Sound Texture (2007-present)
To work with that element of sound we might call it's "texture", to create work that is itself "textural" is a very contemporary idea. I have spent some time thinking about this phenomenon as an aesthetic interest, as a perceptual phenomenon and as a behavior of sound signals. I am keenly interested in ways to extract, sense, transform or synthesize textural elements, and how to create machines that can identify, parse and re-define textural qualities. My work in creative, listening and reacting machines has largely centered around this aesthetic concern, which has most recently led to my exploration of of the use of nonlinear time/frequency analysis techniques - something that finds its way into other software projects including FILTER and recently GREIS. This recent "experimental signals and systems" work is built around the use of empirical mode decomposition and ideas from systems modeling. This was best articulated in my recent Journal of Acoustical Society of America paper.
Related writings:
Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch and Pauline Oliveros. Sound Texture Recognition through Dynamical Systems Modeling of Empirical Mode Decomposition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 132, issue 4, pp. 2734-2744, 2012.
Doug Van Nort. Instrumental Listening: sonic gesture as design principle. Organised Sound 14(2):177-187, August 2009.
Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch and Pauline Oliveros, Sound Texture Analysis based on a Dynamical Systems Model and Empirical Mode Decomposition, Proceedings of the 129th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, San Francisco, CA, November 2010.
Doug Van Nort, Texture Perception: Signal Modeling and Compositional Approaches, in Proc. of the 2007 Conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC-07), Montreal, QC, August 2007.