Dan Overholt visits the CMS to give a talk on new physical interfaces, and introduces to the group his Overtone Violin project.
Dan Overholt is an Assistant Professor in the Medialogy program at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on the intersectionof Music and Human-Computer Interaction. Dan holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara,a M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and Bachelors’ degrees in Electronics Engineering and Music (violin performance) from California State University, Chico. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to STEIM, the Studio for Electro-InstrumentalMusic in 2003, and a National Science Foundation fellowship inInteractive Digital Multimedia in 2006. He composes and performs internationally with his musical interfaces and audio signal processing algorithms, and has published and presented work at venues such as ICMC, NIME, AES, CHI, and SIGGRAPH, and ISEA. He has also worked as a consultant in industry for companies such as Eventide, Emu, and Echo Audio.
Abstract
This lecture will discuss one approach to designing, implementing, evaluating, and iteratively exploring new families of digital musical instruments for the real-time expressive control of digital signal processing algorithms. The Musical Interface Technology Design Space focuses on the research and development of tools that facilitate enhanced performance techniques through the use of multimodal human- computer interfaces and the algorithmic generation and processing of sound. Musical interface technology is a broad field that encompasses both technology and artistic aesthetics, as well as other disciplines such as physiology, ergonomics, and human cognition and behavior. Several new musical interfaces were developed during ongoing research into this area, which will be discussed according to the musical aspects they enable, and the resulting effects they have had on music composition and performance. The need for extremely responsive
controllers allowing subtle musical inflections is related to both philosophical and pragmatic concepts within musical, technological, and humanistic fields that can be used to guide and inform future directions for research in the field. This presentation will illustrate interfaces such as the Overtone Violin (for more information, see http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~dano/ ), describe their implementations and performance techniques in detail, and use them as examples to clarify and understand the exploration of new performance techniques they have brought about during this evolutionary journey into a modern perspective on one of mankind’s oldest forms of art.