Peter D. Manning

• Professor Emeritus at Durham University

A corpus of 1878 recorded works of historic electronic music from 1950–1999 has been collated. This novel data set empowers chronological study of variation over time, and the answering of research questions based on associated annotated metadata, such as art music versus popular music or comparing female and male composers. We describe the challen...

The relationship between technology and creativity in the analysis of electroacoustic music: A comparative study of Riverrun by Barry Truax and Imago by Trevor Wishart The TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), conducted by the three authors of this article and funded by United Kingdom’s AHRC (Arts and Humanities Resear...

The world of music technology embraces a spectrum of creative activities, ranging from the production of permanent, fixed media compositions to works that are created live in concert performance. Between these two polarities many different genres are encountered, including, for example, free improvisation, the diffusion of multi-channel works in la...

This paper introduces the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), funded for 30 months by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, investigating the relationship between technological innovation and creative practice in electroacoustic music of the last 40 years (http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchcentres/t...

The pioneering contributions of Daphne Oram to visual music, notably the construction of her unique synthesiser known as the Oramics Machine during the 1960s, have yet to be fully recognised. The development of this synthesiser, in terms of both the creative objectives that inspired its design and also the functional characteristics of the resultin...

The legacy of Stockhausen's role in developing the art and practice of electroacoustic music is significant, in terms of both the repertory of works he produced for the medium from the early 1950s right up to his death in 2007, and also the supporting documentation he has provided in terms of scores and technical records and his many writings on th...

The birth of electroacoustic music is associated with an era of creativity which is now firmly embedded in the past. As the years advance so the opportunities for evaluating the pioneering years of the medium become increasingly remote. Few can now claim first-hand experience of working with the technologies that shaped and influenced the evolution...

From the earliest experiments with the manipulation of 78-rpm disks during the 1920s, the technology of recording has played a major role in the evolution of electroacoustic music. This has extended not only to the recording and reproduction of materials but also to key components of the compositional process itself. Although such influences have b...

At the 1990 ICMC, this research group presented a paper on a multi-transputer based system [Bailey et al., 1990] and demonstrated a prototype module consisting of 16 transputers on a single card. During the intervening period, ten of these cards have been developed into an operational audio processing network, using 160 x T800 floating-point transp...

This project is a part of our on-going research into real-time audio synthesis using a distributed parallel processing plat form. In this paper we present our successful implementation of a 9-voice real-time granular synthesis on a part of the 160 Transputer network. Granulation and time-stretch of recorded natural sound are described. 1. Introduct...

Durham Music Technology is an ongoing collaboration between the Concurrent Digital Signal Processing group in the School of Engineering and the Electroacoustic Music Studio in the Department of Music at Durham University. In this activity report, we present current research interests in multi-processor architectures for real-time synthesis, VLSI im...

This article provides an insight into the history of interactive graphical control interfaces for computer-based and computer-assisted music applications and identifies a number of the challenges which currently face contemporary designers of new software and hardware tools in this context. By studying some of the key features of this rich and vari...

The composition and performance of music is a plural activity that combines the outcomes of a number of procedures, many of which involve functions that operate in parallel. in terms of sound-synthesis operations, a significant number of generative and signal-processing operations involve a combination of concurrent elements, ranging from the produ...

One of the limitations of real‐time musical instruments is their methods of gestural capture. The normal Man‐Machine Interface is constructed from a series of switches organised as an electronic keyboard, and can typically provide only two or three control dimensions (time struck, velocity of strike and pressure). Conversely, traditional musical in...

The Transputer family of devices designed by Inmos Ltd. are out-performed by contemporary processors designed specifically for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) in most audio-rate applications, but are superior to most DSP chips when interprocessor communication forms a significant part of the workload. The Durham Music Technology Group is interested...

A multi-processor audio computer is described which has been developed within an interdisciplinary group in Music Technology and Audio Engineering at the University of Durham. Aspects of real-time sound generation and control are discussed together with the management of serial MIDI input and output conversion.

2nd Ed, New as Paperback Bibliogr. s. 361-363

controversy over the sociological implications of a world increasingly dominated by the powers of automation. Attitudes towards computing and the arts have also tended to polarize around two points of view, one in favour of exploring the creative benefits of such a marrying of disciplines, the other firmly opposed to any further encroachment of sci...