Montreal

Nice place, if a little cold, wet and snowing. Reminds me a little of New Zealand/ Queenstown in many ways . . . Spent some time with the folks at McGill's Schulich School of Music.

Old music school

New music school

Dean, Don McLean showed me through some of the recording studios:

API Console

Mutimedia room and soundstage

I also met with Sean Ferguson, a composer and Director of CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology). They house six, what they term 'research axes', and each of which have dedicated labs and resources.

Must fly, (literally). Now on to Leeds and dreadful weather, I believe. Still, looking forward to catching up with friends at Sixth Annual Art of Record Production Conference.

Lowell & New York

Traveling once more, and a very good experience and entry into the US via San Francisco. Nice people, if still very busy and slightly confusing . . .
Now completed the first leg of the tour, first to Lowell MA - beautiful little town north of Cambridge and Boston.
Caught up with the good folks of UMass Lowell Music and their wonderful hospitality. They run some terrific degree programs in music education, sound recording technology, music business and performance. Many thanks to Alex Ruthmann and John Shirley:

[A great night out at Boston's Lennox Hotel, w/ an amazing glass of 'The Balvenie']

Then on to New York to catch up with Nora Farrell (now teaching part of the year in our Bachelor of Music Technology program) and Bill Duckworth who's also now supervising some of our QCRC PhD candidates. Thanks for a delicious Thanksgivings Day dinner (that's pumpkin pie, clementines and roasted chestnuts . .!)
Or, as they also call it here – Turkey Day! Pics from the spectacular Macey's Thanksgivings Day Parade:

Flying out today, onward and upward to Montreal & McGill University's Schulich School of Music. Looking forward to it.

Overseas Itinerary Nov-Dec 2010

Just about to hop on a flight for the US. Very much looking forward to seeing old friends again, making new ones, and of course engaging in the various events.

21 Nov – 23 Nov
UMass Lowell, Massachusetts. www.uml.edu/College/arts_sciences/music. MOU follow-up, curriculum review. Prof Wil Moylan, Dr Alex Ruthmann, Dr Alan Williams

24 Nov – 27 Nov
New York. HDR supervision development, music technology history, practice-led research, and Thanksgiving Day. Monroe Street Music, Prof Bill Duckworth, Nora Farrell, Steve Newcomb, Prof Susan-Schmidt Horning.

27 Nov – 1 Dec
Montreal, McGill University www.mcgill.ca/music PentaCon benchmarking, collaboration.
Prof Don McLean. CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology). www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca

2 Dec – 5 Dec
UK, Leeds Metropolitan. www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/index2.htm
Presenting paper on 'Remixing modernism' at the 6th International Art of Record Production Conference. www.artofrecordproduction.com/content/view/233/127.

5 Dec – 8 Dec
UK, Manchester. Royal Northern College of Music. www.rncm.ac.uk Research: www.rncm.ac.uk/content/blogsection/8/52/
Staff seminars, HDR development. Prof Jonty Stockdale, Professor Richard Wistreich, Dr Jane Ginsborg.

8 Dec – 11 Dec
London & Guildford, Kingston University. fass.kingston.ac.uk/schools/performance/music
Seminars, practice-led music research. Dr Frank Millward.

No doubt will blog more and send pics over the following weeks.

ISME Beijing 2010

A wonderful diversion. Last week we had the pleasure of presenting at and attending the International Music Education Society (ISME) 29th World Conference in Beijing.

Along with others from the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, myself and colleague Scott Harrison presented a research paper entitled, Reflecting on reflection-in-action: Supervising practice-based doctorates in music.

What an incredible – and gigantic city! The culture, the friendliness and the wonderful music and art will never be forgotten.

Below, here's a slideshow with images from around Beijing, from the conference & music underscore from the spectacular Chinese opening ceremony.

Colbert at the Grammys

Check it out . . .

digital arts conference season

Lots of travel and interesting events over the last couple of weeks. I visited the very spooky Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney) for a PhD seminar.

Once a mental institution, now houses academic artists and designers (!) - very beautiful historic building, wonderful artwork and artists, but I'm positive its haunted. 'Nuff said.

Back to Brisbane next, to present a paper 'Authority 3.0' at the fourth annual international CreateWorld 2009 conference on Brisbane's beautiful South Bank.

A great turn out again, with artists from all over the country, from New Zealand and the US. This time, with a new AUC CreateWorld blogsite and well as CreateWorld09 on Twitter.

On the Tuesday (1 Dec), one of the CreateWorld keynotes featured an iChat hook-up to New York with Bill Duckworth and Nora Farrell, talking about their latest Sonic Babylon project and new iPhone app:

Right after the CreateWorld conference, I flew back to Sydney again on 4 Dec to present at the ICoMCS2 conference (that's the second International Conference on Music Communication Science), at the University of New South Wales.

My paper was about a recent album recording project 'Foreign objects & the art of interpretation'. Overall, the conference presented fascinating interdisciplinary collection of people, from psychology, music, education and science.

Xmas soon. Best wishes to everyone for the holiday season.

eResearch Australasia 2009

Its conference season here in Australia once again. Now in beautiful Manley, Sydney for the eResearch Australasia 2009 conference, 10–12 Nov.

This year's theme is No Boundaries. What challenges are raised by a world with no boundaries? What potential can we unlock?

The conference features speakers and demonstrations from the Australian and international eResearch community, aiming to provide:

• A catalyst for innovation and collaboration, by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines;
• A forum to support the development, enhancement, and harmonisation of national, regional, and discipline-specific eResearch infrastructures and services;
• A showcase for innovative science and research enabled through these technologies and services.

Here's a few snapshots of this:

What's all this got to do with music and the arts?

Well, interestingly the 'humanities' sessions are some of the most widely attended, with a range of interesting presentations about this work on line, and particularly in relation to understanding new digital data sets captured and modelled accordingly, then to the new kinds of research questions and projects that arise. A range of these with abstracts and contact info can be found on the conference program, here.

For example, here's one interesting project about the performing arts from AusStage – an accessible research facility for investigating live performance in Australia. It was built by a consortium of universities and industry partners with funding from the Australian Research Council.

AusStage and the Aus-e-Stage Project: Collaborative eResearch in the Performing Arts. This session presented researchers demonstrating innovations in performing arts eResearch, new research applications for the AusStage database and raised questions about the implications of visual interface design and collective approaches to data curation for research in the performing arts.

Elsewhere, there have been a range of sessions about training Research Higher Degree students, increasingly interested as they now are in using the web for their own variants of e-research, and increasingly wishing to model different kinds of modelling, and different kinds of exegesis (including interactive, web-based and the like). Here's a few related presentations:

eResearch Training for Higher Degree Students (University of Melbourne)
eResearch practices, barriers and needs for support: Preliminary study findings from four NSW universities.
eResearch Education and Training.

CreateWorld 2008

Back in Australia now, and into CreateWorld 2008, the Australian national digital arts conference, hosted by the Apple University Consortium (AUC) and Griffith University. Now in its third year, the 2008 conference must have been the most successful, with a terrific attendance and a wide range of panels, papers, keynotes, performances and podcast program.

AUC chair, Denis Antionelle opens the conference.

Some of the highlights for me were the various performance /talk events, including some stunning music-scored-to-speech patterns from Brisbane's Topology ensemble . . .

. . and some engaging VJ work from Adelaide's Luke Toop, featuring Apple's Quartz Composer software tools.

There were also a good range of academic papers and session presentations. Stephen Emmerson and I presented some of our recent recording work in IMERSD around our paper on Music, Recording and the Art of Interpretation (see earlier blog entry). Great fun to try to squeeze that many people into a recording studio control room!

A Podcast Team (Allan Carrington, Kate Foy, Cat Hope and Ian Green) were cruising the conference, audio recorders in hand, gathering short interviews to help better understand the conference themes in their broader context, and to tease out their implications for learning, teaching, research and creative performance in higher education.

WAAPA's Cat Hope works up some new podcasts.

The podcast program from CreateWorld 2008 is available at createworld2008.edublogs.org.

Great turn-out, fantastic location at Griffith's South Bank campus.

Look out for the final series of refereed papers in the conference proceedings, to be published shortly on the Create World 2008 site. Thanks everyone, for a great conference.

The Art of Record Production conference, Lowell USA

Presently visiting the USA, via LA, to Boston then to Lowell for the 4th annual international Art of Record Production conference.


This year, the conference was hosted by UMass Lowell's music department and the home of Prof William Moylan, the author of one of the world's leading music technology education texts, Understanding and Crafting the Mix, Second Edition: The Art of Recording.

One of the highlights was the opening keynote from industry legend record producer Phil Ramone (14 Grammys!), who also has just launched his new book, Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music. He spoke at length with wonderful personal tales about his work with Dylan, Streisand, Sinatra, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, on and on . . .

Another highlight was Lowel's 'critical listening room' where conference delegates were treated to amazing sound and analysis work with both famous recordings, as well as exceptional work form their graduate (Masters) students.

A discussion panel featured Dj Spooky (Paul Miller), Steve D'Agostino, David Hewitt, Mark Rubel on the theme 'The Recording Studio as Musical Instrument'.

I presented a paper entitled On disintermediated culture, education, and craft and it was teriffic to meet UMass's Wil Moylan and Alan Williams, as well as old friends from the UK (I saw them last at the first 2005 APR conference in London).

Speaking of old friends, following the ARP conference here, I'll then be heading down to New York city for a week, to catch up with William Duckworth and Nora Farrell. Bill and Nora were in Australia last 2007 and collaborated with the Queensland Conservatorium research centre on the fabulous iOrpheus - Art Among Us. Will be plotting for iOrpheus II.