C4DM Seminar: Alex Harker - Bespoke Musical Programming: A Field Report
QMUL, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Centre for Digital Music Seminar Series
Seminar by:
Alex Harker, University of Huddersfield
Date/time: 9th of Feburary, 12:00-13:00
Location: G2, ground floor of Engineering Building, Mile End Campus
Title: Bespoke Musical Programming: A Field Report
Abstract:
As a musician I want to be able to use computers to explore new sounds, modes of interaction and ways of thinking about musical creation. I also want the tools I use to do exactly what I want them to do in configurations I can devise. To add to my list of demands, I’d like them to be stable, flexible, well-maintained, well-engineered and have thoughtfully considered interfaces: I want them to work reliably if I’m on stage and to allow me to stay immersed in a creative flow (rather than technical details) in a studio setting. It is probably for the best, given such uncompromising demands, that the software tools I tend to use most are ones that I create. This obviously has implications for the time available to create musical work. Since starting out as definitively a composer twenty or so years ago, I have now ended up firmly down a rabbit hole of digital signal processing, scripting languages, git repositories, C++ templates, continuous integration and even some forays into the Scheme programming language. It’s not exactly what I would have imagined myself doing when setting out on this path years ago, but I have learnt a lot along the way. It has also transformed my approach to many aspects of composition, such that programming is now embedded in several different areas of my creative practice, including processing of sound, managing and navigating large sample databases, creating, typesetting and display of scores and handling musical decision-making in realtime.
In this talk I’ll reflect on what is now nearly twenty years of being a programmer making tools that support musical making (both my own and other people’s), the technologies that interest me, and the creative results. Some of these tools are one-offs, made to solve a specific musical or technical problem for a single piece. Others are the result of larger, more technically-focussed projects designed to have longevity and their own lives outside of my own creative practice. I’ll discuss work in progress, review some completed projects (technical and compositional), talk about the relationship between creative work and technology, and touch upon issues of sustaining a practice of creating road-ready tools for music creation in a research context, where novelty has obvious value, but code maintenance might not.
Bio:
Alex Harker is a composer and programmer working with instruments, electronics and programming.
His compositional work explores instrumental techniques and timbres, open approaches to form and the blending of electronic and acoustic sources. It is often created in close collaboration with performers and has been performed in the UK, France, Denmark, Switzerland, the USA and South Korea. Past projects include drift shadow for Niamh Dell (oboe and electronics), Fluence for Jonathan Sage (clarinet and electronics) and The Kinetics of Resonance for Dimitrios Tasoudis (solo drum kit). Current collaborations include work with ELISION and TAK ensemble.
As a programmer, he works as a developer for Surreal Machines (https://www.surrealmachines.com), as one of the maintainers of the iPlug2 project (https://github.com/iPlug2/iPlug2) and has worked with Ableton as the core developer for the Max for Live Convolution Reverb package.
He is a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, where he researches and teaches composition, creative coding and production. Within the University, he is the Director of CeReNeM (Centre for Research in New Music) and Leader of the Creative Coding Lab.