FIRST MOVEMENT : Artistic Design

A support environment for audio-related artistic design is described. The rst part of the paper identiies requirements for artistic design support through an analysis of music composition activities, and presents an artistic design system object model adapted from the more conventional engineering design system technology. The second part examines the problems of representation, visualisation and manipulation of audio design objects in an artistic design system. Two research contributions are reviewed: an evaluation of clustering techniques for Group Additive Synthesis representation of sounds; and an evaluation of input devices for navigation in 4-dimensional perceptual spaces of sounds. Motto: \ The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience " 1 PRELUDE Computer science research has focused on support for engineering design activities, such as CAD and software engineering. Important issues are process and object management, and support for cooperative working with multime-dia and multidatabase systems. This work has highlighted inadequacies of current relational database technology, particularly with respect to the representation, visualisation and manipulation of non-textual data objects. The data modelling solutions typically build upon object-oriented and semantic database technologies , with artiicial intelligence solutions to management and design tasks. We see two omissions in the above research. Firstly, there has been relatively little emphasis on the sound dimension of multimedia technology 37]. This is in spite of the importance of audio as a medium for human communications , and as a commodity in a number of specialist applications. Audio-intensive applications exist in the arts and the music, television, cine and video sound industries, and often require large databases of sounds 26, 41]. The second omission is consideration of the needs of artists (as opposed to engineers). We believe that there is an artistic, intuitive and creative aspect to most design activities, even in business and commerce, but which is poorly