Month: October 2019

Allegra Shorto, Khora Contemporary

Immersive technologies are changing the nature of what an artwork is and how it is valued. Technological developments are beginning to blue the boundaries between virtual and physical space. Amidst this shifting landscape Khora Contemporary is rethinking the value of an artwork in a market that seems to increasingly value experience over possession.

Biography

Allegra Shorto is Art Director of Khora Contemporary and is based between London and Copenhagen. Her work focuses on establishing Virtual Reality as a widely applied medium within the arts, through collaborations with artists and institutions working with new digital technologies. Allegra has a background in contemporary art curation and holds a degree in History of Art from the University of Cambridge.

Aki Pasoulas, University of Kent

This paper explores a compositional method based on the interpretation of information received through all senses as gestural and textural activity in the aural domain; it attempts to map our experiences from a number of systems (visual, gustatory, olfactory and haptic environments) to another (aural space). The paper starts from the method I followed when creating my latest composition, as a case study for this approach. For the making of my piece I used information collected through multisensory walks, including environmental recordings and sensory maps as starting points to create layers of sound material. The piece does not employ data sonification digital processes, but instead, it conveys sensory information from the immediate environment as either sonic gestures or textures. Starting from Smalley’s motion and growth processes, I approached my experiences as shapes developing in time. Gesture implies a motion, a temporal structure, whereas texture implies a consistency, the feel and appearance of something. The construction of the piece involved mapping sensory experiences on a relative timeline on separate soundmaps, smellmaps, touchmaps, tastemaps and sightmaps. Composite layers of that information were combined with recognisable sounds from the environmental recordings I made during the walks, to form musically meaningful structures. For example, according to my interpretation, a smell that starts strong and disappears slowly can be represented by a relatively fast attack that gives rise to a texture which gradually disintegrates and disappears; whereas grazing in a passing gesture bristles of tall cereal crops can be translated into thin high-frequency spectral lines appearing and disappearing over lower-frequency oscillating figures. Transferring experiences between senses followed a loose interpretation in my recent piece, but focusing on constructing more detailed maps will overcome this tendency. Similar structural processes can be followed for all senses, where possible, which are combined to create polyphonic structures that eventually form larger sections in a composition. In addition, my composition explores interrelationships between music, time perception, memory and the listening environment, as it is based on a number of multisensory walks with senses acting on different timescales. Ultimately, the composition becomes an imaginary soundscape approached in a non-linear way, in the sense that no story is unfolding but rather, it is a presentation of snippets of experiences about particular spaces, places and times, based on a specific theme. Evidently, listeners will not relive the experiences I had through the multisensory walks, as the composition does not replicate them. Instead, this process allows us to use creatively information that we receive from other senses, often neglected when thinking about sound.

Biography

Aki Pasoulas is an electroacoustic composer, Director of Education and the Director of MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre) at the University of Kent. He also taught at universities in London including City, Middlesex, and the University of the Arts, and he holds a PhD on timescale perception in electroacoustic music. His research interests include acousmatic music, time perception in relation to music, psychoacoustics and sound perception, spatial sound, acoustic communication, and soundscape ecology especially in relation to listening psychology. He has written for instruments, found objects, voice, recorded and electronic sound, composed music for the theatre and for short animation films, and organised and performed with many ensembles. His scholarly and music works are published through EMI/KPM, ICMA, Sonos Localia, HELMCA, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Aki received honourable mentions at international competitions, and his music is continuously selected and performed at key events worldwide.

(http://www.aki-pasoulas.co.uk)

René Idrovo, University of York

Technological advances have always had an impact on the development of new audio-visual aesthetics. Recently, exploiting the spatial capabilities of immersive sound technology in the form of Dolby Atmos, Alfonso Cuarón introduced in Gravity (2013) an innovative sound design approach that enhances the illusion of ‘presence’ in the space of the diegesis by always maintaining a coherent, realistic, and immersive representation of a given point-of-audition. Such sonic strategy – which we have termed immersive point-of-audition – provides a three-dimensional representation of the filmic space, localising sound effects, music, and dialogue in accordance to the position of the sources within the diegesis. In this paper, we introduce the definition and main characteristics of this emergent sound design approach, and using Gravity as an illustrative example, we argue that it has the potential of facilitating the processes of transportation and identification in cinema.

Biography

René Idrovo is an emergent filmmaker and scholar. He is a lecturer in sound related subjects at Universidad UTE, Ecuador; and a Ph.D. Researcher in Film and Television at University of York, UK. His research studies the impact of sound technology in the generation of new audio-visual aesthetics, focusing on the relations that exist between realism, the sonic space, and the immersive experience in cinema. His work has been published in academic journals in Latin America, United Kingdom and Europe. As part of the Ecuadorian National Scholarship Programme, he has been selected among a large number of applicants to become one of the leaders that shall contribute to the development of the country’s film and television.

Adam Melvin and Brian Bridges

Cinema’s audiovisual language is often treated in terms of distinct planes of image and sound, with the soundtrack itself comprising multiple modes ranging from established musical structures to more extensively textural sound design, much of which may serve affective framing functions rather than conforming to a simple diegetic/non–diegetic dichotomy. Some authors have sought to elucidate the mechanisms and functions of how sound and image may influence each other, most notably Chion’s (1990) audiovisual contract. Whilst treating music and sound design as separate may provide for some specificity within our analytical frameworks, the acoustic circumstances of many contemporary soundtracks provide examples in which sound texture, gesture and timbre combine to delineate spatial attributes and territories. Furthermore, commentary relating to the haptic score (Mera, 2016) has highlighted imperatives around considering music and sound design in integrated contexts (Kulezic-Wilson, 2019). This paper will seek to develop the approach Mark S. Ward (2015:166) proposes for considering the cinematic soundtrack via a spatiotemporal contract based upon concepts from embodied cognition, most specifically, the image schema theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1999), placing particular emphasis on the potential for audio to articulate and structure perceptual space. It will seek to explore aspects of cross–modal integration between both music and sound design and sound/music and the image via spatiotemporal concepts and models derived from image schema theory, with a particular emphasis on embodied spatial models of timbre, elaborating upon the timbre–space models of Grey (1977) through the application of embodied concepts; see Roddy and Bridges (2018). In more integrated soundtracks, spatial perspective, via timbral articulations, can be seen to grow in importance beyond the simple delineation of mental/internal and physical/external action. Timbral gestures are seen to provide the communication channels facilitating cross–talk between axes of spatial (delineation/diffusion) and temporal (integration/disintegration) structures. As the soundtrack, in this context, is considered primarily in terms of the implications of its auditory materiality, the visual territories are reinforced or undercut with affective auditory planes whose syntax and structure seems to function in relation to models from embodied cognition. Cinema, as a multimodal, audiovisual ‘language’, is thus a contract between space and time via mechanisms and frames from embodiment. Embodied models of timbre within the soundtrack can therefore provide one means by which the soundtrack can be treated in an integrated manner, both in its own right, and in relation to the visual.

References Chion, M. (1990) trans. Gorbman. C. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia Univ. Press, New York Grey, J.M. (1977) Multidimensional perceptual scaling of musical timbres. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 61(5):1270-1277 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. New york: Basic Books. Kulezic-Wilson, D. (2019) Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press Mera, M. (2016) ‘Materializing Film Music’, in Cooke, M. and Ford. F. (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Film Music. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp.157-172 Roddy, S & Bridges, B. (2018) Sound, Ecological Affordances and Embodied Mappings in Auditory Display. In: M Filimowicz & V Tzankova (eds), New Directions in Third Wave Human–Computer Interaction. 1 edn, vol. 2, Human–Computer Interaction Series, Basel, Switzerland, pp. 231-258. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73374-6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73374-6 Ward, M. (2015) ‘Art in Noise: An Embodied Simulation Account of Cinematic Sound Design’. In: Coëgenarts, M and Kravanja, P. (eds) Embodied Cognition and Cinema, Leuven University Press, pp.155-186

Biography

Adam Melvin is a composer and lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music at Ulster University, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland. A great deal of both his compositional and research practice is concerned with interrogating the relationship between music, sound, site and the visual arts, particularly moving image. He has received numerous international performances and broadcasts of his music; his research has been published in The Soundtrack, Short Film Studies (Intellect) and in the Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media. He is a member of Dublin’s Spatial Music Collective.

Brian Bridges is a composer and lecturer based in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland, where he lectures in music technology at Ulster University and is Research Director for music and associated subjects. He is the current president of ISSTA (the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association) and serves on the editorial board of Interference: a Journal of Audio Culture. Much of his work is inspired by connections between perceptual processes, creative practices and technologies, and his creative output includes sound–based installations, audiovisual pieces and electroacoustic and acoustic composition, including microtonal and spatial music. He is a member of the Spatial Music Collective and is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre.