Some notes towards a project I’d like to do. I think turning our paths through the world into collaborative auditory maps would be a wonderful thing.

Exploring links between music and mathematics in a networked mobile system

This project would develop software capable of analysing the positions of a group of learners relative to each other and streaming music generated computationally using the qualities of the group’s shape back to each learner, allowing members of the group to receive auditory feedback on the shape of the group, and to manipulate the audio stream through positioning their bodies differently in space.

For example, five learners, each with a mobile device capable of broadcasting its location (through GPS, network triangulation or similar), might be the vertices of a five-sided polygon, as imagined from above. Qualities of this shape – the interior angles, the length of the sides, the regularity of the shape, the surface area it covers, the length of time the shape has persisted – could map to musical features – dynamics, frequency range, degree of polyphony, range of instruments, different thematic material, degree of harmony – that could be used by software in generating a musical response.

The software would be designed to enable the precise nature of the correspondence between geometric quality and musical feature to be set by users themselves, allowing learners and teachers to explore the connections between the shapes made in space and the ways they can be analysed to an appropriate degree of complexity, and to represent the relationships between shape and harmony in the way they feel is most appropriate. Regular shapes might lead to more harmonious music; shapes sustained for a longer period might be louder than those that persist only briefly; serendipitous figures might be rewarded with specially-chosen vocal samples; learners might be guided towards target shapes through more attractive or moving musical forms; basic musical rules might be used to chart the stochastic movements of students travelling home, producing auditory geographies of familiar territories: a school song might be written by the movements of a victorious sports team during their final match.

The pedagogic value of this system might lie primarily in the capacity for supporting cross-curricular exploration, the participatory design of learning activities by learners themselves and the opportunities it presents for learning across age groups, with more able or older students preparing geo-acoustic systems for younger students to experience, or technologically more fluent students realising other students’ ideas about the relationships between shape and music.

Additionally, from a research perspective, the embodied nature of learners’ interactions within the geo-acoustic system is modally distinct from more usual forms of interaction with these subjects and presents an interesting and novel set of questions around the ways in which intellectual understanding relates to physical bodies, as well as being an opportunity to foreground current issues in education debates, not least perhaps the opportunity to explore more rigorously popular notions of “kinaesthetic intelligence” and to promote physical activity within an educational context. The nature of the activities designed by teachers and learners might well resonate with current interest in the potential educational value of pervasive and augmented reality gaming.

Despite this interdisciplinary focus, there are a number of traditional subject areas addressed in the development and use of such software. The following list is indicative rather than comprehensive.

• Geometry — understanding the ways in which practical geometry abstracts shape from the physical world and the language mathematicians use to describe geometric shapes and relationships
• Acoustic theory — models of synthesis, tone and timbre
• Music — composition, generative approaches to music creation, music theory
• Computer science — understanding networks, representing and manipulating variables using programming languages
• Psychology of perception — making sense of the world through auditory cues, proprioception and mental schemata
• History of science — Pythogarean notions of order and harmony, and how far these relate to current ideas about the way we understand the natural world to be ordered

Additionally, exploring the possible activities that this software might support could lead to explorations of the ways in which information can be presented through sound (sonification) and the various groups in society who might find this approach to sharing information about their environment beneficial, as well as supporting conversations about sound design in media, noise pollution, the ethics of location-aware software and the ways in which people’s individual actions contribute to larger effects.

Update: we’re all friends again, and it’s very likely it was entirely in my head. But I think the things below still puzzle me.

I’m skirting an argument with a prominent neuroscientist, in which I feel both of us are slightly puzzled that the other one shows signs of thinking less respectably than we might have thought at first meeting, and I think it comes down to the language we use. Of course it does, you say, and you’re right to point out the triviality of my insight, but it’s important to me to understand exactly where our individual assumptions about the world are being reflected in our speech, and you are not even real. So I am going to try and collect some examples of language that troubles me — that’s all, just causes me concern — so that I stand a chance of understanding our miscommunication and avoiding what would be a disagreeable falling-out, one that would damage me professionally far more than it would them.

The tendency of neuroscientists to use the word “learning” where other people might say “recall” is pretty widely acknowledged, I think (and came up again today, with a speaker from a neuro background).

One of the articles sent to me by the academic first referrred to uses phrases like “…the part of the brain responsible for…” (not going to quote for Google reasons), and this bothers me: using the word “responsible” implies agency, and this seems to indicate some assumptions about identity, mind and body, causality and so on that are, to my knowledge, still reckoned as unresolved by most people who have given it some thought. Far better to stick to the positivist roots and say “..the part of the brain where we see a certain kind of activity when we see someone display this behaviour”.

Actually, this is the kind of things that got Susan Greenfield into trouble at her recent book launch: a crowd of philosophers and theologians and psychologists gently (for the most part) pointing out that for a long time other people have been thinking about aspects of mind and behaviour that neuroscience has only just begun to recognise, and that perhaps she ought to stick to doing very good neuroscience instead of very bad philosophy.

I think it’s starting to look as though my problem lies with what I percieve to be a lack of self-awareness on the part of some neuroscientists, in that the language they use reveals assumptions about the world that for them are unchallenged, and yet to those who have given them a little more thought are far from certain. When they talk about the brain and their experimental data I am enthralled and fascinated: when they extrapolate naively into domains that have been much more thoroughly examined by others they do so with no respect for the traditions of thought that might teach them to be less confident in their generalisations.

Probably better I put that here than in an email. To be continued, I think: there’s something big here to be given more thought.

Check me out!

I’m going to Hack Day!

So I guess I should start planning now. Anyone else going?

I’m on the fifth floor of the National Library in Singapore, in a room with Ian Livingstone, Caryl Shaw, John Buchanan and a whole bunch of interesting researchers and developers, taking a break from an intensive day of thinking about a whole load of different projects – mobile games, games to help teach film language, a campus-wide ARG making use of ad-hoc bluetooth networks and a whole load of other projects. I took a break from that last sentence to talk to someone from animationxpress.com and read about the New Games Movement before going for karaoke and then coming back for a second day of talks ad conversations, including a chat with Caryl from EA about Spore, a new game she’s working on, and an introduction to ACID.

I’d meant to write everything up here as soon as it happened, but to be honest, my brain’s full. It’s been overstimulating. Which is always better than boring.

Communication over here is something I’m finding much less straightforward than I thought it might be – apparently, there’s more to it than just memorising all the HSBC ads. Although I knew about Singlish, and was looking forward to finding out more about it, everything I’d read suggested that, in the kind of contexts I was going to find myself, what we laughingly call Standard English would be in use.

Of course, an idea this welcome can be hard to let go of, and it’s taken me a while to stop thinking that people are trying to speak the same language as me, just because they say they are. In most of my meetings so far there’s been a moment where I start to wonder if I’ve been passing out every few minutes, fugueing violently in a kind of delayed jetlag, consequently missing the information that would make the last few sentences comprehensible. My colleagues here are used to looking at me now in complete bewilderment as I try to make a link between sentences that come after one another but are otherwise utterly unconnected.

So I’m doing some homework. I bought a copy of “English in Singapore” (Ling & Brown, 2005), which is recommended by Anthea Fraser Gupta. (Brown, with Chia Boh Peng, considered whether Estuary English might be an alternative to RP as a teaching model: he’s published hugely, according to google, but so far this is my favourite).

For more references, Roles and Impact of English as a Global Language (Doms, 2003) seems useful, as does this summary from David Deterding (also from the English Language & Literature department at NIE). I’m looking out for English as a Global Language by David Crystal, mainly because I loved Stories of English. I might leave the SAAL for the time being.

This whole are of new Englishes is fascinating : having only encountered the idea in the context of emerging discourses online, discovering its relevance offline at first-hand can’t help but be eye-opening. Imagine that, offline life being fascinating.

Legitimising these new forms of English is a direct challenge to the ethos of the Speak Good English movement, which is either a well-meaning attempt to make sure people from Singapore can be understood outside the immediate area, or “a triumph of the relentless, hegemonic forces of globalization”. Regardless of whether it’s a reactionary echo of colonial orientalism, or a practical effort to help Singaporeans continue to take over the world, what’s interesting to me is that the kinds of speech it identifies as not being “good English” aren’t the bits that cause me such confusion. There are lots of kinds of Singapore English, and I’m fine with Singapore Colloquial English, or at least, I understand why I don’t understand it. My confusion comes from Standard Singapore English. People saying “lah” to intensify something is easy to understand – it’s being kindly asked to discuss on something all the time that gets to me. I don’t know what is that.