Jeffrey Hass
Professor of Music and Director
Center for Electronic & Computer Music, Jacobs School of Music
Project: "A Three-Dimensional Sound and Projection Mapping Installation"
Jeffrey Hass composes music for electronics combined with large and small acoustic ensembles, video and dance. His current work involves design of interactive wireless sensor systems for performers and dancers. His music, dance and video works have been premiered at International Computer Music Conferences, SEAMUS, Australasian Computer Music Conference, Pixilerations, Spark Festival, American College Dance Festival, the World Dance Alliance and many more. He has also delivered papers at the New Interfaces in Musical Expression Conference, Toronto Electroacoustic Conference and several dance festivals.
During this project, Professor Hass will partner with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) to create a three-dimensional audio-video work for exhibit as a gallery installation, an integrated sonic sculpture, or a beginning to end composition. Professor Hass will project three-dimensional video images on irregularly shaped surfaces coated in projection-grade paint (projection mapping) in a way that fully covers them so they may be viewed in 360˚. At the same time he will use a cutting-edge spatializing technique (ambisonics) to create three-dimensional sound by equally diffusing sources of composed electronic music above and below the plane of the listeners. By using software tools to map 3D sound and 3D visual images onto one another, music and video will be uniquely conceived as both aural and visual at the same time (that is, as single artistic gestures) in a revolutionary way that creates a totally immersive experience for audience members.
Stacie King
Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor
IU Anthropology Department
Project: “A 3D Digital Collection and Virtual Exhibit for Santa Ana Tavela’s Community Museum”
"My research focuses on the peoples of Oaxaca, Mexico between 1500 B.C. to the present. I am particularly interested in how people in the past negotiated their place in the social, political, and economic world around them. I am interested in the ways that people figure out and creatively construct who they are, how they materially mark themselves in different social settings, and how they experience life as people with multiple overlapping and intersecting social identities."
During this project, Professor King will partner with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) to evaluate 3D imaging and scanning software programs, as well as web platforms for 3D object display, with the goal of determining the technologies best suited to developing a virtual exhibit space for the Santa Ana Tavela Community Museum in Oaxaca, Mexico. Professor King recently submitted a Level II NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up grant to produce a virtual exhibit of 3D archeological artifacts depicting the cultural heritage and history of the Santa Ana Tavela, and to develop a low-cost flexible digital museum protocol for communities with limited resources. Her ultimate goal is to empower local people in Santa Ana Tavela to manage and control their own virtual museum.
Ruth Stone
Laura Boulton Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Project: "Ebola in Town": Critical Musical Connections in Liberian Communities during the 2014 Ebola Crisis in West Africa
In February 2015, Stone received an Indiana University Collaborative Research and Creative Activity Funding Award for her project "Ebola in Town": Critical Musical Connections in Liberian Communities during the 2014 Ebola Crisis in West Africa. During this project Professor Stone will partner with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) to segment, annotate, and analyze digital video data using the Annotators’ Workbench (AWB) software pioneered and developed by the EVIA Digital Archive (www.eviada.org), a project under IDAH and the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM).
Professor Stone will conduct ethnographic research to study how local Kpelle performers and audience members utilize indigenous music and the performing arts to unite and rebuild communities devastated by the ongoing Ebola epidemic. She will examine how the Kpelle use everyday expressions of music sound and motion to connect, and at the same time, negotiate ways of avoiding contracting the deadly virus as they navigate a bounded landscape in which physical contact is potentially lethal. Using the qualitative methods and techniques common in ethnomusicological research (fieldnotes, participant observation, playback interviews, video recordings, transcriptions) she will forge new paths of knowledge at the intersection of music and health. With the AWB software she will carry out an in-depth analysis of her digital video fieldwork recordings of dance, movement, gesture, and musical patterns, and will write descriptive annotations that explore how, in a climate of fear of contact, Kpelle musicians use music as a critical and vital tool of connection to creatively cooperate, and to intelligently comment on this overwhelming crisis.
This project will build on her previous research on musical performance during the Liberian civil war crisis and post-crisis period, and will complement her annotated video collection of Kpelle musical events deposited in our EVIA digital archive. The completed project will be peer-reviewed and made available online through the EVIA search and browse application (www.media.eviada.org) The work carried out under the CRCAF will also form the basis of a peer-reviewed article, and will lay the groundwork for collaborating with IDAH on an external funding application to expand the scope and depth of the project, and further explore how communities use the arts to facilitate interactions, construct networks, and provide emotional paths through conflict.