Jamie Bullock

Thoughts on #codingforkids

This week, government minister Michael Gove announced government plans proposing that current school ICT is replaced by a new Computer Science GCSE. I have no actual numbers for this, but my guess is that most people think this is a great idea. Why wouldn’t we want kids to learn to code?

The tricky part comes when we start to dig into the detail. What will the new curriculum contain? How will it be taught? Who will teach it? 

One thing I am clear about is that the choice of programming language should be left to individual teachers and pupils.

What I’d like to see the new curriculum achieve:

• sharpen creative and analytical skills through projects and play
• understand abstraction and think in an abstracted way
• self-teaching through experimentation and research
• learn to modularise and classify problems and solutions
• understand algorithms, data structures, interface, and state 

This is what I personally understand as ‘computational thinking’.

The end results, be it an mobile app, a game, or a robot controller and the languages used, should result from the skills and interests of teachers and students. 

What makes something a musical instrument?

I’ve been thinking about this question since my final year as an undergraduate, and explored it in some detail in my M.Phil. thesis. I’ve also blogged about the subject, and discussed it many times. I’m now approaching a kind of opaque definition:

“If we take two performances of a piece, played on the same instrument, with identical articulation, and subtract one performance from the other,  we’re left with the instrument”

In other words, to be called a musical instrument something must be capable of nuance.

Mechanical and analogue electronic instruments, are broadly predictable in their behaviour, but at a detailed level they constantly produce small, unpredictable variations in tone and response even with the same playing techniques.

With digital instruments, this capability for nuance and unpredictability isn’t inherent and therefore needs to be added artificially. For me, providing these nuances of interaction remains one of the key challenges of digital instrument design.

*Image by Soophoo from Wikimedia commons

The art of illusion

This week I had the pleasure of working with the Palindrome dance company for a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire. The company is led by Robert Wechsler, who has spent 10 years researching and developing the EyeCon video motion tracking platform in collaboration with developer Friedrich Weiss.

As part of the performance, the group gave an hour-long workshop in which they talked about their techniques and how they were used. I was particularly interested to hear about their use of motion tracking since Palindrome have developed some of the most effective work I have seen, apparently achieving extremely accurate synchronisation between movement (gesture) and sound (music). The sync seems accurate in terms of both spatial and temporal localisation, for example dancers can trigger sonic events with tiny movements of their fingers or eyes even at some distance from the camera.

I use words like ‘seems accurate’ and ‘apparently’, because it became evident from the workshop that unlike many motion capture systems, EyeCon doesn’t work by giving accurate data about the dancer’s location in 3D space, neither does it capture data about the position of individual body parts. Instead it takes a 2D window of the space and tells us where the dancer is in that window, whether they are intersecting a marked area, the amount of movement within that area and degree of left-right symmetry. It can’t tell us the dancer’s absolute height, but it can tell us if they appear bigger or smaller within the window.

The word ‘appearance’ is critical here because in many regards EyeCon and the Palindrome approach is more about how things appear than how they are. In the following video clip, for example, it appears as though the motion capture system is accurately tracking the movements of eyes and mouth. In reality, it has nothing like that level of detail. Instead it knows roughly where movement is occurring, and the intensity of that movement. The appearance of eye movement controlling sound is an illusion, effectively created through the correlation of movement, motion sensing and audio triggering. We see the eyes move and we hear a sound, so our brains assume that there is some connection between eye movement and sound production. This may be the case, but often the system will just wait for any movement within a given window region and then react.

A Human Conversation from Jamie Bullock on Vimeo.

This approaches something I have used in my own work for a long time, and which I believe very strongly, which is that the audience’s perception of what happens is far more important than what actually happens. The obvious analogy in the world of live electronic music is score following. State of the art score following typically uses a stored model of the musical work (a representation of the score), and tries to match incoming to this model thereby giving a precise temporal location within the score as output. This approach is OK for music where a high degree of reproducibility is required, but personally I’m more interested in creating a more organic sense of interaction for the performer and audience. That is, I’m not so interested in where the performer is within a score, but rather where they are in the space of musical possibilities.

So as live electronics musicians, what can we learn from Palindrome and their approach? I think the key for me is that we need to ‘think smarter’ about how we use our technical resources in order to create synergies between art and technology where the whole is greater than the sum of constituent parts. We need to always be aware of perception and how the human mind always tries to connect cause and effect. For me this is an interesting space to play with both technically and artistically.

2011 computer music conference calendar

The following is a Google calendar giving the key dates (including paper deadlines) for a selection of 2011 conferences relevant to live electronic music, computer music and music technology research. An iCal file for the calendar can be found here. Enjoy!

2010: a year in search of tempo giusto

Following my ambitious 2010 New Year’s resolution to read a book-per-week, I started perhaps inappropriately with Carl Honoré In Praise of Slow. ‘Slow’ has the potential to be a life-changing read. It describes a way of life that calls into question the ‘productivity culture’ in modern society, suggesting an alternative based on living (eating, working, loving) more slowly in order to achieve a happier, more fulfilling life. A lot of the ideas presented by Honoré, come out of The Slow Movement and its predecessor Slow Food, the antithesis of ‘fast food’ and ‘ready meals’. All good stuff.

So, inspired the book, I set out to slow down my life. I started growing my own vegetables, making bread, thinking, relaxing, taking time to ‘savour each moment’ etc. For a moment it worked, but for all my good intentions my journey into the world of ‘slow’ was shortlived — quickly the demands of daily life took over as the initial inspiration from In Praise of Slow melted away.

Now at the end of 2010, I find myself reading Do More Faster edited by David Cohen & Brad Feld, an entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur advice book, born out of the TechStars startup accelerator. Do More Faster is an excellent collection of short articles by successful founders, investors and CEO’s sharing their experiences of creating startups. It’s mainly quickfire, practical advice with a common theme of speed — make decisions quickly, fail fast, get feedback early, throw things away etc. The book is written in short easily digestable chunks (1-3 pages) that can be read quickly. It’s not only about speed, but that’s the key advantage of small companies over big ones, writes Cohen.

So what happened? How did I go from “In Praise of Slow” to “Do More Faster”? The truth is, like most people, I live a very busy life: I have 3 small children, a full-time job, a house and garden to maintain and ongoing side projects etc. So, whilst I like the idea of ‘going slow’, it’s not really practical.

One of the key points Honoré makes is that the Slow Philosophy isn’t about doing everything slowly, it’s about achieving ‘tempo giusto’ (the right speed). This means it’s best to do some things quickly and others slowly, as appropriate. The problem is that In Praise of Slow is an exposition on an idea not a practical handbook. It doesn’t really tell you how to achieve slowness, it just says what it is. But here’s the idea: if I do some things quicker, I can do others slower. It’s about balance — simple!

So in 2011, I’ll try to put this into practice and search again for tempo giusto.