Zurich Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology

There was 'pop colloquium' today at CCRMA.  The announcement was made just last night, so the audience was small and the duration short.  A handful of folks from the Zurich University of the Arts came by to talk about some research projects happening there now.  The one that especially caught my attention was Daniel Bisig's presentation on Interactive Swarm Orchestra and Immersive Swarm Spaces.  In brief (if I understand correctly), the studies map the results of lifelike swarm simulations (flocking birds, schooling fish, etc) to musical and graphical parameters.  The result is a transposition of the emergent properties of swarms (a single cloud like entity comprised of many individuals) to an artistic framework.  This kind of thing has interested me for a long time, in particular as a way to perform granular synthesis using something other than rand().  They have made C++ libraries available, which I think I'll be checking out some time soon.