WFAE 2011: Crossing Listening Paths

Keynote Speakers:
R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, Katharine Norman, Christopher W. Clark, Allen S. Weiss

CALL FOR SCIENTIFIC AND ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS

Soundscapes are seldom simple; on the contrary, they tend to be complex sounding systems continuously changing in time, which no art or science can approach in depth on its own.

Listening is the ‘corner stone’ for the appreciation, participation and study of the sonic environment that surrounds and includes us. As Westerkamp (2002) remarks, it is the ecological balance of our planet that becomes audible “to those who care to listen.”

We might consider listening in two ways: as the actual activity of focusing (in innumerable ways) our attention to the soundings, and in a metaphorical manner; listening as a metaphor. A research or a compositional approach to the sonic environment, for example, can be thought of as a listening path.

One alone cannot listen to everything that is simultaneously sounding in the soundscape; similarly the meanings transmitted through soundings cannot be fully uncovered by a single discipline. The multidisciplinary approach in the research of the sonic environment has been highlighted from the very beginnings of Acoustic Ecology.

These different aesthetic and scientific approaches to the soundscape are considered here metaphorically as crossing listening paths, which in their ‘conjunctions’ and interactions might create a better understanding of the whole.

‘Crossing listening paths’ is the main theme of the Conference of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, which will take place at the Department of Music of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece from 3-7 of October 2011.

The conference will be endorsed by the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the Hellenic Society for Acoustic Ecology, will be organized and co-sponsored by the Department of Music of the Ionian University and the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Laboratory (EPHMEE) of the Ionian University, and will be supported by the Computer Music Laboratory of the Department of Music Technology and Acoustics of the Technological and Educational Institute of Crete.

http://www.akouse.gr/wfae2011/

USING AND ABANDONING ROUNDHOUSES: A REINTERPRETATION OF THE EVIDENCE FROM LATE BRONZE AGE–EARLY IRON AGE SOUTHERN ENGLAND: LEO WEBLEY

It has recently been demonstrated that a number of roundhouses of the early first millennium BC in southern England show a concentration of finds in the southern half of the building. It has thus been argued that this area was used for domestic activities such as food preparation, an idea which has formed the basis for discussion of later prehistoric ‘cosmologies’. However, reconsideration of the evidence suggests that this finds patterning does not relate to the everyday use of the buildings, being more likely to derive from a particular set of house abandonment practices. Furthermore, evidence can be identified for the location of domestic activities within contemporary roundhouses that appears to contradict the established model.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2007.00277.x/abstract

Benjamin Cook

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2011/benjycook/16001

A paper from the MiPP team was submitted to The Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity (IAA) at the University of Birmingham and the CAA UK Chapter committee invited us to present at the CAA UK Chapter conference 2011. The conference was held at the Institute of Archaeology, Birmingham on the 1st April – 2nd April 2011.

Topics included initiatives within the sphere of archaeological computing, but papers that addressed the following themes were particularly encouraged:

§ Working in a Visual World – From gaming to solid modelling, mobile technology to augmented reality.

Other themes of long-standing interest to researchers and practitioners include:

§ Archaeological computing methods and techniques within the Cultural Resource Management (CRM) environment.

§ Pattern recognition – Finding patterns within archaeological data, site patterning, image recognition, etc.

§ Theory within Archaeological Computing – The application of archaeological theory within the computing environment e.g. post-processual approaches to archaeological computing.

As I noted in my TAG presentation before Christmas, archaeology is really all about the material record: tracing what has survived in the soil, and building theories top of that. Many of these theories concern what people did, and where and how they moved while they were doing them. During a capture session in Bedford last week (which alas I couldn’t attend), the team tried out various scenarios in the Animazoo mocap suits, using the 3D Silchester Round House created by Leon, Martin and others as a backdrop. They reconstructed in a practical way how certain every day tasks might have been accomplished by the Iron Age inhabitants. As Mike Fulford pointed out yesterday, such reconstructions – which are not reconstructions in the normally accepted sense in archaeology, where the focus is usually on the visual, architectural and formal remediation of buildings (as excellently done already by the Silchester project) – themselves can be powerful stimuli for archaeological research questions. He cited a scene in Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, where soldiers are preparing for battle. This scene prompted the reflection that a Roman soldier would have found putting on his battle dress a time consuming and laborious process, a fact which could in turn be pivotal to the interpretation of events surrounding various aspects of Roman battles.

One aim of MiPP is to conceptualize theoretical scenarios such as this as visual data comprising digital motion traces. The e-research interest in this is that those traces cannot really be called ‘data’, and cannot be useful in the particular application area of reconstructive archaeology, if their provenance is not described, or if they are not tagged systematically and stored as retrievable information objects. What we are talking about, in other words, is the mark-up of motion traces in a way that makes them reusable. Our colleagues in the digital humanities have been marking up texts for decades. The TEI has spawned several subsets for specific areas, such as EpiDoc for marking up epigraphic data, and mark-up languages for 3D modelling (e.g. VRML) are well developed. Why then should there not be a similar schema for motion traces? Especially against the background of a field such as archaeology, where there are already highly developed information recording and presentation conventions, marking up quantitative representations of immaterial events should be easy. One example might be to assign levels of certainty to various activities, in much the same way that textual mark-up allows editors to grade the scribal or editorial certainty of sections of text. We could then say, for example, that ‘we have 100% certainty that there were activities to do with fire in this room because there is a hearth and charring, but only 50% certainty that the fire was used for ritual activity’. We could also develop a system for citing archaeological contexts in support of particular types of activity; in much the same way that the LEAP project cited Silchester’s data in support of a scholarly publication. It boils down to the fundamental principle of information science, that an information object can only be useful when its provenance is known and documented. How this can be approached for motion traces of what might have happened at Silchester in the first century AD promises to be a fascinating case study.

Originally published on Stuart’s Blog: http://stuartdunn.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/mipp-forming-questions/

In late February, the MiPP team convened at the University of Bedford, where Helen Bailey hosted two day’s of motion capture. The objectives were to test a few aspects of the technology and methodology which have arisen over the last few weeks.

Key apects of the sessions included:

- real-time emplacement of present day motion-actors (dancers) in a virtual archaeological site (Iron Age Silchester – focusing upon the roundhouse).
- an investigation into the potential meanings and choreographies generated by such a methodology.

As always with these presentations, it was the questions afterwards which were really interesting (although alas I had to leave before the general discussion at the end of the day, as legions of snow clouds closed in on southern England). It was clear, once again, that engagement with other archaeological practitioners is key of MiPP is to be a success; but that a project which is about process rather than material needs  to have its proper archaeological context spelled out if that engagement is to happen.  I suspect, however, that once the second stand of the project – the dynamic reconstructions – are under way and demonstrable in a more final form; this will actually be very much easier. We must also link these processes to current discussions about agency and materiality, as discussed for example by Martin Wobst. Ruth Tringham of UC Berkeley indicated that similar issues had come up in her team’s thinking about process at Catalhoyuck. I was asked what merits the various motion capture systems have over simply videoing the excavators at work in HD: this indicates to me that we need to investigate, document and demonstrate in a very robust way the functionaries that the bvh and .fbx viewers that we are using can bring for panning, zooming, viewing the data from multiple angles in 3D and – critically – linking the data with the archaeological data that is there: these critical advantages over standard video are extremely important for the question of ‘why’, as opposed to ‘how’ do we take MoCap out of the studio. A further functionality which I think we need, which struck me when was reviewing the data earlier this week, is that we need the subject’s line of site to be projected onto the floor surface. This is not obvious in the current footage, and yet it is central to documenting the subject’s relationship with his or her material. Finally, I was asked about capturing the movements of larger numbers of people at the same time. This, of course, was originally envisaged as part of MiPP, but had to be abandoned due to technological constraints. Of course this would open the process up to capturing the pathways of visitors through, and around, sites.

Overall – still much to do, but I sense that some really interesting issues are beginning to emerge.

(Favro and Johanson 2010)