A few weeks ago, I participated to the MCM 2015 conference in London:
It was the first time I participated to an MCM conference (I had a paper accepted in MCM 2011, but could not go due to conflicting job schedules), and had two contributions. The first one, in collaboration with Andrée Ehresmann and Moreno Andreatta, was a talk about a categorical generalization of Klumpenhouwer networks, which I presented briefly here. I will write more about it in the future, as the subject is a bit complex. The other contribution was a poster presentation about the analysis of John Cage’s Number Piece 
Here is the IRCAM team, including me, just arrived in St. Pancras:
And here is my poster !
Both contributions are now published in the proceedings in Springer’s LNAI 9110 :
- A Categorical Generalization of Klumpenhouwer Networks, A. Popoff, M. Andreatta, A. Ehresmann, Mathematics and Computation in Music, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 9110, 2015, pp. 303-314
- A Statistical Approach to the Global Structure of John Cage’s Number Piece Five5, A. Popoff, Mathematics and Computation in Music, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 9110, 2015, pp. 231-236
The conference was extremely interesting, and was a good opportunity for me to meet many people from the math/music community. The conference even had concerts (the performance of Guerino Mazzola was… quite a performance ! And Moreno gave us an overview of his compositions using hamiltonian cycles in the Tonnetz…). I think this is a great idea !
London is really a beautiful city, it was a perfect context for such a conference, and for interesting talks with colleagues.
I took an extra day after the conference, as I wanted to visit the city, being there for (almost) the first time. In particular, I absolutely wanted to go to the Tate Modern to see the Rothko paintings. I was not disappointed:
What I wasn’t expecting was that the galleries also had the six “Cage” paintings by Gerhardt Richter.
He painted these while listening to Cage’s music, and being attracted to his ideas. By the way, we have one picture of Cage standing in front of one of Richter’s paintings, though Cage and Richter actually never met.
And here went the week, time to go back to Paris, and to my normal job…
In later posts, I will talk into more details about the two contributions to this conference.
alpof 