Integra Lab at ICMC/EMW 2017
This year’s International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) was hosted at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in conjunction with Shanghai’s Electronic Music Week (EMW) festival. Balandino Di Donato and James Dooley from Integra Lab attended the conference to present a paper on the MyoSpat gesture-controlled audiovisual system. They were accompanied by [...]
Performing at Audio Mostly 2017
Just back from a fantastic week in London attending the Audio Mostly conference held at Queen Mary University by the Centre for Digital Music. Audio Mostly is a conference which brings together musicians, sound designers, and technologists to discuss their latest understandings. This year the theme of the conference was Augmented and [...]
MiXD 2017
As part of Frontiers festival at Birmingham Conservatoire, MiXD 2017 showcased a selection of works by MMus students interspersed with DJ sets from our own Richard Cornock. The audience was presented with a range of exciting performances exploring interactive live electronics and audiovisuals.
formuls at SONada and SPECTRA
formuls is the audiovisual performance environment created by James Dooley. Using bespoke software to manipulate and control generative algorithms, finely tuned noise and particle-based visuals are crafted during live performance. Throughout the improvised performance oscillating, kaleidoscopic soundscapes with responsive visual projections emerge and slowly evolve through time. A key [...]
Dancing with Sound and Light
Integra Lab is happy to announce a new project! James Dooley and Balandino Di Donato are currently collaborating with Sonia Sabri in an interactive audiovisual dance performance. Sonia Sabri has established an international reputation for presenting Kathak dance in a contemporary context. She creates work relevant to modern audiences, that [...]
Equinode II
Equinode II, an interactive audiovisual work by James Dooley and Balandino Di Donato, was commissioned by SPECTRA Festival Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur (22nd-23rd October, 2016). Fusing audio, visuals and physical gesture to create playful artworks where the quality of the interaction is central to the user experience, the Equinode series [...]
Transforming Transformation: “conclusions and future work”
Our AHRC Digital Transformations project "Transforming Transformation" officially finished last week, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about how the project went and what our future directions might be. The aim of the project was to initiate a new human-centred approach to sound transformation that departs from existing [...]
MiXD website now online
As part of the final phase of our AHRC Digital Transformations we're organising a national symposium on Music Interaction Design (MiXD). At the symposium we will present our own Transforming Transformation project, which will sit alongside other former AHRC Digital Transformations project as well as a range of talks and [...]
Glasgow School of Art showreel
Great to see our AHRC Digital Transformations project featured in our project partner Glasgow School of Art's digital showreel (at 23 seconds in).
MiXD videos now available
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq-_CChlufc&list=PL7E6VwpzpQbn7-ueF8wFBN9Idnf-P8nF_ The videos from our MiXD symposium are now available via the following link. The symposium was huge success and featured a presentation of our final AHRC Digital Transformations system (Integra Forms) as well as our Transforming Transformation artistic commission alongside a range of other talks and demos including [...]
ICLI Paper accepted
Our paper titled 'Approaches to Visualising the Spatial Position of Sound-objects' has been accepted for publication as a paper and demo at the International Conference on Live Interfaces. The paper, brings together research conducted to-date as part of our AHRC-funded Transforming Transformation project, a collaboration with Glasgow School of Art's [...]
EVA paper accepted
Our paper titled 'Approaches to Visualising the Spatial Position of Sound-objects' has been accepted for publication as a paper and demo at EVA London 2016. The paper, which draws heavily on research conducted as part of our AHRC-funded Transforming Transformation project explores ways in which sound spatial location and spatial [...]
Keynote confirmed for MiXD symposium
In order to greatly extend the final workshop of our AHRC Digital Transformations project we've decided to host a national symposium on Music Interaction Design (MiXD). We're now delighted to announce that Jason Mesut has confirmed will be delivering the Keynote address. Jason is a professional user experience and interaction [...]
Transforming Transformation Experiment 4
https://vimeo.com/album/3830936/video/152990816 This is the fourth experiment in a 1-year AHRC Digital Transformations project run jointly between Birmingham Conservatoire’s Integra Lab and Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studios. The project explores new ways of positioning sound in space using touch-free interaction. In this experiment we use the Microsoft Kinect [...]
Adding vibrotactile feedback
One of the findings from our first round of tests for the system we have developed for our AHRC Digital Transformations project "Transforming Transformation" is that users have difficulty precisely grabbing an object within a virtual 3D environment if they only have visual feedback to guide them. The final phase [...]
Initial test results
We have now completed the first round of testing on the system we've been developing for our AHRC Digital Transformations "Transforming Transformation" project. Full results will be available in due course through peer-reviewed publication, but in summary we conducted a system usability and user experience (UX) study involving 14 participants [...]
Transforming Transformation at Music Tech Fest
Today I demo'd the first prototype of our 3D Sound Transformation system at Music Tech Fest Central in Ljubljana. The system-in-progress, has been given the working title "Integra Forms" on account of our aim to enable sound to be transformed (or formed) in space as though it is an invisible [...]
Transforming Transformation experiment 3
https://vimeo.com/139458528 This is the third experiment in a 1-year AHRC Digital Transformations project run jointly between Birmingham Conservatoire’s Integra Lab and Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studios. The project explores new ways of positioning sound in space using touch-free interaction. In this experiment we use the Microsoft Kinect [...]
Integra Lab welcomes Niccolò Granieri
Integra Lab welcomes Niccolo Granieri. Niccolò will be joining us as a research intern working across a range of projects including module development for Integra Live and research into new technologies for touch-free 3D interaction with virtual environments. Aa recent graduate of Conservatorio di musica Giuseppe Tartini in Trieste, Niccolò [...]
Integra Lab welcomes Luiz Casteloes
Integra Lab welcomes Luiz Casteloes. Luiz will be joining us as a postdoc researcher working on developing educational apps based on contemporary compositional techniques such as microtonality, sound spectra analysis, and musical grammars. Brazilian composer, professor at Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (Brazil) since 2009, Luiz has a strong background in [...]
Transforming Transformation experiment 2
https://vimeo.com/138194406 This is the second experiment in a 1 year AHRC Digital Transformations project run jointly between Birmingham Conservatoire’s Integra Lab and Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studios. The project explores the creative applications of 3D sound manipulation, specifically sound spatialisation. In this experiment we use the Microsoft [...]
Announcing the MiXD symposium
As part of our AHRC Digital Transformations project we were planning to present our final system (working title "Integra Forms") through a national public workshop hosted at Birmingham Conservatoire as part of the annual Frontiers Festival. However, since we have received significant interest from researchers interest in using the boundaries [...]
Equinode
https://vimeo.com/137622817 Equinode fuses interactive light projections and algorithmically generated music to create an immersive audience experience. n Visitors uncover streams of music and manipulate the spectrum of light by stepping onto the platform and finding a point of balance and equilibrium: an equinode. Sensors hidden in the platform detect the slightest [...]
equinode for Vagiti Ultimi Spoiler!
Just a quick spoiler about ‘equinode’, an interactive installation created for Vagiti Ultimi 2015, which will be running from 26th August until 14th September in Atri (Teramo, Italy). The installation has been realised by me, James Dooley and Guido Iommarini as members of the new born Star Node group. Our work has been [...]
Transforming Transformation experiment 1
https://vimeo.com/131588660 This is the initial experiment in a 1 year AHRC Digital Transformations project run jointly between Birmingham Conservatoire’s Integra Lab and Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studios. The project will explore the creative applications of 3D sound manipulation, specifically sound spatialisation. In this first experiment a basic [...]
Designing a human-centred system for sound transformation
At its core our AHRC Digital Transformations project "Transforming Transformation" has a simple aim: to instigate a new way of transforming sound that radically improves on existing approaches. The current state of the art If a music producer or sound designer wants to transform a sound, for example by applying [...]
Highlights from NIME 2015
The New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference (or NIME) is a conference that started out as a workshop at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in 2001. It’s an international conference, with approximately 250–500 attendees annually and one of the bigger music technology / computer music conferences. [...]
Fully articulated hand tracking with Kinect 2
This video from MicroSoft Research shows some of the hand-tracking capabilities of the Kinect. Shame this functionality isn't yet in the public SDK as it would've been highly relevant to our project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-xXrMpOHyc
Choosing technologies and frameworks
Choosing technologies and frameworks is an important early stage of any digital research project. Basing a project on the wrong tech can cost time and money, make systems harder to support, prohibit certain types of use, diminish user experience or result in early obsolescence. However, there is rarely (if ever) [...]
AHRC Digital Transformations project begins
We are delighted to announce the beginning of our AHRC-funded Digital Transformations project, titled "Transforming Transformation: 3D Models for Interactive Sound Design". This will be a 12-month collaboration with Glasgow School of Art's Digital Design studios, world leaders in digital interaction and visualisation and commercial partners TwoBigEars, experts in developing [...]
Integra Lab welcomes Balandino Di Donato
Integra Lab welcomes Balandino Di Donato. Balandino will be joining us as a PhD student, working on live sound spatialisation using gestural control. As recent graduate of Conservatorio di musica Alfredo Casella in l'Aquila, Balandino focused for his graduation on Metis, a Tangible User Interface, and various other systems. Balandino will be with the Integra [...]