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Iannis Xenakis was a pioneer in algorithmic composition of music and art. He combined architecture, mathematics, music, and performance art to create avant-garde compositions and performances that are still being analyzed, performed widely, and discussed today. Xenakis’s musical contributions are deeply algorithmic in nature, inspired by his appreciation and understanding of mathematics and controlled randomness, i.e., stochastic processes. This paper argues that Xenakis's algorithmic approach is style-agnostic, as it may be used with different sonification choices to produce pieces with more traditional aesthetics, possibly bringing broader acceptance, appreciation, and application of his techniques and ideas to more traditional compositional spaces. Also, today’s music technology has evolved tremendously, through the integration of artificial intelligence, advanced computing algorithms, and human computer interaction – techniques and technology that were unavailable to Xenakis, but which would have been inline with his pioneering spirit. We explore some of Xenakis’s early works in algorithmic and stochastic music, and reimagine the types of music Xenakis could possibly be making today, having access to the modern technology of smartphones and computing devices. Examples include a retelling of Xenakis's “Concret PH” using smartphones for sound spatialization and audience interaction / participation; “Éolienne PH”, an example piece which utilizes the same statistical distributions as “Concret PH” to produce a completely different sound aesthetic; “on the Fractal Nature of Being…” which combines Xenakis's stochastic / aleatoric techniques with traditional music theory and modern mathematics / fractal geometry; and, finally “Nereides / Νηρηΐδες”, a piano miniature piece, which is made using statistical distributions from a cloudy sky. We close with some general ideas on the future of the Algorithmic Arts.
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A Modular Smartphone for Lending
We motivate, design, and prototype a modular smartphone designed to make temporary device lending trustworthy and convenient. The concept is that the phone can be separated into pieces, so a child, friend, or even stranger can begin an access-controlled interaction with one piece, while the own-er retains another piece to continue their tasks and monitor activity. This is grounded in a survey capturing attitudes towards device lending, and an exploratory study probing how people might lend pieces of different kinds of modular smartphones. Design considerations are generated for a hardware form factor and software interface to support different lending scenarios. A functional prototype combining three smartphones into a single modular device is described and used to demonstrate a lending interaction design. A usability test validates the concept using the prototype.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657141
- PAR ID:
- 10063457
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 205 to 215
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Iannis Xenakis was a pioneer in algorithmic composition of music and art. He combined architecture, mathematics, music, and performance art to create avant-garde compositions and performances that are still being analyzed, performed widely, and discussed today. Xenakis’s musical contributions are deeply algorithmic in nature, inspired by his appreciation and understanding of mathematics and controlled randomness, i.e., stochastic processes. This paper argues that Xenakis's algorithmic approach is style-agnostic, as it may be used with different sonification choices to produce pieces with more traditional aesthetics, possibly bringing broader acceptance, appreciation, and application of his techniques and ideas to more traditional compositional spaces. Also, today’s music technology has evolved tremendously, through the integration of artificial intelligence, advanced computing algorithms, and human- computer interaction – techniques and technology that were unavailable to Xenakis, but which would have been inline with his pioneering spirit. We explore some of Xenakis’s early works in algorithmic and stochastic music, and reimagine the types of music Xenakis could possibly be making today, having access to the modern technology of smartphones and computing devices. Examples include a retelling of Xenakis's “Concret PH” using smartphones for sound spatialization and audience interaction / participation; “Éolienne PH”, an example piece which utilizes the same statistical distributions as “Concret PH” to produce a completely different sound aesthetic; “on the Fractal Nature of Being...” which combines Xenakis's stochastic / aleatoric techniques with traditional music theory and modern mathematics / fractal geometry; and, finally “Nereides / Νηρηΐδες”, a piano miniature piece, which is made using statistical distributions from a cloudy sky. We close with some general ideas on the future of the Algorithmic Arts.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3126594.3126633
