“If you don’t give thought to design, users will not take to the technical tools you’ve created.”
Interview with Thomas Bottini, researcher in computer science for music
“Knowledge Transfer(s): the interviews
Since 2008, CADI has investigated the field of knowledge transfer by interviewing experts who agreed to supervize fifth-year students in carrying out their final degree projects. This is an effort to build up a corpus of testimonies to come to a better understanding of the collaborative and representative methods resorted to by innovation and creation players, taking into account economic, cultural and evrironmental trends. In March 2010, we evolved the print issues into an electronic…
Thomas Bottini holds a degree in computer engineering from the Technological University of Compiègne (France). In parallel to his engineering training, he studied human sciences and the philosophy of artistic creation-related content. His current research into creating tools for the advanced reading and writing of multimedia documents demonstrates his keen interest in studying the relationship between digital technology and artistic creation. To further study this link, he has worked in collaboration with musicologists from the IRCAM (French institute of research and musical/acoustic coordination) to develop as a cross-disciplinary team a multimedia environment dedicated to musical analysis. In 2006 he created a tool to help organize musical analysis in tables (Musique Lab Annotation).
MUE - Auréien Pasquier's final degree project carried out with the help of Thomas Bottini, 2008-2009
Computer music and real/virtual paradox
CADI: What is computer music? What type of people use it?
T.B: Computer music encompasses several fields. But I suggest we stick to computer-aided composition since this was the main theme underlying Aurélien Pasquier’s project. This method dates back to the fifties when researchers from the big American universities began to analyze existing music pieces in an automatic way. Their research paved the way towards new music-generating composition tools which can be categorized into two different approaches: the musical approach and the acoustic approach. With the musical approach, computers are used to generate musical structures (notes, melodies, variations, tunes, etc.). It is therefore writing-based. The acoustic approach has more to do with sound synthesis and creating new sounds so as to keep treading upon new soundscapes. The tension between these two dimensions – between musical speech embodied by notes on the one hand, and the sound bodies through which they take shape (i.e. the acoustic dimension of musical speech) on the other hand – is essential to understanding computer music and indeed music in general. More simply, it concerns the tension between “abstract” and “concrete” dimensions. Computer music has only reinforced the necessity to become aware of the binary pattern underlying music. Over the last sixty years or so, many research projects have been jointly conducted in these two complementary fields. On one side synthesizers have evolved and have even ensconced themselves within computers (some software-based synthesizers are just as powerful as hardware ones): this is the acoustic approach. On the other side writing tools help give concrete expression to musical ideas and provide some kind of enhanced music scores for writing melodies and tunes and handling musical structures and are not solely for generating sounds. The tune writing device developed by Aurélien ranks in this category.
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