepend the symbol with a nasty little bit of syntactic grubbiness: #'
I understand Lisp macros in principle but can't write them in practice. Again, more syntactic grubbiness. Lisp macros are expanded at compile-time into ordinary Lisp code. The macro definitions contain Lisp code which must be prepending with a ` to indicate that it will be returned as-is when the macro is expanded, or a , to indicate that it will be evaluated and the result returned when the macro is expanded. It gets grubbier, though. You can use ,@ to tell it to evaluate the following expression at expansion-time and splice its result into the returned code.
Also I don't understand keywords. They're prepending with some more syntactic grubbiness, a :. But I can never anticipate where libraries like CLIM and CLSQL will use keywords and where they'll use plain symbols.
Similarly, I don't like vectors/lists and hashes/a-lists (or p-lists, they're different things!) Far too many solutions to the same problem. I never know which I'm supposed to use. I don't like the fact that you use functions to managed them (e.g. access elements). In Python, the syntax for managing lists and dictionaries is very clean and predictable (not to mention well-documented).
It's downhill from here.
SBCL has the most dreadful debugger. Get this: it doesn't actually tell you what line of your source code it got stuck on!! Can you believe that? Even in C you get it tell you which line of your code you need to start hunting for the mistake from. I found someone's blog post about getting SBCL to give you line numbers but it somewhat misses the point. I'm a n00b, I have difficulty with even the simplest of functions. I really don't need to be dealing with non-trivial hacks just to get started in the language.
Another weird thing it does is that whenever you import library code, it seems to compile or something. In any case, it takes a long time to import a module and spews out lots of messages while it's doing it.
But there's something fundamentally more wrong with Lisp and it's community. There are Lisp libraries for just about everything. Which is great, except that in most cases there are several libraries which do the same thing. Some of those libraries are functionally incomplete. Pretty much all them have very little documentation. This is a real problem for people who are jobbing programmers who need to get stuff done, as well as for n00bs who want to progress beyond trivial number and string manipulation games and do some more interesting and pointful stuff like accessing their database or generating XML.
For example, I was trying out the CLSQL tutorial. And the first example I typed in contained a mistake. I found out what the problem was in a conversation form 2004. A particular bit of this library had been deprecated, but the tutorial hadn't been updated.
I think these are indicative of the problem with Lisp. It's by hackers for hackers. So libraries don't get completed because they're hacker projects that become uninteresting once they've been solved in principle. They're then not solved satisfactorily in practice because no one depends on them.
I still want to like Lisp but it's not making it easy so far. It's a very different experience to when I first started learning Python. Then, I found that all the things I normally did while writing programs were suddenly rendered simple. And it had a large, comprehensive and well documented standard library. I could write non-trivial Python applications (not just simple programs) without relying on any third party code and move them from one system to another without problems. And there was also a large selection of well written and often well documented libraries for doing all the things the standard library doesn't provide for.
Of course, come back in six month's time and I'll be a hardcore Lisp hacker flaming stupid n00bs like me who just don't get it. |
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| OSDir |
[Dec. 24th, 2008|05:12 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
I hate this OSDir thing. You know, the mailing list archiver thing.
Obviously, the adverts are annoying, but that's just become an inevitable feature of contemporary Web use. What really annoys me is that it doesn't show you the date of a message when you're viewing it. It doesn't even show you the date in thread index view. The only ways to find the date of a message are either to go to the date index or to get the year and month from the message URL.
It's pants and I wish it would go away. |
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| Sigur Rós |
[Nov. 22nd, 2008|11:49 am] |
We went to see Sigur Rós at Alexandra Palace on Thursday. I thought they were a bit loud really. Their music is quite melodic and sonically detailed. It really relies on the high frequencies but they seemed to treat the gig like a rock concert and over-did the bass and the drums. But their specially effects were good. They had a waterfall in front of the stage at one point and various showers of little bits of paper.
One other cool thing: we were stood behind Peter Serafinowicz and Sarah Alexander!
Alexandra Palace is amazing. I'd never been there before but it's absolutely massive and it's in a fantastic location on top of a hill with a lovely view of the city. Unfortunately neither of use took our cameras or phones so no photos I'm afraid :-(
Back in Norwich this weekend and it's snowing! |
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| Annual Entry |
[Nov. 17th, 2008|10:49 pm] |
Oh no, I missed my last-blogging anniversary!
I've done quite a bit in the last year. Most important, I've got a lovely girlfriend.
I've also started a new job working at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems research group in the Computing Department. I'm working on a Ph.D as part of a research project called Purcell Plus. We're attempting to make a musicological case for computational musicology.
So I've moved to London. New Cross to be precise. It's a very lively area. But we still have a flat in Norwich and I often go home at weekends which is very nice.
I'm learning Lisp. Most of the tools my research group are developing are Lisp-based. Once I'd been prompted that Common Lisp is actually multi-paradigmatic and that re-using procedural paradigms from languages like Python in Lisp is perfectly acceptable I started getting on a lot better. I need to learn CLOS and CLIM next. Maybe I'll blog about that.
It's nice working in a computing department. As my first degree was in music I've never experienced a university computer science department before. I like the slightly more productive research culture and the more skill-based, cumulative undergraduate programme. I've been tutoring first year Java labs. (Java is a dreadful language to teach in. Maybe I'll blog about that too.)
We had a great weekend this weekend. Zoe played the Poulenc Double Piano Concerto in Norwich Cathedral on Friday which was fantastic! We went to her sister's birthday party in Sussex in Saturday. And chilled out in New Cross last night.
Should I start blogging again? Maybe. |
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| Missing Journal: Computers in Music Research |
[Nov. 15th, 2007|12:45 pm] |
I'm looking for any further information regarding the journal Computers in Music Research.
So far I know that it was published by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, edited by John Wm. Schaffer, had the ISSN "1046-1744", and that it published six issues annually, the last of which (1999) was delayed and published in 2003.
I also have the following citations:
- Alphonce, Bo. "Computer Applications in Music Research: A Retrospective". Computers in Music Research 1 (1989): 1-74.
- Popovic, Igor. "The Analytical Object: Computer Based Representation of Musical Scores and Analyses". Computers in Music Research 1 (1989): 103-116.
- Fujinaga, I., B. Alphonce, B. Pennycook, & N. Boisvert. "Optical recognition of music notation by computer". Computers in Music Research 1 (1989): 161-164.
- Smoliar, Stephen W. "Lewin's Model of Musical Perception Reflected by Artificial Intelligence". Computers in Music Research 2 (1990): 1-37.
- Desain, P. & H. Honing. "Towards a Calculus for Expressive Timing in Music". Computers in Music Research 3 (1991): 42-120. http://www.nici.kun.nl/mmm/abstracts/dh-91-f.html
- Fujinaga, I., B. Pennycook, & B. Alphonce. "The optical music recognition project". Computers in Music Research 3 (1991): 139-42.
- Orpen, K. & D. Huron. "Measurement of similarity in music: A quantitative approach for non-parametric representations". Computers in Music Research 4 (1992): 1-44.
- Uno, Yayoi & Roland Hübscher. "Temporal-Gestalt Segmentation: polyphonic extensions and applications to works by Boulez, Cage, Xenakis, Ligeti, and Babbitt". Computers in Music Research 5 (1995): 1-37.
- McGee, Deron. "Developing Knowledge-based Simulations as a Method for Investigating Theoretical Positions". Computers in Music Research 5 (1995): 39-66.
- Blombach, Ann K. "Determining Keys and Correct Pitch Notation in Tonal Melodies". Computers in Music Research 5 (1995): 67-102.
- Koozin, T. "Graphic Approaches to Musical Analysis in a Multimedia Environment". Computers in Music Research 5 (1995): 103-118
- Pearsall, Edward R. "Reviews: Gerald Edelman, 'Bright Air, Brilliant Fire'". Computers in Music Research 5 (1995): 119-32.
- D. Collins & D. Huron. "Voice Leading in Cantus Firmus-based Composition: A Comparison between Theory and Practice in Renaissance and Baroque Music using Computer-Assisted Inferential Measures." Computers in Music Research 6 (1999): 53-96.
Please leave comments here or email me directly if you can either fill me in on any further citations or even supply me with full text of any of the articles from this journal. |
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| Digital Representations of Performing Arts |
[Aug. 22nd, 2007|05:32 pm] |
I've finally done a write up of some of the things I thought were interesting from the conference I attended in July. This text was framed for use on the conference's Wiki and so addresses the implications of the ideas discussed for the Sonic Arts Research Archive rather than being a more general write-up (like I didn't write about Beauty and Beast or the conference dinner during which there was much discussion of Harry Potter, markup languages, and general and particular geekery).
The Textual Bias
In her keynote paper, Susan Melrose (Middlesex) makes the point that archives are often considered things to be read; text is privileged at the expense of, crucially in this context, more performance-relevant content such as audio and images. SARA reflects this textual bias. Its main design concerns have been around the database schema used to store meta-data and its Web presentation used to convey that meta-data. Although this meta-data is "meta" in that it describes media objects, the nature, availability and sometimes even presence of these items has been a secondary concern. And although archival projects often privilege meta-data, Melrose also makes the point that very few archives ever make the methods or schema of this meta-data available. It would be very feasible for SARA to publish its database schema allowing users some insight into the structure of the data while using the archive.
Rick Rinehart (UC Berkeley), in his paper on the Media Art Notation System, takes up the issues around the nature of what is and can be stored as media objects. He asks the pertinent question, "is the art in the computer?" or, the case of SARA, "is the music in the recording?" He makes a case for longevity of encoding of digital art by storing scores rather than instantiations. Scores, in this context he argues, are generally computer code used to create digital art works. SARA makes little provision for storing this type of media, but rather stores performance instantiations in the form of digital images and digital audio - often using the MP3 encoding method which raises serious concerns for longevity. It does, however, also store a number of recordings on CD and DAT but these are problematic in their availability. SARA also stores a small number of sound diffusion sketches and it seems quite a feasible objective to attempt to archive score-like computer code.
In discussing what aspects of a performative digital art work should be stored, Rinehart proposes addressing the views of the artist, encouraging negotiation between the artist and the archivist. Similarly, Melrose argues that many performers are often removed from the digital realm occupied by archivists. SARA (and other digital art archive projects such as those which are of concern to Rinehart) is an interesting case in that the practitioners whose work it captures are working with what Rinehart calls "born-digital" objects. However, although they are often quite technically aware, their bias is more usually towards art and performance technology and different to the technological biases of the archivist. Rinehart stresses that the Media Art Notation System is for archivists, not for artists. Similarly, SARA currently (and maybe in the future) will be expanded by archivists with archival biases, rather than by artists. It did, however, in its early stages foster a curatorship scheme in which artists were invited to select and archive content.
Similar to Rinehart's discussion of capturing score-like data, Paul Clarke (Dartington) argues for a view of archival material which is more dynamic and allows for the possibility of using it as a resource for future performance work. SARA is well placed to implement this idea in that much of its content is produced as a result of practice-led research and it is housed in an institution whose faculty would be biased towards this kind of work, and which has the resources and context to carry it out. However, it currently lacks the provision of a data capture method which would allow such recycling of material.
The Institutional Bias
SARA is very much a product of UEA. The majority of the data it holds (particularly records of events) are concerning UEA artists and works. This reflects a wider issue with archival projects, especially those with loosely defined remits: the processes and consequences of selecting material for archiving. What should the archivist include? And what should be left out? Institutional biases plays a key role in this process. Sally Jane Norman (Newcastle) argued that our "historical apparatus", our references are built upon what we chose to document in the past and warned against succumbing to the "omniscience myth", the archive as an authority.
Norman, along with Rinehart and Melrose, discussed the idea of not privileging the account given by the archive of works and performances. Rinehart described an accounts mechanism as part of the Media Art Notation System which takes the postmodern view of works as texts with different readings and doesn't privilege any reading as authoritative. He argued against implicitly fixing the work's status at the point of archiving and suggested that archives should make explicit their own role in the history of the works they document. Norman and Melrose both highlighted the importance of the (often neglected) view-point of the spectator, Melrose fitting this into her concept of "set ups". Similarly, Clarke described being able to store users' routes through the archive and making such information available as another resource. SARA makes no provision for differing accounts of works or performances and assumes a kind of authority. The solution to this problem is two-fold: first the database schema should be altered to allow for capturing such information; and second (but more difficult) alternate views of works need to be captured.
Paul Stapleton (SARC, Belfast) also discussed the "cultural authority" of the archive in the context of the how the archived account of a work may influence future views of that work or performance. He demonstrated video recordings in which the camera operator, through constantly changing perspectives, plays a clear role in interpreting the performance. To a lesser extent, SARA's use of MP3 encoding affects the perception of future archive users of the works archived; as does the decision (with electronic music) whether to make an ambient recording (with microphones) or a source recording (capturing the final mix of digital audio before it is sent to the speakers). SARA rarely makes these distinctions explicit.
Stapleton's project, LiveArchives.org, highlights one of the main current shortcomings of SARA. SARA is, as mentioned above, a project rooted in its host institution. All of the selection and archiving work is carried out at UEA by a very small number of people. Except through correspondence with the project's staff, outside users can have no influence on the content of the archive. LiveArchives.org, on the other hand, has adopted some ideas prevalent in contemporary online social construction of knowledge such as user submissions and tagging (the assigning of categorising words or phrases to items in the archive by the users). At times when no one at UEA is working on SARA, the archive cannot grow at all; this is problematic for a project whose remit is to document "current practice".
Clarke's ideas around practice-led research discussed above are also relevant here in that they attempt to break down the institutional authority of the archive. He argues that archived documents should be "critically reflexive" allowing the archive to grow through reactive means as well as by conventional submission. Implementation of these ideas is as much a question of technology as it is of archiving practice; as mentioned above, it requires a media representation technique (such as Rinehart's score-like representations) which allows such interactive re-use of material.
Stapleton also discussed the importance of performance documentation in the academy and noted the trend that doctoral level researchers are permitted to include performance as part of their research work while researchers in later stages of their careers are rarely given this opportunity, only written documentation is acceptable. SARA reflects this in that a considerable portion of its content is evidence of practice by doctoral students from UEA, but it does also include work by research fellows and the UEA faculty.
Conclusions
Perhaps the overriding impression from the preceding discussion is the current dichotomy between static, insular archival practice and dynamic, democratic archival practice. It will be necessary to investigate the benefits and costs to SARA of implementing a more user-centric archival paradigm and interesting to explore some of the technologies which may enable such practices. |
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