Not quite…as I write this on New Year’s Eve, I’m taking a break from writing the mammoth final report for the ERC, and uploading new videos for the various pieces that came out of NESS. Indeed, beyond this report, which will definitely not be finished by midnight, a lot of NESS activities will continue into the new year.

We’ll still be working with musicians to create new pieces of music…so if you’re a musician, and interested in what you’ve heard in these pages, don’t hesitate to contact us! We still have the multichannel research space available in at least the immediate future. There are still vast unexplored worlds of sounds waiting to be mined in the existing codes.

We’ll be developing the room acoustics modelling system into a commercialisable product, through ERC Proof of Concept funding for a project called WRAM (Wave-based Room Acoustics Modeling).

And, of course, we’ll be looking at those NESS codes which could potentially be real time, and see if we can turn them into viable real-time musical instruments.

Thinking back to 2012, when the project started (or, further, to 2010, when I wrote the proposal) is almost like an anthropological study. We had no 3D codes, no collision models, no bowed string models, and only tiny experience with CUDA. All pieces were written using Matlab! The team that came together for NESS was truly superb. Thanks to the entire NESS team, including the visiting composers, for the massive amount of work you all did. I hope that it’s been fun for you…it certainly was for me.

See you all in the afterlife…