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Showing posts with the label composition

A Contemplative Movement Online Score

Barbara Dilley developed a shared dance/meditation practice called Contemplative Dance Practice – CDP, a "dancer's meditation hall". I've been exploring adaptation of this score for online sharing. The aim is to share meditation and movement across the gap of social distancing. (See below the score description for online meeting logistics and further info about the practices.) (The framing of this score is a work in progress, continuing to change. Revision information is at the bottom.) Score Description The score is divided into sections. At the beginning of each timed section the facilitator says which section it is and arranges for a bell to sound at the beginning and the end of that section. Opening Circle : Time for brief introductions / check-ins and to review the outline of the score (essentially, the bold headers below). Meditation: 15 minutes for stillness . In the original score the participants share sitting meditation. We invite whatever meditat...

An Accumulation Score for Ensemble Movement

Many people are acquainted with the notion of conventional musical scores, which describe what musicians should do to perform a song/piece. No matter how specific the instructions, it can't be perfectly complete. It's always necessary for the person performing the score to make choices of their own - particular emphases and cadences and whatever it is that establishes what the performer expects is best to realize the piece. At the other end of the spectrum, improvised pieces can have scores also. Those scores don't generally use standard notation, but instead describe some parameters of the piece in some way, leaving many aspects up to the participants. This accumulation score is one such movement improvisation score. I don't recall where I first learned about it, nor do I recall the exact instructions I received in the various times I've been exposed to it. The ones below are my own take on it, but I expect they're similar to those that many others have also ...

How and why multiple dispatch is good (Julia vs Python)

I'm really interested in the programming language, Julia , for several reasons, multiple dispatch being prominent among them. (I have some painful contortions in the  Python implementation of my speculative programming project, Spherical. The contortions would not be necessary if Python was implemented with efficient multiple dispatch.) I think   this video   gets at the essence of multiple dispatch's virtue. Unfortunately it's a video, who has time for that? The distilled message is that the multiple dispatch (multimethods) solves   The Expression Problem , and that's not a small thing. It's an oblique way of saying that it's a more comprehensive way to do procedural composition than other approaches, and so fundamentally has greater potential for comprehensibility. Composition is the essence of building stuff, and comprehensibility is the factor that governs collaboration between people - including, for that matter, of a person with themself over time. ...