Since 2015, when I obtained my bachelor degree, I have been involved in research projects related with computer science applications focused on real-time systems and artificial intelligence.
My very first publication came from a project associated with my undergraduate thesis that considered computer music generation, and the conference where we sent the paper (LACCI 2015) was about computational intelligence. Thus, there were several topics and applications, and people from several backgrounds and titles such as masters, doctors, PhD students, etc. It was something overwhelming because I felt like I knew nothing, and I needed miles to achieve what others already reached.
However, I was not the only one with that same feeling, even professors with trajectory had that sensation, but why?. The reason is the research line. One of them explained to me that they are highly focused on something very specific (their research line) and it is difficult to be in complete sync with other projects, despite all of them use a computational intelligence component. Since that moment, I was more confident about my work and how I can continue in the path of being a researcher in audio and music technology lines.
After traveling and experiencing scientific conferences inside Ecuador and abroad, I never felt as comfortable and excited as at NIME 2019, the 19th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, which was hosted at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the first time in Latin America, obviously I was not going to miss this opportunity.
It was a time of changes and taking risks in my professional life (still it is). In two months without a job, I wrote two conceptual papers for NIME, one related with a tool for helping game developers in the audio mixing process implemented in 2015, and the other one a digital instrument based on augmented reality under the concept of a modular synthesizer (AuSynthAR), a recent project I still working on. I participated as “independent researcher” without the representation of any institution, just me and the money that I spent from my own pocket 🙂 (it is almost impossible to get founding for this kind of things in Ecuador). Some colleges at the conference where surprised about this affiliation, they said “this is love for science”, I am grateful for their admiration.
At NIME, there were oral presentations, demo sessions, concerts, and installations. Everything was in place to support one of the most amazing conference that I have attended. Actually, I was able to meet a community of people that is constantly working on innovative ways to create audio and music material, that is NIME. In those days I just wanted to go to Europe with them and worked on all of those things.
NIME influenced me to think about exploring the hardware, since I have worked mostly in software. Thanks to that, I have future plans to use the Bela platform, which is highly used in the community, but not limited to it. There are other platforms and ways to built an interesting interface, the point is to highlight the musical human expression through technology.
Another aspect is the musical approach. At NIME I realized that the music conceived by the use of these new interfaces can be placed as “expressionist” from my point of view. Such freedom is difficult to process on common people that usually hear Western music. So, I think that a human-centered work is needed to create more “terrestrial” compositions and performances, we also need to think in the audience, that is why I focused on emotions in my first work mentioned at the beginning of this post, and I plan to follow that path in order to contribute to the NIME community with something that can be highly expressive for the performer and pleasant for the listener.
Finally, I want to conclude by inviting you to know more about NIME and some research projects and centers dedicated to explore music and technology. Here you have some links.
- https://www.nime.org
- http://www.smcnetwork.org/
- https://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/
- https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg
- https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/
- http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/lcm/
- https://magenta.tensorflow.org/
- http://www.ness.music.ed.ac.uk/
Let us the technology help us express our human nature, I say this as a musician.