December 2004, Issue 69
Published
by Sonaris Consulting, Felix Bopp, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[formerly Music for New Media Newsletter]
You can find the online version at: http://www.sonaris.info
Content
Scientific findings: CNMAT, European Language Resources Association, Institute of Sound and Vibration Research
CNMAT
Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
CNMAT is a music research, teaching, recording and performance facility located in the hills just north of the UC Berkeley campus.
CNMAT presents concerts that cross cultural and musical barriers and could as easily feature traditional ethnic music as state of the art computer music. They also provide a forum for diverse lectures and demonstrations for students and the community in the Sound Spatialization Theater.
People involved at CNMAT are from a wide range of disciplines and are drawn together by their common interest in exploring the world of music. The principals are specialists in musical composition, musical psychoacoustics and computer science. The researchers and visiting scholars are from many university departments including physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, psychology, computer science, cognitive science and music. Professional musicians are of musical traditions ranging from middle eastern to jazz. Composers in residence come from around the world.
http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu
European Language Resources Association
ELRA is the driving force to make available the language resources for language engineering and to evaluate language engineering technologies. In order to achieve this goal, ELRA is active in identification, distribution, collection, validation, standardisation, improvement, in promoting the production of language resources, in supporting the infrastructure to perform evaluation campaigns and in developing a scientific field of language resources and evaluation..
http://www.elra.info
Institute of Sound and Vibration Research
At the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton, we have for the last ten years been working on using digital signal processing to improve the quality of sound reproduction systems. The ultimate goal is to be able to produce the illusion in a listener of being in a "virtual" acoustic environment which is entirely different from that of the space in which the listener is actually located. Sound systems designed for this purpose are usually referred to as "surround sound" systems, or "3D-audio systems"; we prefer to label such a system a virtual imaging system.
http://www.isvr.soton.ac.uk/FDAG/vap
Club of Amsterdam
Summit for the Future - Media & Entertainment
Date: January 26-28, 2005
Location: HES Amsterdam School for Business, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Website: http://www.clubofamsterdam.com
Gain critical insights and a deeper understanding of the issues that will shape the Knowledge Society. The Summit for the Future 2005 is an international conference that brings together experts, thought leaders, policy makers and knowledge workers.
Why should you attend?
The Club of Amsterdam has rapidly become a melting point of different visions. Communications (including broadcasting) is by far the world's biggest business. It's also the most influencial. Find out where it is going and how you can anticipate the Media Evolution. Network TV in the US is losing viewers and advertisers. Yet, growth of Wi-Fi & Broadband in North America and Europe seems to be beating all predictions. CD piracy is at an all time high. But so are sales of certain music artists. Press Freedom is at an all time low. So what is the world not talking about?
If you're looking for Vision, rather than just Television, make sure you're part of the Media & Entertainment stream discussions in January.
Who should attend?
This stream is designed to interest and involve senior management and strategists within the following media sectors. Print Media [Publisher, Head of Business Development, Editor-in-Chief Print, Editor-in-Chief On-Line], Broadcaster [Program Director, Editor in Chief, Head of Business Development, Senior Current Affairs Producer, Head of On-Line], Music Industry [Publisher, Distributor, (Rights) Lawyer, Retail, Musician, Head of Marketing], Entertainment Industry [Publisher, Games Producer, Distributor, Retail], Wireless Industry [Mobile Business Development, Telco, Lawyer],
You can download the descriptions about the Knowledge Streams [*.pdf, ~ 100KB]]:
Each Knowledge Stream can be attended by 25-30 participants.
The results of these workshops will then be discussed in the final plenary forum.
If you like thinking "out of the box", this Club of Amsterdam Summit may prove to be the best conference of 2005.
You can also just attend the
by World Bank Institute
The stellar list of contributors to this book includes Nobel Prize winner and Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Irrational Exuberance author Robert Shiller, and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The theme on which they are all passionate is the importance of a free and independent press.
As World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn points out in the foreword to this book, "a free press is not a luxury. It is at the core of equitable development." Contributors to this volume explore the role of the media as a watchdog of government and the corporate sector, the media’s power to influence markets, its usefulness as a transmitter of new ideas and information, and its ability to give a voice to the poor and disenfranchised. They also tackle the potential harm an unethical, propagandistic, or irresponsible press can cause and the impact of insult laws and other policies that hamper the operation of a free press.
Several contributors describe the challenges faced by the media in specific countries, including the former Soviet Union, Thailand, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Zimbabwe - these are fascinating case studies and vivid illustrations of the media’s potential as a catalyst for change and growth.
Advance Praise for The Right to Tell: "I’ve been waiting for ten years for someone to put together a book like this. The Right To Tell finally makes the case linking open media with economic growth and development. Each article in this collection is like a building block in a public policy brief that places open media at the forefront of development strategy. It follows Amartya Sen’s groundbreaking Development As Freedom with compelling arguments that independent media are essential to social development and economic growth. Open media translates into transparency and government accountability, less corruption, participatory democracy, civil society and, yes, greater income. This book is a must read for policymakers who are only now waking up to the immense power of open media." - David Hoffman, President, Internews Network
As a cultural institution, the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe holds a unique position in the world. It responds to the rapid developments in information technology and today's changing social structures. Its work combines production and research, exhibitions and events, coordination and documentation.
For the development of interdisciplinary projects and promotion of international collaborations, the Center for Art and Media has manifold resources at its disposal: the Museum for Contemporary Art, the Media Museum, the Institute for Visual Media, the Institute for Music and Acoustics and three new departments – the Institute for Basic Research, the Institute for Media and Economics, and the Filminstitute.
Projects
Since July 2004 the Institute of Basic Research hosts Andres Burbano as a visiting scientist. He works on the following project:
"Ways of neuron" is an online scientific documentary about the impact of Neuroscience research and its relationship with the nature of the mind. A fundamental aspect of the documentary is, from an aesthetic point of view the coherent relationship between data processing and content access. The documentary will have a navigational interface whose design will be guided by conceptual principles rather than by traditional principles of visual design.
Music is "symbolic dynamics". Chaos set to music can enhance our understanding of complex dynamics. The aural representation of dynamic systems cannot merely be viewed as a non-scientific leisure. Music can be also understood as a symbolic dynamics in the scientific context. In the 80´s and 90´s of the last century strong attemps have been made to understand nonlinear dynamical systems through symbolic representations in order to learn more about the dynamics. In the case of the famous Lorenz- attractor one can introduce a very simple symbolic sequence, for example, the encoding of the current position of the system at the right or left wing as a "O" or "1", respectively, leading to a O-1-time series. If we generate beats with this sequence it results in a rythm as an acoustic aspect of the Lorenz system. We also try to use the acoustics in order to provide a new sensual impression of the chaotic dynamics, i.e., the symbolic dynamics can be regarded as a supplement to visual perception. No reliable physicist will deny - we guess - that the "visual" figurative presentation of a nonlinear system is a substantial contribution for the understanding of these systems. Why should this not be the case with "aural" figurative representations as well?
Project title: Non-formal Learning in the Context of the New Media (Prospects for enhancing skills through network and multimedia learning: Analysis of skills-enhancing learning by means of computer activities not explicitly designed as learning systems)
This research project begins by describing in detail the non-formal and implicit learning processes that occur in daily dealing with the new media. This serves as the starting point for a more detailed analysis of implicit learning processes and everyday patterns of skill development. Here, too, the relevant recent research into human cognitive and affective-motivational learning is summarized from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Implicit learning – and especially the elaboration of a clear and scientific conception of intellectual and perceptual-motor skills – is here the thematic focus of a number of different research projects.
Defining the nature of human skills brings together such different branches of research as artificial intelligence, analytical philosophy, cognitive psychology, motivational psychology and the more recent mapping of human intelligence. On the basis of these analyses, investigation may be conducted in a later project segment into some innovative aspects of future workplaces designed to facilitate learning processes, IT-centered training concepts and the design of learning environments and learning software.
http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e
The HMP-A1 has a 20GB hard disk, so users can copy movies or still image data from their PCs, digital video cameras, et al, and play them on the passport-sized HMP-A1. This compact multiplayer measures 129.6mm x 75.6 mm x 22 mm and weighs 250g. It has a 3.5-inch LCD. The hard disk can store 35 hours of MPEG4 files or 9.5 hours of MPEG2 files. The HMP-A1 can play six contiguous hours of MPEG4-formatted moving images and eight straight hours of MP3-formatted music before the built-in lithium ion battery runs down. Users can conveniently hook up their HMP-A1 to their TV.
The PC-SMP2E/CB is what Buffalo calls a"TV Capture Card" that turns a normal notebook PC into a cable TV. All you have to do is plug the card into a slot on a notebook PC and connect the PC to a cable TV tuner via a wire included with the card. The card is attractive for those who want to watch TV without investing another JPY200,000 or more into a new PC or TV; it costs only a tad more than JPY10,000.
by Japan Media Review
I-mode has transformed the way Japanese, especially youth, communicate privately and publicly and serves a different social function than the PC Internet. In this academic paper recently presented at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, new media researcher Jack Qiu explores the influence of NTT DoCoMo's mobile Internet platform on Japanese society.
Meaning "everywhere" in Japanese, DoCoMo (or NTT DoCoMo) is Japan's leading wireless communications operator and arguably the world's most successful mobile Internet provider. Started in February 1999, DoCoMo's legendary i-mode (information mode, a 2G/3G mobile-Internet platform) had attracted 40 million users in Japan plus 1 million subscribers in Europe and other parts of Asia by the end of January 2004. Launched in 2001, DoCoMo's FOMA (freedom of mobile multimedia access) service is the first fully commercialized 3G network in the world, with more than 3 million users in March 2004.
The commercial success of DoCoMo has many social ramifications as it provides a new technological tool that assists, enhances, and alters the ways in which people interact, conduct their lives, and coordinate themselves in time and space. It is the purpose of this review to summarize the basic information about DoCoMo, its history, how it works, why it succeeds, and how the mutual shaping between technology and society takes place, giving rise to a fascinating keitai (mobile phone) culture that is central to the understanding of the transitional information society in contemporary Japan.
The full article is available at:
http://ojr.org/japan/research/1097446811.php
The EUROPRIX Top Talent Award is Europe’s contest for innovative projects and creative contents for top students and young professionals using all multimedia channels & platforms
This years winner:
French Underground – Music DVD is the overall winner of the EUROPRIX Top Talent Award 2004
The EUROPRIX is a premier Europe-wide strategic project to develop the fast-moving multimedia markets in Europe. One of its main activities is the EUROPRIX Contest for the best multimedia products and applications, devided in general Contest and Stundents’ Award. Further activities include the EADIM – European Academy for Digital Media, EUROPRIX Summer Schools. The number of related activities are organised by the EUROPRIX Partners in 26 European Countries.
http://www.toptalent.europrix.org
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