About
I am a second year PhD student within the
Interaction, Media, and Communication and
Centre for Digital Music research groups in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, at Queen Mary University of London.
I am supervised by Dr Nick Bryan-Kinns.
Research
The creation, performance and enjoyment of music has always had a strong social component; people make music in groups, perform in front of audiences, and dance together at concerts. However it can be argued that tools for computer based music production are typically designed for single user interaction, and do not adequately support group music-making activities.
My research attempts to address this deficit through the design of novel software interfaces for group music making. I am particularly interested in how people engaged in group music-making activities transition between personal and group-level creativity, and the way group-members are able to maintain awareness of each-others activities during collaboration.
My methodology involves designing and building multi-user computer music software which is then used in controlled experiments with groups of musicians. These experiments are designed to reveal patterns of behaviour in the musicians working together. In turn, these patterns and tendancies can be used to inform the design of new software which is better suited to the task of multi-user computer music-making.
This research will hopefully feed into the design of more effective, interesting and engageing multi-user music software and technologies including collaborative music production environments, live computer based performance software and entertainment systems such as musical computer games. Outside the computer music domain my findings may be applicable to other forms of computer supported creative group activities.
Sensory Threads
I am involved with the Sensory Threads project in collaboration with Proboscis. Sensory Threads is an multi-disciplinary interactive digital artwork and research project. Our first exhibition was back in June 2009, as part of Surface Tension at the London Science Museum's Dana Centre. See below for the official video.
Sensory Threads is a mobile and collective sensing experience, which aims to draw attention to imperceptible phenomena in our everyday environment. Four participants wear portable sensors as they move through the city, and the real-time sensor data is presented as a generative musical soundscape.
My contribution has been the development of the generative music software, which transforms the live sensor readings into an interactive musical soundscape. As well as being pleasant to listen to, the soundscape is designed to provide intuitive and recognisable mappings between the sensor data and audible representations in the music. The soundscape is programmed in SuperCollider.
You can listen to a short sample of the Sensory Threads soundscape, and you can also read about out sound design for Sensory Threads in the paper Sensory Threads: Sonifiying Imperceptible Phenomena in the Wild, presented at the 2009 Sound and Music Computing Conference in Porto, Portugal.
Other Activities
I provide teaching assistance on various undergraduate Computer Science programming modules. These modules introduce students to the core concepts in Java programming and cover more in-depth topics such as object oriented programming and the design of graphical user interfaces.
I am the PhD student representative for the Interaction, Media and Communication research group and I co-ordinate reading sessions for the Interactional Sound and Music Group.
This year I was on the review committee for NIME++ 2010 New Interfaces for Musical Expression, hosted in Sydney. I was also a reviewer for the Sound, Sight, Space and Play postgraduate symposium at De Montfort University Leicester.
Multi-Touch Projects
I am currently involved with supervision for several Undergraduate and Masters projects within the department concerning the use of Multi-Touch technology for musical, collaborative and creative interaction. I was also recently interviewed for a documentary about Multi-Touch technology, which can be viewed below.
Previous Work
My previous projects have included building a musical multi-touch cellular automata, a sound-interactive digital painting (presented at the Newcastle Maker's Faire 2009), and a series of generative soundscapes controlled by digitally augmented poi, which were deployed at various clubs and festivals in the UK back in Summer 2007. These projects, and my other interests, are documented on my personal website http://www.robinfencott.com. Below you can also watch an interview with me at (Re)Actor 2008.
Contact
Robin Fencott
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science,
Queen Mary University of London,
Mile End, London. E1 4NS
Room CS416, extension: 5245
e-mail: robinfencott/www@eecs.qmul.ac.uk