9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling and Design (FARM)

27th August, 2021, co-virtual with ICFP 2021, held entirely online.

About

The ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modelling and Design (FARM) gathers together people who are harnessing functional techniques in the pursuit of creativity and expression.

Functional Programming has emerged as a mainstream software development paradigm, and its artistic and creative use is booming. A growing number of software toolkits, frameworks and environments for art, music and design now employ functional programming languages and techniques. FARM is a forum for exploration and critical evaluation of these developments, for example to consider potential benefits of greater consistency, tersity, and closer mapping to a problem domain.

FARM encourages submissions from across art, craft and design, including textiles, visual art, music, 3D sculpture, animation, GUIs, video games, 3D printing and architectural models, choreography, poetry, and even VLSI layouts, GPU configurations, or mechanical engineering designs. Theoretical foundations, language design, implementation issues, and applications in industry or the arts are all within the scope of the workshop. The language used need not be purely functional (“mostly functional” is fine), and may be manifested as a domain specific language or tool. Moreover, submissions focusing on questions or issues about the use of functional programming are within the scope.

Workshop Registration

You can register for the FARM workshop through the ICFP registration page.

At least one author of each accepted submission must register and present their paper at the workshop.

Program

The schedule can also be found on the ICFP conference website.

All times in the Paris timezone (UTC+2) and preliminary.

11:15 Welcome
11:30
12:00
12:30 Break
13:00
13:30
14:00
14:30 Break
15:00 Performances session

“Logical Soundness” aims to express a mathematical proof in a way so that the basic structure of the proof is audible. Elements of the proof are represented as musical motifs, and other aspects may modify the music or sound. Recursive aspects of the proof are also represented, for example by doubling the speed.

I have chosen a soundness proof to express in sound, in particular lemma 4.3 of this paper. This proof has been formalized in Agda. Also using Agda, my own program uses reflection to get the intermediate representation of the proof, and converts this into music using a mapping from names to motifs, maintaining the basic structure. It uses my library MusicTools to handle most of the work and generate a MIDI file as output.

Drawing inspiration from Mark Kac’s famous essay, “Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?”, in which he asks if one can determine the shape (boundary limits) of a 2D drum from its eigenfrequencies, this hybrid presentation/performance will present previous work done with modal synthesis. The work looked at materiality by implementing various parameters drawn from different types of marble on modal drums with a fixed geometry. In conclusion I will provide early experiments and motivations for further developing the design of drums and meshes with different geometries to sonically explore the question above and develop compositional techniques that take into consideration topological properties of meshes.

The piece captures the gesture of the percussionist to drive the electronics. A first version was created by percussionist Thierry Miroglio in Shizuoka (Japan) in 2016. The final version has been commissioned by the Biennale de Venise in 2017. The electronics has been rewritten in 2020 to use SuperCollider and this work is part of my PhD.

The programming of the piece is structured using “actors” (parallel objects) that represent inputs from the environment (accelerometers, onset detection and spectral analysis of the percussion) and output sound sources (generative process, synthesis, spatialization’s data, etc.). Each sound sources “listen” to some “gestures” (kicks, sliding hands, etc.) that are detected in the accelerometers inputs.

The synthesis relies on a SuperCollider server which is driven by the antescofo program. The interaction between the two is completely applicative from the antescofo point of view (the actors attack an API which hide all the technical details of the asynchronous communications via OSC with the SuperCollider server).

16:00 Break
16:30 Keynote: Phoenix Perry

Workshop Organization

Workshop Chair: Daniel Winograd-Cort (Luminous Computing)

Program Chair: Jean-Louis Giavitto (IRCAM Paris)

Publicity Chair: Michael Sperber (Active Group GmbH)

Performance Chair: John MacCallum (HfMT Hamburg)

Code of Conduct

FARM adheres to ICFP 2021’s Code of Conduct.