Research at Keele Discovering Excellence | Page 22

Discovering Excellence | Music

Music
Professor Rajmil Fischman
Cyber Soirees – bridging popular and art culture
Rajmil Fischman, Professor of Composition in Keele’s Research Institute for the
Humanities, is looking to take musical composition to a new level with his work
that aims to enable music performance by using natural hand actions
It will implement a self-contained
‘Manual Actions Expressive System’
(MAES) consisting of a digital glove
controlled by specialised software
for the creation of musical gestures
– furthering the possibilities
afforded by game controllers.
While these gestures result from
tracking and analysing hand
position, rotation and finger bend,
the technology will allow
performers to concentrate on
natural actions from daily use of the
hands, for example the physical
movement associated with
‘throwing’ and ‘sowing’.
For this reason, MAES will not require
formal musical training, producing
sophisticated sound that is a
believable result of the performer’s
natural actions and providing
intimate control of the sound.
Professor Fischman, whose work is
funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, said: “This will
allow individuals who would not
have had the opportunity otherwise,
to engage actively in music making.
At the same time, it will enable
performers to achieve virtuosity by
providing gestures that can be
adapted to individual requirements.”

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MAES will complete the first stage
of an overarching strategy for the
realisation of ‘Structured interactive
immersive musical experiences’,
in which users advance at their
own pace in a virtual environment
stimulating all the senses (hearing,
sight, smell, etc.) and choose their
own trajectory through a musical
work, but have to act within its
interactive rules and constraints
towards a final goal – the realisation
of the music.
Professor Fischman adds: “Imagine
a weekend afternoon in a middleclass parlour during the second half
of the nineteenth century. If we
could travel in time to that period,
it is quite likely that we might have
found ourselves in a soiree including
music performed live by family
members gathered around the
piano or other instruments,
re-enactments of theatrical plays
and role-playing games. Such
gatherings used to foster creative
social interaction which has now
become increasingly rare.
“Hopefully, research into immersive
and interactive musical activity will
retrieve new forms of social
gatherings in both real and virtual
‘parlours’. We already see new
paradigms encouraging communal
activity in social networking sites
and I believe that, given appropriate
tools and conditions, this is also
possible in the case of music
creation and performance; be it at
home or in ‘cyber-soirees’.

“I also believe that it will help
breach the schism between so
called ‘popular’ and ‘art’ culture,
which became so stark in the
twentieth century before it was
challenged by post-modernism.
In fact, electronic media already
encompasses a wide range of
creative output that happens to
defy popular/art dichotomies.
“We can now conceive performers
in the modern parlour who use
appropriate technologies to
embrace music resulting from
a wide spectrum of aesthetic
conceptions and approaches,
even if they do not have formal
musical training: for instance,
in the case of a video game
generation that prefers total
immersion and interactivity.
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