Figure skating and artistic research

[Mathematician]

LIGO’s funding comes from the National Science Foundation. The NSF’s budget for all basic scientific research is about US$ 7 billion this year, down half a billion from last year. (Congress faces the task of convincing the American taxpayer that non-commercial scientific research is worth it.) There is a lot of competition for this money. Each of the 700 or so projects that the NSF sponsors must persuade the NSF that their project is the most deserving. (I have attended -- and led -- a number of seminars on “how to write a successful NSF proposal.")

I agree with the first part of your post. Interpreting all wave phenomena as music does not always have any particular scientific merit. But we humans do like the sound of a vibrating string.

LIGO has never been denied anything though. Their trend is only upwards. The entire field of "gravitational wave detection" is absolutely pumped and inflated to the moon in every way. They're already planning billions for the next generation.

At first I was going to push back on your idea that funding would benefit from some musical transformation. Frankly, a middle schooler could probably turn a visual wave into a note. You can literally just do whatever with it. Theres no objective connection to music with a gravity wave. Actually though, I realize you could be right anyways. I remember some project in which scientists "demonstrated" what a black hole "sounds like" , and pop-sci totaly ate it up - I'm sure funders were pleased . Yes, you definitely know better than me about how funding works.

Figure skaters are expected to match movement to music -- and they win or lose competitions according to their ability to do so.

Theoretically, they should... but if only that were actually true!

^ As I understand the OP's project, she is attempting to come at the question from the opposite direction. Traditionally we say "Here is a piece of music. What should the skater be doing in response?"

But is it possible to ask "this is what figure skaters do on the ice; do the skating movements themselves suggest musical phrasing, pulse, emptionsal content, etc.?"

Does a skater (or choreographer) ever say to him/herself -- I have just created the world's best figure skating program. Now I will begin tne search to find appropriate music to match it?

Well, maybe this isnt exactly what you're referencing, but there is clearly a mutual reciprocal relationship between movement and music, rather than a unidirectional causal one. We know this because certain athletes have specific skills, or schticks, that the choreographer considers first, which puts paramaters on what sort of music they choose for the athlete. So although I doubt somone designs entire programs before thinking of music, it seems that physical movements are an original, primary factor acting on music, just like the chosen music's nature might also suggest the later choice of other (maybe the majority of) movements and timings (for example the fundamental movements anyone can do, and must be present in any program, and the order/rhythm with which they are performed) - one is not more indipendent of the other (in my opinion). For example, Yametova's schtick of a backwards gliding split is always considered before her trainers choose music, and they end up picking music with long rests or harmonies, or some other feature, which lends itself to that breath-taking move. So basically I'm saying your suggestion that music and movement might be reciprocal and totally interdependant, sharing primary importance, rather than the music being an absolute with movement only considered relative to it (an analogy tangential to our other discussion ), is totally supported.

 

[4everchan]

gestural control/movement to create music is an absolutely HUGE field that 100% stems from the way music is made on acoustic instruments.

yes but the movements are made on the instrument... what is the instrument here ? the ice ? yes... we can hear swooshing sounds but is that music ?

When you pluck a string on a lyre, you are making a physical gesture (and effort) that causes the string to vibrate, then producing sound waves. There is a ton of research and debate, especially since the advent of computer music (and analog generation of music via electricity i.e., synthesis and tape), into the how we reconcile our perception of sound and the source of the sound.

aware of that

Computer music opened up the possibility for sound to be created without this physical effort, because electricity generates the necessary energy that was once required by a person's physical effort (not fighting against this either way was one of the topics of my first doctorate research, for example: http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_EMS15_Aska.pdf) - this became a huge debate in computer music - do we need to re-introduce this perceived gestural effort or not? Is it ok to perform in a laptop orchestra, for example, and just click with the mouse? Is this performance? Connecting sound and visual is absolutely nothing new and nothing unusual.

i play an acoustic instrument. i cannot say i love computer originated music. sorry.

For this project I of course was never imagining it to be competitive programs, I was hoping to work with figure skaters in an artistic context.

as i said, it could be interesting for a non-competitive endeavour.

But if you read my post above, it is meant to be something reciprocal, not a figure skater creating movement because of "how the music is created" - it could result in converting the skater themselves into an instrument, which affects how they interact, but this is also 100% precedented, as this research has been done in gamified music before, for example (Rob Hamilton's Echo Canyon uses a game avatar as a musical instrument and my The missing piece also does something similar, by connecting the musician with the avatar, thus generating the sound world). What I did and do see, especially after having data from just some small and simple movements, is a musical potential within a lot of figure skating movements and artistic potential for musical and physical expression.

of course the sounds are not 100% generative, because I imposed strict parameters for which pitches were playd back, when, and how, and with what instrument, what volume, etc. I chose to layer specific things at specific times for the dramaturgy of the music.

again, i appreciate your post and research, though is very far away from what I specialize in. I cannot really comment on that much more. I answered to the thread because @Mathman asked the question about how does a skater express music... for that, I had a constructive answer. I cannot really comment on computer generated music because of course, my instrument is old, the music i play is old and I am old well sort of old now The very little exposure I had with electronic/computer generated music has not convinced me. To me, it's a bit like artificial intelligence (though it's much better of course). The human spontaneity and personal reading of a score cannot be replaced.

It's a constant debate... maybe you are aware of Canadian Lara St-John, a violinist who made the headlines because the Game of Thrones musical theme, "fake cello" is awful and would have been so much nicer performed by a real human being on a real instrument

So yeah, there are two different things : research which is extremely important, but the actual artistic performance. To me, if research can bring a lot of innovation, it can never replace what the human brings to art

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/tuesday-ukraine-latest-mavis-gallant-obit-gun-laws-study-old-olympic-medal-and-more-1.2904229/canadian-musician-takes-on-the-game-of-thrones-fake-cello-theme-1.2904232

 

[4everchan]

I once suffered a brief spell where I became frustrated with skaters trying to edit their music to come out to the exact number of seconds required in a four minute thirty second program, using such stratagems as randomly repeating a few bars or splicing in a couple of extra measures from some other song. I searched at the music department of my local bookstore for compositions and recordings that were already exactly 270 seconds long and required no editing. My project never amounted to anything, but I did meet Todd Eldredge there once, thumbing through the classical section, perhaps with the same goal.

There used to be a sort of annual choreography competition and skate-off where a skater would choose a theme and design a program, along with selecting the music that they felt went with the theme. The skater and the choreographer might be the same person, or they might be a team consisting of one skater and one (aspiring) choreographer. One year Sean Rabbitt won (“Caffeine” ), Bebe Liang was second (“Time”). The fun for the audience was that the themes were not announced beforehand, so you had to try to guess from the actual performances.

musical editing is very upsetting at times... not only do editors for figure skating repeat things they shouldn't repeat but they also skip in the middle of things... sometimes, it makes absolutely no sense at all. Yes, I prefer much better when we get ONE piece of flowing music... but yeah... it's not going to be possible of course

 

[zeit_hexe]

yes but the movements are made on the instrument... what is the instrument here ? the ice ? yes... we can hear swooshing sounds but is that music ?

aware of that

i play an acoustic instrument. i cannot say i love computer originated music. sorry.

as i said, it could be interesting for a non-competitive endeavour.

again, i appreciate your post and research, though is very far away from what I specialize in. I cannot really comment on that much more. I answered to the thread because @Mathman asked the question about how does a skater express music... for that, I had a constructive answer. I cannot really comment on computer generated music because of course, my instrument is old, the music i play is old and I am old well sort of old now The very little exposure I had with electronic/computer generated music has not convinced me. To me, it's a bit like artificial intelligence (though it's much better of course). The human spontaneity and personal reading of a score cannot be replaced.

It's a constant debate... maybe you are aware of Canadian Lara St-John, a violinist who made the headlines because the Game of Thrones musical theme, "fake cello" is awful and would have been so much nicer performed by a real human being on a real instrument

So yeah, there are two different things : research which is extremely important, but the actual artistic performance. To me, if research can bring a lot of innovation, it can never replace what the human brings to art

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/tuesday-ukraine-latest-mavis-gallant-obit-gun-laws-study-old-olympic-medal-and-more-1.2904229/canadian-musician-takes-on-the-game-of-thrones-fake-cello-theme-1.2904232

I didnt say everyone had to love computer generated music. I said that it was a debate within the community. Integrating this system does not exclude a live performer - there are tons of pieces for live instruments that have some processing or other effects, this is one of the best possibilities of a situation like this - that the processing could be a means of connection and bridging a connection between an instrumentalist (live performer) and figure skater (live performer).

Like in the paper I posted, I tend to not have an opinion either way (instrumental or computer music is better), I rather think they both have their own benefits and possibilities.

 

[Mathman]

http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_EMS15_Aska.pdf)

Thank you for this link (and for this thread).

The exposition in this paper is very impressive. Is there a youtube link to the two compositions listed in reference #1?

When I was in graduate school -- in the nineteen sixties! -- already there was scholoarly activity in computer-generated and -assissted composition. I had a buddy -- his degerees were in mathematics but his consuming hobby was world, ethnic and fokk music -- who wrote his master's thesis on training a computer to compose Rounds, then in his PhD thesis, to compose symphonies. (The symphonies were not very successful, way back then.)

 

[zeit_hexe]

Thank you for this link (and for this thread).

The exposition in this paper is very impressive. Is there a youtube link to the two compositions listed in reference #1?

When I was in graduate school -- in the nineteen sixties! -- already there was scholoarly activity in computer-generated and -assissted composition. I had a buddy -- his degerees were in mathematics but his consuming hobby was world, ethnic and fokk music -- who wrote his mater's thesis on training a computer to compose Rounds, then in his PhD thesis, to compose symphonoes. (The symphonies were not very successful, way back then.)

There is not for those pieces, however, there is for the thesis piece that was basically incorporating the same concepts just on a larger scale: https://youtu.be/OHn0aahLZ5M?si=POQls7nysD4nWWuz

 

[Mathman]

^ Thank you. What I found most striking was the use of silence.

 

[Mathman]

i play an acoustic instrument. i cannot say i love computer originated music. sorry

Hey, give the robots a chance. They have been around only since 1920 (Rossumov's Universal Robots). Humans have been developing their musical skills and sensibilities for tens of thousands of years, if not a million.

 

[Mathman]

...pop-sci totaly ate it up - I'm sure funders were pleased .

I also am sure that they were.

The great majority of funding for basic research comes from public funds. Businesses and private concerns are not going to invest any money unless the research results in something profibable for the funder. Thi is aespecially true for huge projects that cost billions of dollars. Only governments can spend that kind of cash just to incerase human knowledge.

The supercollider near Geneva was originally planned for Texas, with the U.S. governmenmt as primary sponsor. Once politicians got involved, the program was abandoned. No congressman would dare face his constituents for reelction with the plea, hey, vote for me, I just wasted a billion of your hard-earned dollars to look for the Higgs bozon?

The project was taken over by CERN and paid for by a consortium of European governmnts. I see that this year they are proposing to the taxpapyers of Germany, France, UK and Spain that they ought to pony up another 17 billion dollars )(on top of the 23 billion that they recently spent) to produce and study a whole lot of these ghost particles. The public wants to see a few videos of flshes of light for their money. (But look quick -- the half-life of the Higgs partical is measured in septillioths of a second. )

 

[zeit_hexe]

musical editing is very upsetting at times... not only do editors for figure skating repeat things they shouldn't repeat but they also skip in the middle of things... sometimes, it makes absolutely no sense at all. Yes, I prefer much better when we get ONE piece of flowing music... but yeah... it's not going to be possible of course

I also feel like i should apologise because since this is an area where I am not usually active (I am a contemporary composer) and most people in figure skating world don't know me, no one here realises that of course I am primarily writing for instruments. So I really apologise if it came off as me trying to push for generated music, that was absolutely not the intent.

The reason this video, features an electronic keyboard rather than a recorded live pianist is because it is a random experiment I made at home and the only thing I have access to is my Viscount e-organ. In order to have an outside musician, I have to pay them - which is a plan later on and I have several performers that are interested in working on this project. Nothing in the piece was actually computer generated - I composed a piece which was modified by the skating. So I don't mean to offend any musicians, I really appreciate them and work with them all the time. But people need payment - this kind of proof of concept is the kind of thing I could use to apply for funds to actually pay people (which is also why I am myself skating in this video and not an actual figure skater, and why it is filmed in a public skating session).

 

[Mathman]

Nothing to apologize for -- quite the contrary! Musical expression is broad and deep. inviting many opportunities for innovation.

And the tie-in to figure skating as a unique form of movement --

 

[streams4dreams]

This is a fascinating project, thanks for sharing with us! And indeed, no need to apologize, your intent has been perfectly clear from the first post.

I was wondering about the key, which sounds like a minor (apologies if I'm off here, not a music expert). Was this a choice, or is it completely decided by the skating movements? Or put differently, could you also create a major key piece?

And similar to @Mathman, I found this aspect of exploring a skater's musicality super interesting. We often talk about some skaters being musical based on what we see when they skate, but with your approach, we could actually hear the differences in different skaters' skating

As a side note, I think the black hole merger sonification was super helpful in making the phenomenon more understandable to the wider audience. LIGO actually does detect waves (not sound waves, but waves in the spacetime itself), they just had to shift them into a much higher register to be audible, like shown in this video:

 

[zeit_hexe]

This is a fascinating project, thanks for sharing with us! And indeed, no need to apologize, your intent has been perfectly clear from the first post.

I was wondering about the key, which sounds like a minor (apologies if I'm off here, not a music expert). Was this a choice, or is it completely decided by the skating movements? Or put differently, could you also create a major key piece?

And similar to @Mathman, I found this aspect of exploring a skater's musicality super interesting. We often talk about some skaters being musical based on what we see when they skate, but with your approach, we could actually hear the differences in different skaters' skating

As a side note, I think the black hole merger sonification was super helpful in making the phenomenon more understandable to the wider audience. LIGO actually does detect waves (not sound waves, but waves in the spacetime itself), they just had to shift them into a much higher register to be audible, like shown in this video:

You are correct actually - the opening especially there is this melody that is in C-minor

You could choose any pitches you want - you could also have instead sounds triggered, or have a compeltely pre-composed piece that is just modified, etc.

on a very basic level, this is what i did with the pitches:
1. wrote a melody 19 pitches long (you could call it C-major)
2. second melody 19 pitches long (this is the one you heard at the beginning, in C-minor)
3. ascending pitches in a C harmonic series
4. transposed this C- harmonic series and C material to F for the points where I cut in the video where I am doing 3-turns

Based on the gyro speed, pitches are selected from the melody - the faster the gyro, the further the pitch will be selected. This means that if I slowly speed up a spin, it would essentially play the melody in order

At the same time, sometimes I fade in the same gesture, but sweeping through a harmonic series instead of through the melody.

To have different pitches triggered with the exact same software, you would just have to replace the MIDI note numbers, so to change from major-minor (or anything else) would be very easy.

There are also things I am doing with duration, which is why there are some things that are slower and more meandering and some things that are faster and more clearly linked. And the reason I picked major-minor is because I was working with two different tuning systems in this piece and wanted to highlight the subtle detuning betwen them. (I hope this answers your question!!!)

P.s. thank you and thank you for posting that visual, that is really cool!

 

[streams4dreams]

You are correct actually - the opening especially there is this melody that is in C-minor

You could choose any pitches you want - you could also have instead sounds triggered, or have a compeltely pre-composed piece that is just modified, etc.

on a very basic level, this is what i did with the pitches:
1. wrote a melody 19 pitches long (you could call it C-major)
2. second melody 19 pitches long (this is the one you heard at the beginning, in C-minor)
3. ascending pitches in a C harmonic series
4. transposed this C- harmonic series and C material to F for the points where I cut in the video where I am doing 3-turns

Based on the gyro speed, pitches are selected from the melody - the faster the gyro, the further the pitch will be selected. This means that if I slowly speed up a spin, it would essentially play the melody in order

At the same time, sometimes I fade in the same gesture, but sweeping through a harmonic series instead of through the melody.

To have different pitches triggered with the exact same software, you would just have to replace the MIDI note numbers, so to change from major-minor (or anything else) would be very easy.

There are also things I am doing with duration, which is why there are some things that are slower and more meandering and some things that are faster and more clearly linked. And the reason I picked major-minor is because I was working with two different tuning systems in this piece and wanted to highlight the subtle detuning betwen them. (I hope this answers your question!!!)

P.s. thank you and thank you for posting that visual, that is really cool!

Thank you so much for the detailed answer, this is really really cool. Understanding the process better I appreciate even more the creative potential here

 

[zeit_hexe]

Artistic take on training of machine learning and also training myself. Its like part documentation, part artistic project.



I am using these as a way to learn which kinds of movements I might want to track and also ways that I can track some things that I (and some of my collaborators) already had ideas about tracking.

 

[zeit_hexe]

I finally added a section of my website where I compile so far, all of my experiments which currently include
1. the initial experiment
2. the two explorations of artistic documentation and
3. a sound experiment I made where I created an entire composition based on one singular found 3s figure skating sound

Figure skating project

I will leave it here in case anyone finds this and is interested in following the project, or is interested in collaborating in some way.