Instructor: Georg Essl

Title: urMus - Mobile Music Instruments and Environments

Topics/Keywords: mobile music, software environments, programming

Description:

This will be a tutorial of urMus for iPhones and iPod Touches. The goal of the tutorial is to introduce instrument building and music performance on mobile smart phones and lead the participants through the process of building their own using urMus as the environment. urMus is designed to allow multiple levels of entry. It offers a graphical patching interface that can be used to design musical interactions without any direct programming, but it also offers a rich programming language API in the Lua programming language. Lua is a simple multi-paradigmatic language that should be easy to learn for anybody who has mastered another programming language. The tutorial will be accessible for both performers who want to start building interactive systems quickly as well as for instrument designers who want to develop delicate interactions. The workshop will be using iPhone and iPod touches. Participants are welcome to use their own, but we will be providing sufficient devices for all participants.


First 2 hours:

Introduction to the urMus mapping environment, urSound and FlowBoxes, multirate signal flow, semantic connections, live-patching, functionality decoupling and urMus interface examples. This part will be accessible for participants who are familiar with digital sound synthesis environments such as pd, Max/MSP, CSound, RTCMix, ChucK, or Nyquist and is intended to be broadly accessible. This will be joint with the long track.

Second 2 hours:

Programming urMus in Lua. Introduction to Lua, urMus layouting API, urMus flowbox API, programmatic layouting practice, event handling, 2D drawing engine, vis versus dac, towards fully integrated art and music artifacts. This track requires the participant to have a MacBook and XCode/iPhone SDK installed and is intended for audience with programming experience, though the entry level will be moderate. Participants of the short track are welcome to stay on and observe.

Instructor Bio:

Georg Essl is currently Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Music at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University working with Perry Cook and has since then taught and worked at the University of Florida, the MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, TU-Berlin. For the last 5 years he has shamelessly abused mobile phones into noise making machines that transcend the annoyance of ring tones! Physical models and other sound synthesis methods such as the noise-heavy circle maps help in this endeavor.