Day Two: Friday 8 November
10am-12pm: Talk 1
Studio 1, Bathway Theatre
Gaurav Singh Nijjer – The Intimate Dramaturgy of the Machine-Human Voice
Indian theatre-maker and creative technologist Gaurav Singh Nijjer (1994, New Delhi) has been working on integrating live audio technologies on the Indian stage. Through works like ‘Lifeline 99 99’ (2021), an interactive live performance between strangers over a telephone call and ‘Mining Hate’ (2023), an interactive documentary performance that spotlights voices of hate speech and the upcoming ‘Ai-waaz’ (2025) that examines politics of the Indian accent, he has been investigating the shifting nature of the human voice in a post-digital world and its negotiation with machine-generated voices. In this talk-performance, he shares excerpts from his audio-based performance pieces and artistic research that focus on generative voice and sound models, TTS and voice cloning technologies. Situating himself in a postcolonial, non-Western position in the development of these technologies, he questions the inherent burden of the human voices when confronted with those of machines, the politics of speech and accents, the amplification of certain ideologies and the artistic risks contained in the rapid progression of these technologies.
Gaurav Singh Nijjer (1994, New Delhi) is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and multidisciplinary designer from New Delhi, India whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He brings together his experience in design, digital cultures and data to explore new ways of engaging audiences, in the theatre, at home and elsewhere. He is one-half of the Indian theatre collective Kaivalya Plays and works as a freelance artist with collectives in India, United Kingdom and Europe. Gaurav studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, graduating with an MA (Distinction) in Advanced Theatre Practice with the support of the Chevening Scholarship. His recent artistic works include ABSURDO (2023), Mining Hate (2023), Climateprov (2023), Trust Me, It’s a Forward (2023) The Amazing Flabby Breasted Virgin & Other Sordid Tales (2022) and Lifeline 99 99 (2021). As a creative technologist, his work often brings live audio, coding, live camera and video, digital platforms, APIs, automations and other digital technologies and tools onto the stage. As a former German Chancellor Fellows, he undertook artistic research into digital and hybrid performances with the Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll. He has previously received the Parivartan Artistic Research grant to investigate artificial intelligence on the Indian stage, the AI to Amplify Fellowship by Goethe Institut, the Stage Jame #4 grant by Schaubude Berlin, the Befantastic AI Arts Fellowship, C3: Creativity, Codes and Community and other grants to support his work in technology in theatre. Read more about his work on https://www.gauravnijjer.com
Simon Connor – Oden: An alternate, integrated approach to composing audiovisual landscapes
This artist’s talk will uncover the compositional process for Oden, an immersive and intimate audio-visual installation of landscape. Oden is collaborative project between composer/sound artist Simon Connor and filmmaker Andrew Brooks; a study and reimagination of Odin’s Gully, located in the evocative landscape of the Peak District, UK. Connor and Brooks gathered material from this unique site throughout the seasons, filming and field recording using spatial audio techniques. The sound of Oden is informed by an ‘integrated’ approach to the soundtrack; weaving together environmental sound, musical instrumentation, and sound design, in a reciprocal arrangement. This is combined with a contemplative filmmaking style, inspired by works of slow cinema, ecocinema and landscape film.
This talk uncovers the compositional strategies of Oden, including the use of field recordings to directly inform the timbre, texture, gesture, and spatialisation of musical instrumentation, and techniques used to yield a multimodal perception of place. This compostional approach intends for musical instrumentation to interact and illuminate the intricacies of environmental sound, so that music is composed with the landscape, rather than solely about the landscape.
Simon Connor is a composer and sound artist based in Manchester UK. He is also a practice-based researcher and lecturer in Music Technology at the University of Salford. Simon’s creative practice informs his recently awarded PhD research, undertaken at the University of Huddersfield. This research explores new methods for composing landscape, via the integration of field recordings, musical instrumentation, sound design and moving image. Simon’s work has been featured on BBC Radio 3, and collaborative film projects have been screened/performed internationally, including CPH DOX (CPH), DOKU Arts Festival (DE), FILAF International Art Book and Film Festival (FR), Alte Schmiede (AT) Flatpack Festival (UK), the ICA London (UK). For more information see https://simonconnor.co.uk
Edmar Soria – Deep Learning techniques for spatial sound localization
Spatial sound localization, the ability to determine the direction and distance of sound sources, is a fundamental capability of the human auditory system and has numerous applications in fields such as robotics, virtual reality, and audio-based surveillance and is extensively used directly or indirectly by composers and sound artists in order to explore and develop immersive sound aesthetic experiences. Recent advancements in deep learning have shown promising results in improving the accuracy and robustness of spatial sound localization, offering a potential solution to the challenges faced by traditional methods.
Existing approaches to spatial sound localization have typically relied on signal processing techniques such as beamforming, subspace methods, and sampling-based methods (Jenrungrot et al., 2020). While these methods have demonstrated reasonable performance, they can be sensitive to environmental factors and require careful parameter tuning. The advent of deep learning, however, has opened up new possibilities for more robust and accurate sound localization. Deep learning models, with their ability to learn complex, non-linear mappings from large datasets, have the potential to capture the nuances of spatial sound cues and overcome the limitations of traditional methods. These approaches have shown also that deep neural networks can learn to map acoustic features to spatial locations, and that the incorporation of visual information can further improve the performance of these systems.(Bizley & Cohen, 2013).
As the field of deep learning continues to evolve, we can expect to see further advancements in spatial sound localization, with the potential for real-world applications in areas such as robotics virtual reality, smart home technologies and of course artistic and creative tasks.
Possibilities to perform reverse engineering and analysis of sound spatialization from direct audio sources, could enable alternative and new ways of research and artistic exploration of multichannel immersive audio experiences expanding horizons not only in electroacoustic music itself but in soun art practices in general. In this talk, there will be presented and explained some of the aforementioned deep learning techniques followed by a discussion of the implications both technical and aesthetic for the context of multichannel music.
PhD. and M.Sc. in Music Technology from UNAM, a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional and an M.Sc. in Applied Economics from UNAM. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and artificial intelligence at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas, UNAM and is currently a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (FONCA, 2024-2027). He was head of the PIATS Research Area (Practice as Research in Art, Transdiscipline and Sound) of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities at UAM-Lerma (2017-2023) and has served as a research professor in Digital Art within that same institution.
Winner of the Acousmonium INA GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicale) Contest 2016 (France-Mexico), he also obtained the 3rd place in the Xenakis Electroacosutic Music Contest 2023 (Greece). Winner of the SONOM 2014 contest (International Festival of Sound Art), finalist of the “Concours International de Composition Electroacoustique SIME 2018” (Lille, France) and of the Programs, Creadores Escénicos 2018 (FONCA, Mexico), Resiliencias Sonoras-Composición Electroacústica 2020 (UNAM Mexico) and Ecos Sonoros 2022 (Secretaría de Cultura, Mexico).
He has done artistic residencies in two of the most important acousmatic music studios in the world: Musique & Recherches (Belgium) and INA GRM (Paris, France). He has completed residencies in electroacoustic music composition and digital art at DXArts (Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington), the Conservatory of Belo Horizonte-Brazil (under the direction of composer Joao Pedro Oliveira), and CMMAS (Morelia, Mexico). He has been recognized internationally through official commissions for multimedia compositions and performances by Difrazzioni Festival 2016 (Florence, Italy), Multiphonies GRM 2017 (France) and New York University Music Ensemble (2017), as well as in Digital Art Biennials (UK and Colombia, both in 2020). His works include multichannel electroacoustic music, digital art (3D procedural modeling/animation), experimental music and music for contemporary dance and his works have been selected and presented in several international forums in Europe, USA, Asia and Latin America.
As an academic researcher he is a member of SNI-CONACyT (Sistema Nacional de Investigadores) and his areas of interest and work include spatiality/localization of sound (acoustics/psychoacoustics), 3D immersive sound, data visualization/sonification, applications of artificial intelligence to digital art, philosophy of AI and topics of mathematics applied to art, among others and has several refereed publications in this regard. He has published so far, three books as author and two as co-coordinator and author. He is Director and founder of the International Colloquium Espacio Inmersividad, which has so far 3 issues (2018-2019-2020) and Desfases, Festival Inmersivo de Producción Multimedia (2021-2022).