This article considers modular composition as an approach to engendering structural plasticity in musical works. Structural plasticity, in this case, is defined as the ability for the components of a musical work (e.g., events, ideas, sequences, textures, timbres) to vary in how and when they are presented. In this research, modular composition is the process for creating a collection of individual musical ideas (e.g., sequences, patterns, phrases) termed ‘modules’, and designing a dynamic system for their assembly into cohesive structures. This approach results in musical works that exist in a state of constant structural flux, allowing for real-time alteration while progressing beyond similar existing approaches observed in video game music and interactive music apps, from which this research takes inspiration. Approaches involving compositionally focused intelligent music systems are also observed, highlighting how modular composition bridges traditional compositional practices and the design of interactive music systems. Two of the authors’ own works are discussed with regard to how modular composition can be implemented in varying creative ways. The outcome of this work illuminates the creative possibilities of integrating traditional compositional practices with new digital approaches to arrive at a more structurally plastic and alterable form of music.

Play is an essential part of life, a vital part of urban design, and in the case of Newcastle a possible panacea for late night inner-city anti-social behaviour. This presentation introduces a pilot urban design project focused on the design of sets of interactive ‘henges’ across three central Newcastle city locations. Developed through collaborative design with the city council and local SMEs, these henges feature site-specific digital and sensor-based forms of interaction. They represent an innovative approach to shifting patterns of night-time anti-social behaviour within specific locations by reimagining these sites as arenas for individual and social play. The henge sites aim to prompt discussion with city communities over the value of play within urban design and engage citizens in future smart city initiatives. This presentation discusses the challenges of deploying interactive technologies within urban social design, argues for the need to prioritise forms of play within smart city planning, and outlines a collaborative research design involving multiple urban stakeholders.

Recent studies and media articles draw attention to gender imbalances in the music industry, both locally in Australia and globally. In Australia, there have been calls to overhaul tertiary music programmes to support and encourage female students into careers such as sound production, screen composition and contemporary music performance, where women are greatly underrepresented. Taking up this call, we investigated the experiences of women in a music degree programme at a regional university. Positioned as a music education study at tertiary level, we focussed on any barriers female students perceived to be affecting their participation in specific music courses. We took a phenomenological approach, collecting data through focus groups and examining the data through a ‘possible selves’ framework, as described by Markus and Nurius. The findings from the focus groups indicated that female students felt unconfident about some career paths, which they described as male-dominated, notably in the STEM-focussed music technology courses, and perceived some learning environments as not gender-inclusive. The ‘possible selves’ framework pointed to the role of emotions in female students’ learning experiences. The importance of positive emotions for confident learning is applicable to other higher education disciplines, particularly those in STEM.

‘House We Build’ was a co-design project and industry design partnership between FASTlab at the University of Newcastle, and the City of Newcastle local government authority. This project aimed to engage the public as participants in a meaningful digital portal experience of urban planning, comprised of an online game, an animation, and a web identity. Through this experience, the portal would communicate various issues concerning urban planning, and gradually re-shape the discourse between citizens and council. Through the ‘House We Build’ game and accompanying website, animation, and citizen survey, we demonstrated that community members could productively participate in urban planning.

Dynamic Music – music that changes itself according to input – challenges the traditional notion of music as a temporally linear art form and expands music to become more malleable. With the growth of non-linear musical forms within interactive media, there is an opportunity to explore how this concept of dynamic music expands creative opportunities purely in terms of music composition. This research considers opportunities afforded by a novel approach to composing music as a collection of short cells that can be seamlessly sequenced together in different combinations to form changeable musical progressions. Comparable to the audio-based dynamic music approaches commonly found in videogames and other forms of interactive media, this approach is distinguished by its emphasis on seamless sequencing between audio events, re-constructability, category-based musical structure, and absence of any one pre-defined linear progression. We found that creating music in this way allowed the composition to be seamlessly reconstructed in real time to showcase a vast variety of potential musical progressions. Furthering knowledge in this area will aid in the evolution of dynamic music, encourage innovation in digital music making, support additional pathways for creative expression, and lead towards a means of democratising music composition.

This photo essay introduces a pilot urban design project focused on the design of sets of interactive “henges” across three central Newcastle (New South Wales, Australia) city locations. Developed through a collaborative design process with the city council and other local Smart City stakeholders, these henges feature site-specific digital and sensor-based forms of interaction. They represent an innovative approach to shifting patterns of night-time anti-social behavior within specific locations by re-imagining these sites as arenas for individual and social play. The henge sites aim to prompt discussion with city communities over the value of play within urban design and engage citizens in future Smart City initiatives. This essay discusses the challenges of collaborative research involving multiple urban stakeholders, and of developing innovative social design using interactive technologies.

This article presents practice-based research exploring the interplay of real-time music creation and competitive gameplay. Musically creative video games, apps, and sound art are first surveyed to highlight their characteristic avoidance of competitive game elements. The relationship between play, games, and musical activity is then examined with reference to theoretical perspectives from ludomusicology and game studies, revealing a series of mechanical and aesthetic design tensions emerging between competitive gameplay and music creation. Two original music games are presented to explore this interplay across contrasting design approaches: EvoMusic engenders an abstract competitive dialogue between the player and system for authorial control, while Idea presents a more explicit ludic framework with goals, progression, danger, and victory. The games are evaluated in a comparative user study to capture the player experience of composing within competitive game settings. Participant responses revealed conflicting expectations for ludic and compositional experiences. Idea was the preferred game, yet its strong ludic elements distracted from or disincentivized music creation; EvoMusic offered more focused music creation yet also a weaker gameplay experience for lacking these same competitive elements. This relationship reflects the theoretical design tensions suggested by ludomusical scholarship. Further, a majority of participants characterized EvoMusic as being simultaneously competitive and creatively stimulating. The implication is that competitive games can support music creation for certain players, though it remains challenging to satisfy expectations for both within any one system. Design recommendations are drawn from these insights, and the potential for future research into creative music games is discussed.

Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) have mainly addressed biochemical systems. This paper presents a POCT based on recording physiological data and the options for intervention. Smartphone or tablets provide an ever-increasing number of applications for measuring diverse biochemical as well as physiological variables. An important adjunct to this is that the POCT App should provide a means of intervention. Previous work on assessing the efficacy of the biofeedback using HeartMath device has mainly concentrated on the effect of heart rate response, measured as heart rate variability (HRV) with the aim of improving anxiety, depression and immune response. This study investigated the effect of diaphragmatic paced breathing (6 breaths/min) or a serious game-based balloon-game for guiding biofeedback compared to normal breathing on electroencephalograph (EEG) signal complexity. Signal characteristics were analyzed following pre-processing and using the Higuchi Fractal Dimension (HFD) from the EEG directly, HFD obtained after applying Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) and Sample Entropy (SE) from EEG directly. Six subjects participated in the repeated measures pilot study. EEG was recorded using the Thought Technology device with the scalp electrode located at Cz prior, during and after HeartMath biofeedback training. Using all three complexity measures, most or all participants showed the lowest signal complexity during paced breathing regardless of analysis method. Only HFD with HHT showed a significant statistical difference (p<0.05) between the three conditions when using a Friedman repeated measures test. The findings suggest that biofeedback may be efficacious for POCT in psychopathology to reduce complexity of EEG which is often higher in patients with anxiety, depression or schizophrenia.

Digital games are a fertile ground for exploring novel computer music applications. While the lineage of game-based compositional praxis long precedes the advent of digital computers, it flourishes now in a rich landscape of music-making apps, sound toys and playful installations that provide access to music creation through game-like interaction. Characterising these systems is the pervasive avoidance of a competitive game framework, reflecting an underlying assumption that notions of conflict and challenge are somewhat antithetical to musical creativity. As a result, the interplay between competitive gameplay and musical creativity is seldom explored. This article reports on a comparative user evaluation of two original games that frame interactive music composition as a human–computer competition. The games employ contrasting designs so that their juxtaposition can address the following research question: how are player perceptions of musical creativity shaped in competitive game environments? Significant differences were found in system usability, and also creativity and ownership of musical outcomes. The user study indicates that a high degree of musical control is widely preferred despite an apparent cost to general usability. It further reveals that players have diverse criteria for ‘games’ which can dramatically influence their perceptions of musical creativity, control and ownership. These findings offer new insights for the design of future game-based composition systems, and reflect more broadly on the complex relationship between musical creativity, games and competition.

This study examined the effectiveness of diaphragmatic paced breathing at (0.1Hz) or obtaining biofeedback via a computer-game compared to normal breathing on heart rate variability (HRV). The aim was to determine whether individual differences exist and allow best practice on an individualized basis for relaxation and stress reduction. Six subjects participated in the repeat measures pilot study. HRV data was recorded during every session using HeartMath and analysed using Kubios software. Paced breathing indicated a substantial decrease in heart rate. Maximum change of low frequency power (%) was seen for the balloon condition with lesser change during paced breathing, The most changes between rest and intervention was observed for the very low frequency power (%) with no substantial differences between paced breathing and the balloon intervention. This suggests that the balloon game may more effective when breathing at approximately 0.1Hz and initiates vagal predominance which has been associated with reduced stress.

This paper explores different approaches to the sonification and visualisation of two environmental projects undertaken by Nigel Helyer in conjunction with John Drummond.The interactive installation Heavy Metal is focussed upon the real-time analysis and sonification of the chemical elements in a painting via a camera vision system, whilst the Oratorio for a Million Souls project concerns the behaviour and acoustic properties of live bee colonies manifest in the creation of real-time multi-channel sound compositions and associated sound architectures.Whilst these two projects differ in terms of methodology, aesthetics and technical approach they both share a direct concern with a deep analysis of the underlying environmental structures and perceptual frameworks that emerge in direct embodied encounters -on one hand the discovery of what lies behind the surface of a painted image in terms of chemical and colour structures -and in the case of Oratorio, a compelling immersion into the acoustic environment of Bees.

This paper reports on two digital games being developed in an effort to explore real-time interactive composition in a competitive game setting. The games allow players of any experience level to exercise musical creativity via symbolic gameplay interactions with a stochastic music generation system, but critically depart from related media by positioning the player in contest with an opposing compositional agent. We address the context of these works, describe their game and music systems, and frame the two designs as contrasting explorations of competitive, game-based composition. We then identify key human-computer co-creative dialogues ex-pected to emerge from player interaction with the games before discussing their wider implications for Musical Metacre- ation (MuMe). Our plans to formally evaluate the systems by gathering user perceptions of musical creativity, control, and competition are also outlined.

This paper explores different approaches to the sonification and visualisation of two environmental projects:-”Heavy Metal” is focussed upon the real-time analysis and sonification of the chemical elements in a painting via a camera vision system, whilst “Oratorio for a Million Souls” concerns the behaviour and acoustic properties of live bee colonies manifest in the creation of real-time multi-channel sound compositions and associated sound architectures.Whilst these two projects differ in terms of methodology, aesthetics and technical approach they both share a direct concern with a deep analysis of the underlying environmental structures and perceptual frameworks that emerge in direct ‘live’ encounters - one one hand the discover of what lies behind the surface of a painted image in terms of chemical and colour structures - and in the case of Oratorio, a compelling immersion into the acoustic environment of Bees.

We assessed the hypothesis elaborated by Pressing and by the first author that improvisation is normally based on the generation of segmental contrasts in musical features. Nine experienced improvisers performed a series of free-and 3-section referent-based pieces, each of about three minutes. Each player undertook eight improvisations with 'referent' instructions, preceded and followed by a free improvisation. A MIDI-equipped grand piano was used, and audio and MIDI were recorded. Computational analyses of the MIDI data assessed whether performers realized the referents successfully, and then determined the large-scale segmentation of the free improvisations. The performers almost always fulfilled the referents (68/72 improvisations, p < 0.0001), and their free improvisations were also susceptible to large-scale segmentation (p < 0.005). Since performers were only told of the referent structures as the session proceeded, the similar segmentation of both the first and second free improvisation suggests that such segmentation is common in solo free improvisation, in accord with the hypothesis.

This paper reports on the development and clinical evaluation of a video-based, dynamic, sonification device which tracks gestures of music therapy clients with severe physical disabilities, extracts their characteristic features and converts them to dynamic sound. Of particular interest was the extent to which the dynamic properties of the technology could assist in a better understanding of the relationship between movement and emotional expression. Informing the design was the concept of dynamic orchestration. Here, not only was the amount of movement and location of the centre of the movement mapped to synthesis parameters but also the underling voicing structure of the instrument could be changed dynamically in relationship to changes in the measure of motion detected.Participants were five young adults with severe physical disabilities, including quadriplegia, paraplegia, hemiplegia of spastic and athetoid forms, and a degenerative motor disease of unspecified origins. Each participant took part in 8, half-hour individual session conducted at the music therapy centre at the University of Western Sydney. During each session several sonic patterns were trialled and adjusted according to each participant's movements and preferences.Results showed that providing dynamic, musically-based sonification feedback to clients increases their vocabulary of movement responses, sustenance and the level of engagement with the music therapist, all of which are beneficial outcomes of music therapy. There were also indications that the spaciousness of the generated sound influenced the spaciousness of movements, and that the two may be in positive correlation.The development of a sound synthesis engine suitable for a project of this nature is a difficult task. The present system was designed as a free improvisation tool, as task oriented activities were deemed not appropriate for the participants. Further development may include high-level analysis units, reflecting aspects of posture, such as expansion and contraction, as a further approach to constraining sound synthesis outcomes to reflect not only the gesture of a particular limb, but the way in which the generation of that gesture causes variations in the entire body.

This article examines differing approaches to the definition, classification and modelling of interactive music systems, drawing together both historical and contemporary practice. Concepts of shared control, collaboration and conversation metaphors, mapping, gestural control, system responsiveness and separation of interface from sound generator are discussed. The article explores the potential of interactive systems to facilitate the creation of dynamic compositional sonic architectures through performance and improvisation.

This paper presents the current state of research undertaken as part of Performance Practice in New Interfaces for Realtime Electronic Music Performance