November 8th 2011, Tuesday. UCLL Room 107.  11:00-12:30

Abstract: Dr. Marcelo Mortensen Wanderley will discuss the achievements of the long-term project “McGill Digital Orchestra”- a 3-year project aimed at developing new digital musical instruments  and use them in real concert situations, allowing designers, performers and composers to work with and improve these instruments during extended periods of time. The project ended with a one-night public concert during a large new music festival in Montreal. Dr. Wanderley will review the various new instruments developed in this project and highlight the reasons that made them be used in the final concert (or not!), including technical (choice of sensors) and practical ones (issues raised by performers). The talk will also discuss an open-source software tool created for this project: the LibMapper, a tool for the prototyping of mapping strategies without requiring a high level of technical knowledge and which needs minimal manual intervention for tasks such as configuring the network and assigning identifiers to devices.

More information:
LibMapper: www.libmapper.org
Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory: www.idmil.org

Bio:
Marcelo Mortensen Wanderley holds a Ph.D. degree from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), France, on acoustics, signal processing, and computer science applied to music. His main research interests include gestural control of sound synthesis, input device design and evaluation, and the use of sensors and actuators in digital musical instruments. Dr. Wanderley has chaired 2003 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression and co-authored the textbook “New Digital Musical Instruments: Control and Interaction Beyond the Keyboard”, A-R Editions. He is currently William Dawson Scholar and Associate Professor in Music Technology at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT).