Papers by Marinos Koutsomichalis
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing
Organised Sound
Contemporary trains of thought largely denounce hylomorphism and a series of dichotomies of the p... more Contemporary trains of thought largely denounce hylomorphism and a series of dichotomies of the past in favour of rather hybrid, all-inclusive and non-anthropocentric schemata. Yet, the former seem to still pervade our understanding of music and sound art in several respects. For many, composition is a primarily abstract process, musical instruments and audio-related technologies are fixed material means, and artists are creative individuals who are solely and primarily responsible for the artworks they produce. In this article a series of ad hoc and context-dependent compositional traits are scrutinised, with reference to theory as well as to actual artistic practice (both historical and contemporary), and are shown to transcend such assumptions in more or less straightforward ways. In particular, a series of practices is examined that revolves around material inquiry, anti-optimality, and hybrid, reflexive or ‘meta’ interfaces. More, DIWO (Do It With Others) approaches to composit...
Proceedings of the 9th Audio Mostly on A Conference on Interaction With Sound - AM '14, 2014
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Gwangju, KO), 2019
A series of creative text physicalizations are accounted for herein, with reference to research l... more A series of creative text physicalizations are accounted for herein, with reference to research literature and, most importantly , to an experimental algorithmic system designed and implemented by the author. The latter concerns a series of experimental pipelines that 'understand' the input text generating keywords, that utilize them to query 3D data from WWW, and, finally, that transfigure and merge the latter so that new original artefacts are synthesized. The various physical, digital, and post-digital material affordancies of the resulting physicaliza-tions are scrutinized in some depth and in an analytic fashion. Objects of sorts are shown to be ascribed a certain kind of emergent neo-materiality, in that they are themselves hybrid manifestations of interwoven physical and digital affairs. As such, they constitute situated inquiries of the very same (technological) paradigms that brought them forth, as well as of their cultural and ideological offshoots. Physicalizations of sorts are shown to be 'Herzian', post-optimal, and disruptive, being both the creative means towards an exploration of new kinds of materiality/objecthood, and an implicit critique of the canonical functional design schemata that largely pertain digital fabrication nowadays.
Objektivisering is an experimental system for the computational modeling of generative 3D-printab... more Objektivisering is an experimental system for the computational modeling of generative 3D-printable models. The system pivots on Natural Language Understanding technologies and big 3D data. It processes arbitrary text input, eventually generating an array of words and phrases that summarise its meaning. These are then used as queries to retrieve 3D data from Thingiverse. Finally, the resulting bag of models is concatenated, in this way producing original 3D-printable designs in a computational fashion. Albeit being concretely physical, the resulting artefacts also incorporate the cybernetic encodings of their own making. They celebrate a certain kind of objecthood which is hybrid, post-digital, and self-introspective at a structural level, in this way concretely accelerating materialist aesthetics.
The paper describes a metacreative system for real time algorithmic composition of audio mashups ... more The paper describes a metacreative system for real time algorithmic composition of audio mashups and synthetic soundscapes that pivots on evolvable media repositories, i.e., local pools of related media content that are retrieved, and ever-renovated, over the WWW in an evolutionary fashion. The model also involves a sophisticated soundscape generator, a context aware composer to parametrise it, and a machine listening module performing onset detection and spectral profiling in non-real time. The soundscape generator relies on pattern-based generators to spawn complex and contingent audio sequences in both deterministic and nonde-terministic fashions, and is also capable of refined 3D acoustic spatialisation—and multi-channel rendering— with respect to virtual listeners and sonic sources.
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers Adjunct Program - ISWC '14 Adjunct, 2014
International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), 2017
Pervasive technologies in socio-technical domains such as smart cities and smart grids question t... more Pervasive technologies in socio-technical domains such as smart cities and smart grids question the values required for designing sustainable and participatory digital societies. Privacy-preservation, scalability, fairness, autonomy, and social-welfare are vital for democratic sharing economies and usually require computing systems designed to operate in a decentralized fashion. This paper ex- amines sonification as the means for the general public to conceive decentralized systems that are too complex or non-intuitive for the mainstream thinking and general perception in society. We sonify two complex datasets that are generated by a prototyped decentralized system of computational intelligence operating with real-world data. The applied sonification methodologies are largely ad-hoc and address a series of concerns that are of both artistic and scientific merit. We create informative, effective and aesthetically meaningful soundworks as the means to probe and speculate complex, even unknown or unidentified, content. In this particular case, the sonification represents the constitutional narrative of two complex appli- cation scenarios of decentralized systems towards their equilibria.
Trends in Music Information Seeking, Behavior, and Retrieval for Creativity, 2016
Leonardo Music Journal, 2016
Following a series of technological breakthroughs and the proliferation of new, cloud-based media... more Following a series of technological breakthroughs and the proliferation of new, cloud-based media, listening in the 21st century has become dynamic, fragmented, interactive and distributed. Contemporary audiences are typically expected to traverse (big) music databases and, employing several overlapping interfaces, to resynthesize, rather than to merely access, content. On this construal, new ways of both experiencing and thinking about music have been laid out. This article attempts to sketch the “big music” phenomenon, discussing its genesis, outlining its implications and, finally, suggesting a typology for the classification of its carrier media.
The so-called “Greek debt crisis” has led a whole generation of emergent and mid-career artists t... more The so-called “Greek debt crisis” has led a whole generation of emergent and mid-career artists to seek plausible ways to finance themselves and their ar- tistic projects. The same time, all sorts of project spaces, laboratories, workshops, participatory art projects and relevant activities started to appear across Greece’s capital, mainly, as well as in various other cities. For their greatest part, such workshops would zero in open- source software and/or hardware technologies as well as in various aspects of contemporary digital art/culture and urbanism. More, they would advertise themselves as ad- dressing creative individuals of all sorts of backgrounds and disciplines and they would be organised/hosted by a wide range of dedicated or semi-dedicated venues, festivals and institutions, such as for example Frown Tails, Space Under, Athens Digital Arts Festival, the Onassis Cultural Foundation and others. In due course, and following broader international trends, a broader— still topical—‘Workshop Culture’ has been advanced and eventually standardised. In those years of severe finan- cial recession, Greek audiences had been given the chance to engage with all sorts of local or international artists in order to implement a diverse range of art pro- jects, this way suggesting a rather participatory ap- proach to art making. Such a workshop culture ac- counted for a shift towards a culturally dispersed and multi-disciplinary Do-It-With-Others approach. More im- portantly, a viable solution to a very difficult economic condition has been reached, so that prospective artists and art-enthusiasts could be guaranteed relatively cheap access to specialised education and so that professional and semi-professional artists could acquire the neces- sary resources to realise projects. Workshops turned out to be one of the most important means of artistic produc- tion in the Greek economic dystopia. This paper is a first attempt to account for the Greek D.I.W.O. movement, and to examine its signification for the Greek artistic landscape. Eventually, it is shown that such a D.I.W.O.- driven economical model does not necessarily qualify as an ‘alternative’ one but, rather, as a contingency of the dominant commerce-based model of our times.
This paper elaborates on the particular visualisation strategies that are encountered in the cont... more This paper elaborates on the particular visualisation strategies that are encountered in the context of Oiko-nomic threads, a collective art project for an algorithmically controlled knitting machine and open data. In detail, it is examined how numerical financial data are interpreted through a database (an alphabet) of folk motifs and on the account of a partly stochastic computer algorithm, and how the resulting visualisation is further modified and appropriated due to the inherent qualities of the hardware used. The resulting textiles are generative, in that their decoration is computer in real-time and contingent and in that it will differ on each occasion even if the same dataset is used. In the paper, it is further discussed how the knitting machine itself imposes certain hardware-specific compromises to the generated decoration, as well as how it biases the latter with arbitrarily glitches and unintended artefacts. Finally, it is argued that the resulting visualisation may be understood as an machine-intended interpretation of the original data which largely follows machine, rather than human, logic.
Atti del XX CIM ‐ Colloquio di Informatica Musicale ‐ MUSICHE LIQUIDE, 2014
This paper describes SoundScapeGenerator, a generic system for modelling and simulating soundscap... more This paper describes SoundScapeGenerator, a generic system for modelling and simulating soundscapes both in real and non-real time. SoundsScapeGenerator features algorithms for three-dimensional sound-localisation and is able to model complex spaces. The system relies on abstract rule descriptions (generators) to simulate deterministic, “cartoonified” (loosely modelled) sequencing of sound events. It further supports virtual P.O.H. (point of hearing) and is able to render the final output in various channel configurations. Based on generative algorithms, the SoundScapeGenerator implementation allows real-time user interaction with ever-changing soundscapes, and it can easily communicate with other applications and devices. Finally, we introduce SoundScapeComposer, a higher level module developed for the SoDA project (dedicated to soundscape automatic generation), that has been built on top of SoundScapeGenerator, hiding most of the latter's details to the user.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom International Conference, Athens, Greece, 24-26 April 2015.
It has been already shown elsewhere that soundscapes are necessarily experienced and thought of o... more It has been already shown elsewhere that soundscapes are necessarily experienced and thought of on the grounds of complex and of substantial inter-dependencies with several modalities of human existence, such as with cognitive, perceptional, psychological, physiological, emotional, sexual, social, political and other schemata that appear to govern the ways in which individuals, or broader social groups, engage with their surroundings. This schema is generalised herein to also account for non-human subjects such as animals, intelligent machines, software automata or inanimate objects, to this way suggest a less human-centric and explicitly anti-naturalistic approach which is more adequate for a technologically-driven culture like ours. More, it is argued that soundscapes are neither in-space nor in-time and that they should be rather understood as the sonic projection of those underlying orderings that construct and that rhythmically practice space and time. In that vein, it is suggested that the very notion of Soundscape is problematic to the extend it pinpoints an epiphenomenon that is bounded to a particular sensory modality and only implicitly accounts for the underlying processes that constitute it as such. Draw- ing from Deleuze/Guattari, it is eventually suggested that all soundscapes stem from a multiverse of complex rhizomatic and ever-differenciating virtualities, which are locally individualised through a process of multi-modal cross-actualisation established between their various constituents and the latter’s intrinsic dispositions.
This paper examines the application of field recording and of soundwalking practices in secondary... more This paper examines the application of field recording and of soundwalking practices in secondary education as a complimentary learning tool, suggesting that they cultivate a deeper and more holistic kind of knowledge as far as ecology, wildlife and the environment are concerned. It zeroes in a workshop for secondary school students that took place in Lake Vistonida wetland in North Greece on the occasion of the world wetlands day in 2013, and elaborates on its outcomes. In particular, it demonstrates how an audio based engagement with the habitat highlighted certain qualities that are difficult or impossible to pinpoint otherwise, and how a more detailed knowledge of the various species inhabiting the area was achieved. Accordingly, it is examined how such projects may raise awareness regarding the ecological consequences of human presence and intervention in a habitat, and, furthermore, how they may also constitute an informal introduction to acoustic ecology and to environmental audio related arts.
Proceedings ICMC|SMC|2014, ICMA et al., pp. 1610-17, Sep 14, 2014
In this paper we describe the SoDA project, that aims at automatically generating soundscapes fro... more In this paper we describe the SoDA project, that aims at automatically generating soundscapes from a database of annotated sound files. The rationale of the project lies in the ubiquitous requirement for sound designer to produce backgrounds that include specific multi-layered sound ma- terials. SoDA provides an ontologically-annotated database that allows the sound designer to describe the desired sound- scape by keywords: by referring to the database, the sys- tem then delivers a resulting audiofile.
XX Colloquio di Informatica Musicale, Rome 2014
This paper describes SoundScapeGenerator, a generic sys-tem for modelling and simulating soundsca... more This paper describes SoundScapeGenerator, a generic sys-tem for modelling and simulating soundscapes both in realand non-real time. SoundsScapeGenerator features algo-rithms for three-dimensional sound-localisation and is ableto model complex spaces. The system relies on abstractruledescriptions(generators)tosimulatedeterministic, “car-toonified” (loosely modelled) sequencing of sound events.It further supports virtual P.O.H. (point of hearing) andis able to render the final output in various channel con-figurations. Based on generative algorithms, the Sound-ScapeGenerator implementation allows real-time user in-teraction with ever-changing soundscapes, and it can easilycommunicate with other applications and devices. Finally,we introduce SoundScapeComposer, a higher level moduledeveloped for the SoDA project (dedicated to soundscapeautomatic generation), that has been built on top of Sound-ScapeGenerator, hiding most of the latter’s details to theuser
proceedings of Audio Mostly Conference (Aalborg, 2014) - published by ACM (New York, 2014)
The SoDA (Sound Design Accelerator) project aims at providing a flexible software environment for... more The SoDA (Sound Design Accelerator) project aims at providing a flexible software environment for soundscape generation. Based on semantic information, it provides both an annotation schema and an annotated library of sound files that operates in relation to a generative system that delivers the final audio content. SoDA provides the user with various forms of interaction: from incremental assisted exploration of semantic and audio content in real-time to completely automated off-line soundscape composition. In this paper we describe the semantic and audio components and the various interaction modes.
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Papers by Marinos Koutsomichalis
Digital sound artists need to analyze, manipulate, map, and visualize data when working on a scientific or an artistic project. As an artist, this book, by means of its numerous code examples will provide you with the necessary knowledge of SuperCollider's practical applications, so that you can extract meaningful information from audio-files and master its visualization techniques. This book will help you to prototype and implement sophisticated visualizers, sonifiers, and complex mappings of your data.
This book takes a closer look at SuperCollider features such as plotting and metering functionality to dispel the mysterious aura surrounding the more advanced mappings and animation strategies. This book also takes you through a number of examples that help you to create intelligent mapping and visualization systems. Throughout the course of the book, you will synthesize and optimize waveforms and spectra for scoping as well as extract information from an audio signal. The later sections of the book focus on advanced topics such as emulating physical forces, designing kinematic structures, and using neural networks to enable you to develop a visualization that has a natural motion with structures that respect anatomy and which come with an intelligent encoding mechanism. This book will teach you everything you need to work with intelligent audio-visual systems to extract and visualize audio-visual data.