Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!adm!cmcl2!lanl!nmsu!opus!eiverson From: eiverson@nmsu.edu (Eric Iverson) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: ICMC reaction Message-ID: Date: 25 Sep 90 15:21:37 GMT References: <40170@becker.UUCP> <3456@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Sender: news@NMSU.Edu Distribution: comp Organization: NMSU Computer Science Lines: 69 In-reply-to: rowe@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU's message of 25 Sep 90 00:03:34 GMT In article <3456@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> rowe@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Robert Rowe) writes: > As someone who also attended the recent ICMC, I would first like to say > that I found it to be spectacularly well organized, engaging, informative, > and a pleasure to attend. The concerts were uneven, certainly, but I can't > agree with your characterization of the event as 'idea poor'. I can't agree > first of all because I don't know what you mean. There were five parallel > sessions every afternoon - all of those people certainly believed > themselves to be presenting ideas. We can go through the list: Roger > Dannenberg's beam search beat tracker, the IRCAM workstation, Steim time, > etc. etc. The people from the Composer's Desktop Project would not agree > that so many presentations were concerned only with expensive toys. > I would be interested to know why you find all this work so > dull and boring, and why previous conferences were more "idea rich" in > your estimation. Calling the conference "idea poor" seems to me, as a > critique, to be virtually "content free". I too found the conference to be very well organized and do not mean to suggest that none of the participants knew what they were talking about. The organizers worked tireless to ensure a smoothly run conference and should be commended. However, by "idea poor" I mean to say that there was not a lot presented at the conference that I felt I could actually use. Sure, there were plenty of presentations on new workstations and new performance interfaces, but not much theoretical or algorithmic material which could be used without having to shell out a lot of money on hardware. In fact, (if you want a definition of idea poor) at some of the algorithmic composition talks I went to, it seemed as if the speaker was reluctant to "give his secrets away" which I found to be especially frustrating. Now, while this may be necessary if the speaker is developing a piece of software, it does not make for an intellectually stimulating or "idea rich" environment. I was further frustrated by the parallel (although I'm sure necessary) nature of the conference. By scheduling 2 or 3 algorithmic composition papers simultaneously, the number of potential listeners was split accordingly. This served to reduce any possible interest base while leaving many good papers unheard by a sizeable portion of the participants. Perhaps if all the algorithmic people were all in the same room at the same time, we would have gotten a better idea who each other were. As it stood, I found it very difficult to put names with faces and was forced to miss a few very promising talks. (Thereby reducing the number of "ideas" I was exposed to even further) It would have seemed better to run and algorithmic track in parallel with a DSP track so as to minimize conflict amongst rooms. Similarly, I found the paper tree to be rather sparse, which I did not take as an indicator of a healthy conference. It has been my experience in the past that the paper tree is where some of the most interesting and useful ideas can be found. I did not say that previous ICMC conferences were more "idea rich." I have not been to previous ICMC conferences. However, I have been to AI, Computational Linguistics, and Artificial Life conferences in which I left knowing a lot more than I did when I arrived, and had accumulated several papers that I then incorporated into my own research. With limited exceptions, this did not happen at ICMC. Perhaps ICMC conferences are organized differently than the types of conferences listed above. If so, ICMC suffers from the comparison. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Iverson Internet: eiverson@nmsu.edu Computing Research Lab Box 30001/3CRL Life is something to do when New Mexico State University you can't get to sleep. Las Cruces, NM 88003-0001 -Fran Lebowitz (505) 646-5711