NOTE: REVISED SCHEDULE, 10 AM - 6 PM

Crossroads: Sonification Art and Science

A day of discussions, presentations, and performances around data sonification

Organized by Scot-Gresham-Lancaster,  CNMAT Visiting Researcher and Research Scientist at the ArtSciLab at UT Dallas

Data Sonification sits at a crossroads. How do we begin to understand the separation of the act of sonification as sound art and the use of sonification techniques as functional scientific tools?

Saturday, November 10, 10-6 p.m.
Performances, discussions, presentations, and demos with Scot-Gresham Lancaster and guest speakers to include:  Ed Campion (Director, CNMAT), Jeff Lubow (Musical Systems Designer, CNMAT), Andrew Blanton (visiting researcher, CNMAT), Chris Chafe (Stanford University, CCRMA), Sharath Chandra Ram (PhD Fellow, School of Arts, Technology & Emerging Communication, UT Dallas), Sinduja Rangarajan and Jim Briggs (Reveal News) and Bert Barten (Independent Music and Theater producer, Amsterdam).

The term sonification was first coined around 1996, but the actual practice of data sonification had been emerging as a new area of performance and art research for decades before that. Only with the advent of microcomputer data visualisation did a distinct linkage called sonification emerge. In her recent keynote at the ICAD conference in 2017, composer and instrument designer Carla Scaletti described sonification as “the unseen third leg of the audio technology stool.” One leg is the music leg, the other leg is the spoken word … and then this mysterious new leg where data is converted to sound. The history of sonification has many singular projects proposing techniques for using microcomputers to augment data exploration and the boundary between Art and Science. It is very hard to find cases where these efforts have really scaled up. One of the objectives of these discussions is to share information and pinpoint new strategies for moving forward.

Format for the day is performance of each individual contribution followed by discussion

10:00 Opening Remarks by Scot Gresham-Lancaster

10:10 Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan

11:00  Sinduja Rangarajan and Jim Briggs (Reveal News)

11:30 Andrew Blanton (SJSU)

12:00 Lunch break

1:00 Open discussion/workshop “What is the future of sonification in the Art of Music?”

2:00 Chris Chafe: Gnosisong

3:00 Edmund Campion and Jeff Lubow: Natural Frequencies

4:00 Bert Barten “Talking Trees” with Scot Gresham-Lancaster

5:00 - 6:00 closing remarks

This workshop is sponsored in part as part of CNMAT's partnership with The Technologies of Notation and Representation (TENOR) Network . The TENOR Network brings together researchers and institutions to focus on the two principal modes of tracing ephemeral art practices in a more durable medium: Notations provide performers with a set of instructions or framings that guide their performance; Representations, in turn, preserve ephemeral art events (interpretations, improvisations or emergent collective performances) for comparison, analysis and archiving.