RESEARCH

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student and MEXT scholar in the Interactive Intelligent Systems Laboratory (https://iis-lab.org) at The University of Tokyo. I completed my master's research on timbre exploration interfaces for synthesizers and electronic music. My current research is on the relationship between social media use, self-regulation, and psychological well-being. More broadly, my research interests include: interfaces for synthesizers and electronic music creation, the social impacts of online communication, virtual reality and virtual worlds, and cultural, media, and gender studies.

My CV

Research Projects

SoundTraveller: Interactive Timbre Exploration Support for Sound Authoring with Synthesizers

Timbre exploration and creation are key tasks in electronic music composition. Modern synthesizers can produce thousands of unique timbres, but this complexity hinders musicians’ ability to explore these timbres effectively. We developed SoundTraveller, an interactive timbre exploration system aimed at fostering electronic musicians’ creative processes. SoundTraveller allows the user to explore the timbral space using two modes: evolutionary and morphing, with which they can generate hundreds of unique timbres without the need to edit individual parameters. By abstracting away from technical parameters and providing flexible timbre explorations, SoundTraveller offers users new and inspiring ways of exploring timbre, supporting their creativity in electronic music composition. But our results also suggest that the entangled nature of SoundTraveller shifted the balance of agency between the user and system, pointing towards the complex nature of shared agency in creativity support systems.

Publications

First Author

SoundTraveller: Exploring Abstraction and Entanglement in Timbre Creation Interfaces for Synthesizers
Zefan Sramek, Arissa J. Sato, Zhongyi Zhou, Simo Hosio, and Koji Yatani. ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2023.

Interactive Timbre Exploration Support for Sound Authoring with Synthesizers
Zefan Sramek, Koji Yatani. New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2021.

シンセサイザを用いた音の創作に向けたインタラクティブな音色探索支援
Zefan Sramek, 矢谷浩司. 情報処理学会第131回音楽情報科学研究会.

Supporting Author

Groupnamics: Designing an Interface for Overviewing and Managing Parallel Group Discussions in an Online Classroom
Arissa J. Sato, Zefan Sramek, Koji Yatani. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2023.

Bio

Zefan K.G. Sramek was born in 1994 in Toronto, Canada. In 2018 he received his Bachelor's of Applied Science in Integrated Engineering with distinction and a minor in philosophy from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, where he worked with Dr. Mieszko Lis, as well as in the SPIN Lab under Dr. Karon MacLean. During his degree he also completed a 1-year research internship at the Honda Research Institute Japan under Dr. Shigeaki Nishina, in Wakoshi, Saitama, Japan. In 2019 he became a recipient of the Japanese Government MEXT Scholarship, and joined the Interactive Intelligent Systems Laboratory (https://iis-lab.org) led by Dr. Koji Yatani (http://yatani.jp) at The University of Tokyo. In 2021 he received his Master of Engineering degree from The University of Tokyo. His master's research was on timbre exploration interfaces for synthesizers and electronic music. As of Fall 2021, he is undertaking his doctoral research at the University of Tokyo. He is also an experienced electronic music producer and visual artist.

Contact

Contact me online at:

zefanS@iis-lab.org

Or write to:

Zefan Sramek
〒113-8654
Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Hongo 7-3-1
The University of Tokyo
Faculty of Engineering Blgd. 2, 10F, Room 101C2
Japan