UniSSON - Unity Super Collider Sound Object Notation

This presentation introduces interdisciplinary research by Jules Rawlinson, Marcin Pietruszewski and Dave Murray-Rust into action, agency, aura and spectacle in audio-visual improvisation, with a specific focus on small electronic ensembles.

The main output from this research is a suite of software tools piloting frameworks for analysis and visualisation (UniSSON, Unity Super Collider Sound Object Notation) in multiplayer improvisation. The main successes of the analysis and visualisation tools are in presenting a multitemporal and multiresolution view of sonic data allowing the simultaneous display of ‘instant’, ‘recent’ and ‘long-term’ data across a number of important sound-based parameters in accessible ways, which contributes to audience engagement and collaborative performance. The project builds on existing strands of work in creative computing, computer music and musicology but seeks to make newly playful use of these techniques whilst also addressing accessibility issues by working with both widely adopted and open source software.

The aims of this research were to develop a framework for graphical representations of multiplayer sonic/musical interactions in audio-visual performance, explore data visualisation and machine listening/learning tactics for sharing musical gestures in performance, design creative user interfaces for analysis of multiplayer digital sound/music, devise collaborative strategies for integrated and embedded audio-visual performance and the release of software utilities for multiplayer experimentation. The research investigates ways of exploring productively the tension between legibility and co-agency in performance. Real-time video display of visualised sonic data both reveals and structures collective and individual activity through the capture, transformation, and re-presention of interactions. Explorations of visual form and graphic mapping provide new opportunities for performers and audiences to engage with provocation and process in immersive audio-visual performance.