11th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling and Design (FARM)

8th September, 2023, co-located with ICFP 2023, held in Seattle, Washington, USA.

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.

Call for Papers, Demos, and Performance (expired)

FARM 2023 ICFP Page

Code of Conduct

FARM adheres to the SIGPLAN/ICFP Code of Conduct.

Program

Workshop

9:00AM - Weighted Refinement Types for Counterpoint Composition

Youyou Cong

Refinement types are useful for describing specifications of programs. When applied to music theory, however, refinement types are too restrictive in that they do not allow breaking of rules.

To relax this restriction, we propose weighted refinement types, a variation of refinement types where each refinement predicate carries a weight representing the importance of that predicate. In this paper, we present a weighted refinement type system that has core features required for composing species counterpoint. We also discuss

9:30AM - The Beauty and Elegance of Functional Reactive Animation

Ivan Perez

It has been over 20 years since Elliott and Hudak published Functional Reactive Animation, which outlined the principles of interactive programming in functional languages. As a result, Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) has seen numerous implementations and has been applied to multiple areas, like robotics, physics simulations, game programming and user interfaces. The use of the term FRP has itself broadened, and nowadays covers both continuous-time purely functional abstractions and discrete-time reactive implementations. This paper presents a series of increasingly complex FRP animations in a current implementation. With a main focus on clarity and meaning, we explore three independent dimensions: space, time, and color. We demonstrate that, when embraced fully, Functional Programming can result in declarative constructs that are aesthetically beautiful and notationally elegant.

10:00AM - Demo: A functional EDSL for mathematics visualization that compiles to JavaScript

Alistair Beharry

Visualizations are a critical part of mathematics practice and education, and computers and open-source web technologies provide accessible ways to create high-quality mathematics visualizations at virtually no cost. However libraries and languages to create visualizations for mathematics are typically fine-grained, low-level, and targeted to vector graphics domain experts or web developers, not mathematics students or teachers or end-users. We present demos of a functional domain-specific language interface to the JSXGraph visualization library embedded in F# that emphasizes readability, composability, and the ability of end-users to easily create and manipulate elements of high-quality interactive mathematics visualizations without needing vector graphics or web development domain knowledge.

11:00AM - Exploring Self-Embedded Knitting Programs with Twine

Amy Zhu, Adriana Schulz, Zachary Tatlock

This paper delves into the concept of manufacturing quines, which explicitly embeds the intricate details of the fabrication process in the design of an object; the goal is for the programs that manufacture the object to also produce themselves within the object. We highlight how concretizing the design process of an object in the real object can help reconstruct items and remind us of the reality that all objects must be manufactured, incurring labour and environmental costs. By drawing inspiration from self-reproducing programs, we outline a new language design centred around quines for knitting, a versatile technique in fabric construction, with both historical significance and recent advances in programmable whole-garment machines for their manufacture. We show some preliminary results of using this language design to create knitted quines, and discuss how this interesting question might be further advanced.

11:30AM - Homotopy Type Theory for Sewn Quilts

Charlotte Clark, Rose Bohrer

This paper introduces PieceWork, an imperative programming language for the construction of designs for sewn quilt, whose semantics are inspired by Homotopy Type Theory. The goals of PieceWork include improving the diversity of sewn designs that can be represented in computational methods, demonstrating a creative application of Homotopy Type Theory, and demonstrating that the craft of quilting is a worthy object of study in programming language theory. We develop an operational semantics, provide a prototype implementation and examples, and provide initial theoretical results, among which development of a type system is preliminary.

12:00 noon - Demo: Sonic Catalog of Rare Diseases

Stephen Taylor, Aditi Kantipuly

This 15-20 minute demo will present our work in progress, a sonic catalog of rare diseases, along with prior work of data-driven music (fixed media) based on genetic sequences from SARS CoV-2. These sonifications are created from spreadsheets, imported into Max and Kyma and processed in various ways.

Performance Evening

Starts at 7:30pm at the Raisbeck Auditorium (2017 Boren Ave); doors open at 7:00pm. This is in the glass building to the right of the Raisbeck Performance Hall. The concert is free and open to the public, but seating may be limited and conference/workshop attendees have preference.

As music overheard, as image made light.

Andrea Mazzariello

In September 2022 I released an album called War Footing. I subsequently built an installation around it, linking sound to the transformation of video in a dedicated listening room. As music overheard, as image made light carries that idea forward. Vocal and keyboard improvisations drive software designed to analyze, filter, sample, and re-articulate them, then recombine and manipulate simple short videos of acrylic-painted color blocks. I wanted to create a sympathetic ear in the software instrument, a system that would encourage me to play and sing intentionally and with care. I also hoped it would support and reward that effort, in both sound and vision, as well as the efforts of listeners more generally.

Keynote: “Perfectly Imperfect: Music, Math and the Keyboard”

Gloria Cheng

As a concert pianist and harpsichordist, I am devoted to extracting expression and meaning out of the silent abstractions of a musical score. Behind the preparation for any performance is my stark wonder at how such innovative, suggestive sonic domains are realized by composers, literally out of thin air. We’ll explore some basic mathematic principles that underlie all musical discourse, with a focus, given time constraints, on Western classical music. With recorded and live examples from the keyboard, we’ll look at Harmony: from the acoustical demonstrations of Pythagoras, through the contentious battles over tunings and temperaments during the Baroque, to the microtonal experiments of modern times in the work of Harry Partch and Iannis Xenakis. And Rhythm: another vast realm of experimentation and invention, how did we get from 2/4 to the polymeters and irrational meters of Conlon Nancarrow and Thomas Adès?

Looking at music through a mathematical lens is one effort out of many to understand—though never explain—how this remarkable acoustic phenomenon can move us to tears.

Solo Piano Performance

Humanity: From Survival to Revival

Cecila Suhr

Humanity: From Survival to Revivalis an award-winning (2023 Best of Competition Award in interactive media and emerging technologies category from the Broadcast Education Association) interactive audio-visual performance work that depicts the transformation of the dystopian state of humanity to utopianism in both the visual and sonic realms by including the faces of live audiences as part of the multimedia performance. Not only do audiences play an interactive survival game via microphone (sound interactive), but the collaborative efforts are meant to represent saving humanity through collective transformation, healing, and renewal. This work will culminate in a participatory experimental performance where audiences and live music improvisation synergistically drive the work’s visual storytelling framework.

Marcin Paczkowski

Performing music is typically associated with various forms of physical movement. This can include playing an instrument, conducting an ensemble, or incorporating dance and dramatic elements in staged productions. With a personal interest in integrating movement into electronic music performances, I have been actively exploring different forms of motion sensing, particularly using accelerometers, within my own musical practice.

I will discuss specific aspects of this technology, with a focus on the practical implications of expressiveness, reliability, and technical solutions. Following the presentation, I will perform my recent piece titled Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed, showcasing how these concepts are applied.

Aurora: Goddess of Dawn

Joy Lee

AURORA: GODDSS OF DAWN is an immersive audiovisual live performance experience inspired by spectacular nature phenomenon “AURORA”, which is also known as the Roman goddess of dawn, who brings light and hope. Through this interactive live performance, I would like to create a fully immersive and fantastical atmosphere with narratives, sounds, interactive visuals programming and spatial audio system so that the audience really can experience the breathtaking beauty of aurora and the magic it creates beyond imagination. Through creating a space where the artist’s imagination merges with cutting-edge technology, I would like to push the boundary of immersive live show experience.

Workshop Organization

Workshop Chair: Mae Milano (University of California, Berkeley)

Program Chair: John Leo (Halfaya Research)

Performance Chair: Kaley Eaton (Cornish College of the Arts)

Publicity Chair: Michael Sperber (Active Group GmbH)

Program Comittee