Guest Lecture – Shelly Knotts

Shelly Knotts produces live-coded and network music performances and projects which explore aspects of code, data and collaboration. Her experimental and collaborative tendencies have seen her engage with diverse musical practices and styles ranging including noise, jazz and algorave. She performs internationally, collaborating with computers and other humans.

She is currently studying for a PhD with Nick Collins and Peter Manning at Durham University. Her research interests lie in the political practices implicit in collaborative network music performance practice and designing systems which play with particular data structures for algorithmic and improvised music creation. Her work often has a political dimension, using network music to explore social structures and live coding to explore failure as an alternative to virtuosity, as well as developing projects which explore and encourage diversity in music technology.

Current collaborations include audio-visual live coding performance [Sisesta Pealkiri] with Alo Allik, synth-pop duoALGOBABEZ with Joanne Armitage, and telematic laptop ensemble OFFAL (Orchestra For Females And Laptops).

Algorithmic Interfaces for Improvisation

With the development of social networking, interface design and algorithms have become integral to our social interplay with data collection, content personalisation and behaviour prediction mediating the potential interactions we have and e.g. character limits, ‘like’ buttons, and even instagram filters informing the content of our interactions.

This performance-lecture systems explore possible synergies between the dynamics of improvisation in music ensembles which use network technology to exchange musical and social data, and the dynamics of online social networking which is fundamentally mediated by algorithms and interface design. The pieces discussed explore the dynamics of human interaction when data collection and algorithms are used to modify or moderate this interaction, and algorithms subvert or enable particular power-dynamics within the group, taking a critical approach to algorithmically mediating collaborative improvised performance

Network Music – all recorded sound of them speaking. Shared a disk for reading/writing files.

Working with disruptive systems to be pointed in a new direction – interesting way of working out new ideas.

analyzing the input audio for spectral / noise content and make decisions based on the already existing sounds. (lots of bass for a long time? pause the bass?)

http://datamusician.net

https://vimeo.com/shellyknotts