2016
Software, digital audio files
http://www.audiometaphor.ca
Artist(s) Statement:
Audio Metaphor is an interactive piece that presents itself as a search engine in which the audience is invited to enter an expression or a sentence that will serve as a request to an automatic soundscape generation system. Enter “The waterfalls inundate the city” or “The marshmallows explode in the campfire” and it will sound like it in quadraphonic!
This interactive audio installation is questioning the ubiquity of information, be it real or fake, actual or synthetic. Using state of the art algorithms for sound retrieval, segmentation, background and foreground classification, automatic mixing and automatic soundscape affect recognition. Audio Metaphor is a powerful system that generates believable soundscape at interactive rate. The piece points at issues around big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other techno-scientific advances, and their impact on our perception and experience of the world.
Bios:
Miles Thorogood is a practicing media and sound artist, combining algorithm design, computer code and electronics with traditional media. His works have been featured in public art installations, as well as at international conferences and festivals. Some notable highlights have been works for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Fraser River Discovery Centre, International Symposium of Electronic Arts, and the Vancouver PUSH festival. Miles references the natural environment and human produced systems as the point of departure for his technology based works. Graduating with honors from The Australian National University, Centre for Art and Technology, he defined a framework for representing animal behaviours in computer based agents to simulate those species. He applied one such facsimile to a colony of sounding robots, mimicking and interacting with a local bird species. Miles’ MAA research at Emily Carr University involved the analysis of audio signals in natural and urban environments. From this analysis, he discovered a correlation between the pattern of natural and human urban soundscape. Miles then made a computational model of that data for a generative system that synthesized the spectral and temporal attributes of those soundscapes. Mile’ PhD research at Simon Fraser University, School of Interactive Arts and Technology has focussed on endowing machines with human-like creative behaviours. Specifically, he has been modelling human perception to develop algorithms for automating the tasks in sound design practice, toward the goal of computer-assisted creative systems.
Jianyu Fan is currently a Ph.D. student at School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. He holds a Bachelor degree from Beihang University and a Master degree from Dartmouth College. He is interested in the area of artificial intelligence, conducting research aimed at endowing machines with creative autonomous behavior. In particular, he focuses on music information retrieval systems, and generative systems for music and videos. As a scientist, he has presented his papers in various international scientific venues. As an artist, he has been playing the piano for over nineteen years. His art works were presented at conferences and art festivals.
Philippe Pasquier is associate professor in the School for Interactive Arts + Technology and an adjunct professor in Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University. As both a scientist and a multi-disciplinary artist, his work focuses on creative processes and generative systems. His contributions range from theoretical research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational creativity to applied artistic research and practice in digital art, computer music, and generative art. Philippe is the chair and investigator of the AAAI international workshops on Musical Metacreation (MUME), the MUME concerts series, the international ACM Conference on Movement and Computation (MOCO), and he was director of the Vancouver edition of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA2015). He has co-authored over 120 peer-reviewed contributions presented in the most rigorous scientific venues, as well as over 45 artworks and performances performed on all five continents.
More on Philippe: http://www.sfu.ca/pasquier.