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Mobilising John Cage – The design and creation of score generators for the complete John Cage Variations I – VIII. 
Dr Cat Hope, Dr Lindsay Vickery, Aaron Wyatt.
School of Music, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University.

Malaysian Music Journal  2(2) 2014

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The John Cage Variations provide a useful snapshot of a range of score writing techniques employed by Cage throughout this career. From very complex preparations and realization of parts required in Variations I and II, to the almost non-existent scores of VII and VIII, the complete Variations provide a range of opportunities and challenges. In 2011 Western Australian new music ensemble Decibel developed a software-based score maker and player for the works and presented a series of concerts of the Complete eight V ariations. The performances have led to the development of the John Cage Complete Variations App for the iPad tablet computer, developed in conjunction with Peters Edition. Drawing on the ensemble’s experiments with real- time and scrolling computer score generation and performance, and their unique make up of performers, composers, sound artists and programmers, the group have made the realisation of these works more accurate and possible in real-time for the first time. 
This paper discusses the approach taken by the group for the concept, design, creation and eventual performance of the scores for John Cage’s Variations I – VIII, including the packaging of the works into an application. It will also cover the challenges presented by the range of different score formats to the packaging of the collection as a whole. 

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The Limitations of Representing Sound and Notation on Screen
Lindsay Vickery,  School of Music, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts .
Organised Sound 19(3)

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Animated screen-based representation and notation provides an important solution to visualising a range of musical phenomena and techniques including continuous parametrical changes, synchronisation with prerecorded audio or live processing, and nonlinear formal organisation. The limitations of human visual capabilities, however, place some constraints upon the efficacy of screen-based representation, particularly in regard to notation reading. Findings from sightreading studies, exploring the manner in which notation is encoded, processed and executed, are examined with the aim of identifying the perceptual and practical boundaries of presenting animated notation on screen. The development of efficient notation is proposed as an important requirement for alleviating the issues created by the time constraints of notation reading. Studies in semantics and cross-modal activation are discussed as a foundation for the expansion of approaches to the visualisation of sound. 

Exploring a Visual/Sonic Representational Continuum
Lindsay Vickery, School of Music, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. 
International Computer Music Conference, Athens, Greece.

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This paper explores the relationships between sound and its visualisation, focussing upon the issues surrounding representation and interpretation of music through both performative and machine processes. The discussion proceeds in the context of five recent works by the author exploring the representation of sound and musical notation and their relationship to and with performance: unhörbares wird hörbar (the inaudible becomes audible) [2013], EVP [2012], Lyrebird: environment player [2014], Nature Forms I [2014] and sacrificial zones [2014]. Issues examined include: re-sonification of spectrograms, visualisation of spectral analysis data, control of spatialisation and audio processing using spectral analysis data, and reading issues related to scrolling screen score notation. 

icmc2014vickeryws.pdf
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Notational Semantics in Music Visualisation and Notation 
Lindsay Vickery, School of Music, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts
Australasian Computer Music Conference 2014
Melbourne, Victoria

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The utilisation of the screenscore has emerged as a solution to the notational representation of a range of compositional issues including: electroacoustic and synthesised music, continuous parametrical changes, synchronisation with prerecorded audio or live processing, nonlinear formal organisation The time critical issues of presenting notation on the screen, point to the necessity for developing notation and representation that is as efficient as. One important factor contributing to the efficacy of notation is semantic soundness – the degree to which the graphical representation makes inherent sense to the reader, rather than necessitates learning and memorisation of new symbols.
The hypothesis that graphical symbols can elicit meaning through inherent semantic qualities intersects and supports the work exploring spectromorphology, as both a descriptive analytical and prescriptive compositional tool in electroacoustic music. Related studies in non-musical research, such as “Semantic Primes”, visual language, perceptual metaphors and “weak synaesthesia” are examined as a potential basis for the expansion and understanding of this field. 

acmc2014vickery.pdf
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Notating the Sonic Environment  
 Lindsay Vickery, School of Music,
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts
Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference, Berlin 10-14 June 2014

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Emulation of the sounds of the natural environment may be one of the earliest manifestations of music. Alvin Lucier’s (Hartford) Memory Space (1970) and Carbon Copies (1989) both explore this impulse, instructing performers to imitate the sounds of any indoor or outdoor environment (albeit pre-recorded), “as exactly as possible, without embellishment” (Lucier, A. 1989. Carbon Copies. Material Press: Frankfurt am Main). This final clause may have been necessary because the complexity of natural sonic environments often prohibits exact imitation and encourages embellishment.
This paper describes a scoreplayer implemented in MaxMSP, that analyses and visualises significant features of a sonic environment as a graphic score, that is scrolled from right to left across the computer screen. Playback of the source recording is delayed so that it is heard as the corresponding visual event arrives at the “playhead”: a black line of the left of the screen. 



notatingthesonicenvironment.pdf
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Improvising with the Sonic Environment 
 Lindsay Vickery, School of Music, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts
Vs Representation, Prague 17-20 July 2014

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The “Lyrebird Environment Player” builds upon Vickery’s earlier work EVP, in which “electronic voice phenomenon” recordings were visualised as a scrolling score in realtime. In the current work the performer may also choose to analyse the field recording to detect recorded speech or speech-like artifacts that may be present. These are represented in the score as standard text that is visualized using the frequency, amplitude, brightness, noisiness and bark scale values that are applied to non-speech sounds.
The work was commissioned by percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson for her Australian solo percussion program Eight Hits. The proposed performance practice for the work was developed by the authors during Tomlinson’s residency at the Orpheus Instituut for Advanced Studies & Research In Music. It requires that Tomlinson make a field recording and collect objects to play in the vicinity of each new performance venue. Familiarity with the recording and strategies for improvising with it may be developed subsequent to its performance. 

improvisingwiththesonicenvironment.pdf
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Representing Sound with Colour in Music Notation
Dr. Lindsay Vickery,  School of Music, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. 
Space, Time, and Colour: Colour Society of Australia National Conference 2014, Perth, Western Australia, 3rd-5th of October, 2014 The Grove Community Centre,

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In recent times there has been gradual migration of music notation away from the monochrome standard that existed since the beginnings of printed music in the 16th Century, towards the full colour pallet afforded by modern printers and computer screens. This expansion of the possibilities for the musical score has provided the opportunity to represent parameters of musical phenomena that were previously poorly captured by traditional Western music notation: most importantly continuously evolving parameters such as timbre and amplitude, and the depiction of complex sound events such as those found in electronic music.
The musical score is a time critical form of visualisation. Sight-reading and eye-movement studies suggest that approximately 3 cm of score is the upper limit that can be accurately read as a representation of 1 second of sound. For this reason there is a strong imperative for scores to employ symbols that signify sonic events with maximal efficiency. One important goal in such efficiency is “semantic soundness”: the degree to which the graphical representation makes inherent sense to the reader, rather than necessitates learning and memorisation of new symbols.


Research at The Visual Perception and Aesthetics Lab at the University of California Berkeley since 2012, suggests that there is a high degree of correlation between mappings of colour-to-sound: that there are systematic relationships between colour and a range of musical phenomena including timbre, pitch, tempo, intervals, triads and musical genres in non-synaesthetes. This phenomenon, in which cross-modal activation is present in the population at large, has been described by Martino and Marks as “weak synaesthesia”.
This paper explores the implications of recent research into colour-to-sound mappings for the application of colour in musical scores with a particular focus on the representation of timbre segmentation for instruments and electronically generated sound as a tool for creating “semantically sound” scores and for the analysis of sound recordings.
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