Lunch Bites - Bruno Zamborlin and Parag Mital

Location: Space 7, Culture Lab, Grand Assembly Rooms, King's Walk
Starts: Thursday, 30th June 2011 at 12:00
Finishes: Thursday, 30th June 2011 at 13:00

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Bruno Zamborlin's talk is titled 'Gesture-sound interaction in digital media', and Parag Mital's talk is 'Augmented sonic realities'.

'Augmented sonic realities' by Parag Mital

An augmented sonic reality aims to register digital sound content with an existing physical space. Perceptual mappings between an agent in such an environment and the augmented content should be both continuous and effective; meaning the intentions of an agent should be taken into consideration in any affective augmentations. How can an embedded intelligence such as an iPhone equipped with detailed sensor information such as microphone, accelerometer, gyrometer, and GPS readings infer the behaviors of its user in creating affective, realistic, and perceivable augmented sonic realities tied to their situated experiences? Further, what can this augmented domain reveal about our own ongoing perceptual experience of our everyday sonic environment?

Parag K Mital is an American-born London-based PhD-student in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a member of the Embodied AudioVisual Interaction (EAVI) group at Goldsmiths Digital Studios, he explores embodied audiovisual perception by means of augmented sonic realities.  Through creating such experiences, he questions the processes surrounding auditory and visual perception in terms of functional roles afforded by environments.  As an audiovisual installation artist, his work has been exhibited at the London Science Museum, BFI Southbank, Waterman's Art Centre, Kinetica Art Fair, Athens Video Art Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  As a scientist, he continues collaborations with the ECHOES II project in investigating multimodal interaction of autistic children in social learning environments.  He is also a published vision scientist investigating the role of neuro-biologically motivated computational models of eye-movements in investigating active visual cognition during dynamic scene viewing.

'Gesture-sound interaction in digital media' by Bruno Zamborlin

I will present an overview of the research and applications performed with the Real-Time Musical Interactions Team of IRCAM (Paris). We have developed for the last seven years various methods and tools for computer-based gesture analysis, with the general goal to use body movements to interact with sonic and/or visual environments. This research has largely been influenced by sustained collaborations with musicians/composers and dancers/choreographers. We will present some of these works, focusing on gesture research and interfaces. In particular, we will present the cases of musical interfaces and various experiments we have been carried on in music pedagogy. We will also present dance performances and interactive installations we have collaborated on. 

In music, we studied physical gestures of musicians such as the bow movement of violin players. This allowed us to formalize key concepts about continuous gesture control, gesture vocabulary and co-articulation (similarly to speech production). This fundamental research led us to design augmented instruments, incorporating these challenging concepts. In parallel, we are designing new interfaces and paradigms to control sonic environments, individually or collectively. In particular, we are developing tools to re-perform sound and music with such interfaces. In particular, we developed a "gesture follower" system that allows for the recognition and synchronization of gestures with sound materials. 

In dance, we will present performances and installations, where we used the same technology than for music. While designed with different goals and aesthetics, two of them use a similar interaction principle: the visitor is invited to dance "imitating" dance material displayed on a large screen. This brings us back to open questions with musical interfaces: how can we learn gestures and the interaction with digital media, and how this affects our gesture and sound perception?

Bruno Zamborlin is currently a PhD student in Arts and Computational Technologies at the Goldsmiths, Univ. of London. He is also member of the Real-Time Musical Interactions team at IRCAM.  His work at IRCAM as a research developer for the past 3 years has focused on real-time gesture recognition for the performing arts.  During this time, he has also collaborated with several composers, such as Ivan Fedele and Pierre Jodlowski, and choreographers, such as Richard Siegal.

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