QMUL School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Centre for Digital Music Seminar Series
**Seminar by Davide Rocchesso (University of Palermo, Italy) **
**Date/time: 11am, Wednesday, 7th August 2019 **
**Location: Graduate Centre, room 103 ** Number 18 on Campus map: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/qmul/docs/about/Mile-End_map-April2019.pdf
Open to students, staff, alumni, public; all welcome. Admission is FREE, no pre-booking required.
Title: ZANG TUMB TUUUM - Designing Sound with Vocal Primitives
Abstract: What are the fundamental elements of sound? What is the best framework for analyzing existing sonic realities and for expressing new sound concepts? These are long standing questions in sound physics, perception, and creation. In 1947, Dennis Gabor embraced the mathematics of quantum theory to shed light on subjective acoustics, thus laying the basis for sound analysis and synthesis based on acoustical quanta, or grains, or wavelets. In everyday life, it is our body that helps establishing bridges between distal (source-related) and proximal (sensory-related) representations of sound. In particular, it is our vocal apparatus that offers body-based representations of sound, so that vocal imitations can be used as probes into the world of sound at large. In analogy with quantum theory, we can derive "observables" and "measurement apparati" to guide voice-based sketching, and to represent sound articulations. Vocal primitives may indeed become the new quanta of sound design.
Bio: Davide Rocchesso received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Padova, Italy in 1996. He is professor of computer science at the University of Palermo, Italy. He was the coordinator of EU FET projects SOb (the Sounding Object) and SkAT-VG (Sketching Audio Technologies using Vocalizations and Gestures). He had been chairing the COST Action on Sonic Interaction Design. His main research interests are sound modelling and synthesis, interaction design, evaluation of interactions.