Abstract

As you might remember, the Computer Lab currently has a composer in residence, Alejandro Vinao. Alejandro gave the final Wednesday seminar last term, in which he talked about his work as a sophisticated user of the current generation of languages developed for advanced music programming.

To follow up some of the questions that arose at the end of that seminar, we’d like to spend about 10 minutes asking a couple of specific questions of the members of your research group. The most convenient way to do this might be to take 10 minutes at the start of your regular group meeting.

The research objective of Alejandro’s visit to the Lab is to investigate computational processes in his work that are not well-described by current music programming languages. In fact, it seems that they are not well described by any programming languages, in that typical languages for process specification tend to be aimed either at industrial control or low-level signal processing, rather than computational processes at the level of abstraction of human perception.

The reason that we would like to visit research groups from other specialist fields, is to find out how analogous computation processes are described when they arise in your own work, in order to see whether this provides an improved basis for formal description in ours.