Adam Stark
Dr. Adam Stark is the co-founder of the interactive arts technology studio Codasign and a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London.
He is interested in developing new ways to create music through interactive technology. In particular, he wants to make electronic music performative and engaging to watch on stage, working with artists and musicians to integrate interactive technologies into their shows and installations.
He has been interested in music since childhood, growing up playing in bands in andaround London. In 2002 he chose to study Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London, spending those years equally divided between learning how to develop technology and writing & performing music with other students. He later went on to study for a MSc in Digital Music Processing at Queen Mary University of London, specialising on audio effects that can automatically detect the tempo of performing musicians.
Staying on at Queen Mary, from 2007 to 2011 he wrote a PhD on using intelligent musical analysis technologies to create new forms ofinteraction in live performance. He explored how these techniques could be used to make audio samples, video, lighting and audio effects respond automatically to musical developments such as chord or tempo changes. He subsequently spent six months working with bands and artists to get this technology into installations and on stage, inviting bands into the studio at Queen Mary and working on an installation at the National Portrait Gallery with artist Di Mainstone.
He continues to explore technologies in live performance in particular as part of six-piece instrumental band, Rumour Cubes.His role in developing the gloves was to expand them as a compositional tool - inviting the wearer to make their own connections between expressive gesture and sound. He and Kelly Snook developed the interface that allows Imogen to map any gestural movement or posture (over 100 per hand) to any sound control device.
At the core of this approach is a recognition that each person who wears the gloves is creatively different, and will want to imprint their own personality on to the music that they make with them. Each wearer can tread their ownmusical path, allowing sound-gesture mappings to be explored easily with inexpressive ones discarded in favour of those that seem natural and inevitable.
The process of developing the gloves was immersive, creative and exploratory and having designed and programmed the granular synthesis capabilities of the Max patch as well as being responsible for the Kinect interfaces and mappings, Adam is an invaluable and efficient developer any team would dream to have.