Presentation at ADC23 - November 14, 2023
Photo by the ADC Team
The Audio Developer Conference (ADC) is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new skills, and build a network that will support their career development. It is also aimed at showcasing academic research and facilitating collaborations between research and industry.
The ADC Team invited me to give a keynote at this year’s ADC in London (November 13-15th) at the Mermaid. The ADC has grown into a full hybrid in-person and online conference with over 600 in-person attendees (London) and over 800 online participants. The ADC Team program over 60 talks each year at the conference over a wide range of audio topics.
On November 14, I presented the talk From NIME to NISE: Rethinking the design and evaluation of musical interfaces. In this keynote talk, I presented my insights into designing and evaluating networked algorithmic spaces that support collaboration, participation, non-hierarchical structures and Do-it-yourself (DIY) practices for Sound and Music Computing (SMC) from a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective. In this context, we looked into the Sensing the Forest project related to creating natural NIMEs as interventions to the environment through sonic arts and sonification. The project contributes to the vision of democratising SMC through the creation of technologies that can empower the community to solve real-world problems.
The slides of my presentation are available here.
The keynote’s topic and especially the Sensing the Forest project intended to spark some ideas on other ways of thinking about musical interfaces. The presentation raised questions about how to connect better academia with industry, the importance of bringing natural time units and environmental awareness into creative processes, the need for bringing more feminist and humanist perspectives into technical development, and the expansion from music to sound to attract more diversity into the community of music builders.
It was a positive surprise to find out more about the successful efforts of the ADC Team to bring more diversity to the audio development community. The talk Diversity in music technology: Initiatives and insights from Music Information Retrieval by Blair Kaneshiro and the Diversity in Audio Reception were relevant events that showcase the important work done by women and allies towards bringing more diversity and inclusion into the field of audio development. This is also exemplified by previous ADC keynote speakers such as Rebecca Fiebrink (UAL), Astrid Bin (Ableton/Bela.io), Imogen Heap (Mimu gloves), Ruth John, Elaine Chew (King’s College London) and Anna Wszeborowska, among others.
Sadly, I missed the talks on November 15 due to teaching duties, including Josh Reiss’ keynote on Commercialisation of Audio Technology. The good news is that the videos will be soon publicly available on YouTube.
The full programme of ADC23 is available here:
https://adc23.sched.com
To find out more about ADC23, visit:
https://audio.dev/adc23/
See you at ADC24!
Acknowledgements: Thank you to Sophie Carus, Bobby Lombardi and the ADC Team for the invitation and excellent organisation, the ADC community for their curiosity about my work and the StF project, and the StF project team members for their help. Special thanks to Luigi Marino for setting up a proof-of-concept of the audio streamer and successfully live streaming from Bristol.