UCLIC Seminar, 20 March 2024. Andrew McPherson.

Seminar Title: Entanglement HCI and Digital Musical Instrument Design: Theory to Practice
Speaker: Andrew McPherson (Imperial College London)
Date: Wednesday 20 March 2024, 15:00-16:00
Abstract: Many new digital musical instruments (DMIs) are created every year, each of which encodes cultural values both obvious and subtle, reflecting the aesthetic priorities of its designer, its constituent technologies, and those technologies' domains of origin. Recent developments in high-performance, low-cost embedded computing promise new frontiers in machine intelligence to be integrated into instruments. The musical opportunities are vast, but so are the risks: who will set the agenda for deploying this technology, and whose interests and aesthetics will be represented?
This talk examines resonances and diffraction patterns between DMI design and recent directions in post-humanist HCI that Frauenberger terms "entanglement HCI". Following theories such as Ihde's post-phenomenology and Barad's agential realism, perhaps musical instruments are better viewed not as self-contained technological objects at all, but contingent and evolving webs of relationships between humans, objects and cultural systems. This talk will present an early snapshot of work in progress on the RUDIMENTS project, an ERC Consolidator Grant (UKRI funded) which examines how entanglement theory can inform DMI design practice and, in turn, what DMI research might suggest for broader areas of HCI, design and arts practice.
Bio: Andrew McPherson is Professor and Chair in Design Engineering and Music in the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. Trained as an electronic engineer (SB and MEng MIT 2005) and composer (SB MIT 2004, PhD UPenn 2009), he leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory (instrumentslab.org), a research team investigating new musical instruments, performer-instrument interaction, embedded hardware systems, and the cultural implications of technology.
Andrew holds a Research Chair from the Royal Academy of Engineering (2021-26) and an ERC/UKRI Consolidator Grant (2023-28), having previously held fellowships from EPSRC (2016-21) and the US Computing Research Association (2009-11). Prior to joining Imperial in 2023, he was Professor of Musical Interaction in the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London. His instruments are widely used by composers and performers, including dozens of new pieces with hundreds of performances, several albums, an opera, a film score, and two successful crowdfunding launches. He is the co-founder of Bela.io, a startup creating high-performance open-source embedded computing systems for makers and artists.
Link: www.ucl.ac.uk/...