May/100
Paper summary: Interconnected musical networks: Toward a theoretical framework
Weinberg, G. (2005). Interconnected musical networks: Toward a theoretical framework. Computer Music Journal, 29(2):23–39
Weinberg (2005) discusses musical networks, the concept of performance as an interdependent art form. Electronics expands the range of possible interdependencies in musical performance: ‘Although acoustic-interdependent models provide an infrastructure for a variety of approaches for interconnections and interdependencies among players, they do not allow for actual manipulation and control of each other’s explicit musical voices. Only by constructing electronic (or mechanical) communication channels among players can participants take an active role in determining and influencing not only their own musical output but also that of their peers’ (Weinberg, 2005, p. 23).
May/100
Book Summary: “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sacks
Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf.
Sacks explores the neurology of music and gives examples of patients who have various unusual responses to music. Told in a wonderful, person-focused, story-telling manner, Musicophilia expounds on music as the wonderful back door to our minds. One man gained a sudden appreciation of piano music after being struck by lightning. Some people get seizures from music or hear music in their seizures. Most people experience getting music stuck in their head, but some have more intense musical hallucinations.
Apr/100
ChucK: mind-bending programming language of the day
I've recently started teaching myself a new programming language: ChucK. You can read a paper by the authors that gives a quick outline of some of the salient features of the language:
Wang, G., Cook, P. R. (2003). ChucK: a concurrent, on-the-fly audio programming language. In Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference, pages 219–226
Mar/100
Robotic drumming with machine learning back end
This video is what I'd like to build: Jazari drumming robots controlled by Wiimotes and machine learning.
Of course, I'm in the business of building better and more algorithms for music and other purposes, but this is the kind of hardware platform that I'd be keen to demo algorithms on.
You can read more on the artist's website.
Peter
Jan/100
TED talk on evolving robots
Today I found this TED talk on evolving robots by Hod Lipson at Cornell.
Towards the end of the talk he makes the interesting point that in absence of a particular reward, a heterogeneous population of simulated robots ends up favouring those kinds of robots that can self-replicate.
Peter
Jan/100
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
Today I came across and insightful discussion on a dark-ish corner of the philosophy of science: why does math describe the universe so well?
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics by Richard. W. Hamming (of Hamming distance and Hamming window fame). Originally this article appeared in The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 87 Number 2 February 1980.
It's a bit of a long read, but here are some highlights:
Jan/100
Can I Get Rid of This Parameter? (Statistical tests)
I'm working on a simulation that has a bunch of parameters. It's getting a bit complicated, so I'm on a witch-hunt for unimportant parameters. The suspect in question is 'channel length.' The channel length can take any non-negative integer value. The ultimate output of the simulation is a random variable, called the 'turn taking.' (More on the details of turn taking coming soon to a journal near you.)
So the question is: does the channel length affect the turn taking?
Dec/090
Liquid State Machine Papers
I've done a bit with echo state networks (ESNs) and mostly neglected the more neuroscience motivated liquid state machine (LSM) research. However, there is some great work going on led by W. Maass. Here are two stand-out publications:
Distributed Fading Memory for Stimulus Properties in the Primary Visual Cortex - actual data from cat neocortex showing reservoir computing sort of responses.
State-dependent computations: spatiotemporal processing in cortical networks - fascinating review of a large body of research including nice discussions of high-dimensional trajectories.
Dec/090
Focused Papers
The goal of most research papers is to focus on a particular objective or hypothesis (survey papers being the major, valid exception), but most papers have lots of extraneous details coming from the exact system and configuration under study.
After discussing the goal of boiling down a problem to its minimal required complexity with Phil Bones and Allan McInnes, I was reminded of the following paper comparing selection mechanism in GA. The point of the paper contains some survey-like discussion, but I admire the simplicity of the system they study. The system choice makes the selection behavior easy to illustrate without extra complexity.
A Game-Theoretic Investigation of Selection Methods Used in Evolutionary Algorithms -- Ficici, Melnik, and Pollack
Dec/090
Robotic Kite Flying
I saw this post in the IEEE Spectrum blog about a robotic kite flying. The group that did it, Festo, has done some other cool project like flying robot penguins.
I guess it's always more impressive to demonstrate learning algorithms on big expensive hardware. But having big hardware is not essential for having great algorithms. I'm sure there are ways to demonstrate great algorithms using relatively primitive hardware.
Peter