Day Two: Friday 8 November
2-4pm: Talk 2
Studio 1, Bathway Theatre
Sara Hamdy – Sonic Spaces Cairo archive
As an artist with a deep passion for sound and visual creativity, my aspiration to attend The SOUND/IMAGE festival is driven by a desire to immerse myself in a community that celebrates innovation and collaboration. Despite any challenges that may prevent me from physically being present, I am eager to engage with this vibrant network of artists and thinkers in any way possible.
Through my work, I seek to explore the intersection of sound and archive, pushing boundaries and challenging conventional norms. The opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals at the festival holds the promise of inspiration, learning, and growth. While I may not be able to attend in person, I am committed to actively participating and contributing to the artistic dialogue that defines this community.
Sara Hamdy: I’m a multidisciplinary artist and curator who is interested in sound research and archiving. My artistic endeavors revolve around sound exploration as a contemporary art form in both the public and private spheres, utilizing mediums such as installations, texts, sounds, drawings, participatory activities, and pedagogical performative acts and situations. In 2020, I established the “Sonic Spaces” project, an online archival platform that aims to document and advance sound studies and creative sonic creations in Egypt. My recent artworks explore how architecture and space impact our mental processes. I collaborate with locations such as mental health facilities and several archaeological sites in Egypt, investigating communication, language, the linearity of space, and time. Through this exploration, I aim to uncover the underlying dynamics of both tangible and intangible systems, imagining unique spaces and emphasizing the subjective aspects of science and architecture. As a curator and sound researcher, my latest endeavor, the “Ecological Bodies, Empirical Sounds” program, interacts with contemporary critical and theoretical frameworks. It seeks to facilitate discussions and investigations among artists and researchers, enhancing comprehension of the intricate interplay between sound, surroundings, and human encounters. By scrutinizing the role of sound in shaping our environment, the program advocates for spatial justice.
Ann Stimson and Marc Ainger – The SNAP Concerts – Creating a Networked Multiverse of Immersive Mediated Spaces
Multichannel, immersive audio is a powerful part of live electronic music concerts. The SNAP concerts joined live “in-person” performers with remote performers from across the globe, performing for a live “in-person” audience and an audience that could join from anywhere (ie, live-streamed on the web), each with it’s own related ambisonic immersive sound environment. The result was a web of inter-related-yet-unique, sonic and visual immersive environments that crossed barriers of space and time.
The SNAP concerts (Sonic Network Arts Project), were a series of unique 360 degree immersive multichannel hybrid concerts, the first of which took place in the Future Lab at mdw Vienna. These were hybrid concerts in that four of the performers were in person in the concert hall, while several others were remote performers, joining the ensemble from California (CCRMA), Minnesota (Zeitgeist), Berlin (TU), and Belgium (the Orpheus Institute).
In each case, immersive audio played a major role in the concerts, taking place on multiple levels:
(1) The concert halls each had 24X4 speakers, allowing for ambisonic placement and movement of sources
(2)The performers in the concert hall each centered their sounds in a stereo space, but were also able to move their sound throughout the space as part of their performance
(3) Each of the remote performers entered the concert hall with their own stereo audio feed. These stereo sources were processed with ambisonics and placed and mixed within the concert space. This allowed for a unified sound field for the remote and in-person performers,
(4) Each of the remote performers received a binaural mix of the resultant ensemble sound. The binaural mix was based on the ambisonic mix of the concert hall.
(5) The binaural mix was simultaneously sent out as live-stream on Vimeo.
(7) Each of the performers had various versions of purpose-built (or modified) instruments that were created for this type of concerts.
(6) All of the performers were in front of cameras, mixed in vdo.ninja, and then sent back to the performers, allowing visual cues. The result was also sent out to the livestream and synced with the audio. The relationships among the audio and video elements are complex in themselves.
Ann Stimson made her professional debut at the age of eighteen as a member of the Debut Orchestra in Los Angeles, and has gone on to perform with various ensembles and as a soloist throughout the US and Europe. Although she performs both traditional and contemporary repertoire, she has long been an advocate for the music of our time. Her work explores the extension of traditional instruments and modes of performance into new, imaginative realms of action and interaction. Most recently, she has performed concerts for the New York Philharmonic Biennial, the Anton Bruckner Conservatory (Austria), the Birmingham Royal Conservatoire (England), the MTI institute for Sonic Creativity (England), the Abrons Art Center (New York), and the National Sawdust (Brooklyn). She has received performance/research grants from the Esperia Foundation and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for research at the Getty Center, and in Florence and Paris.
Composer and sound artist Marc Ainger works with concert music, computer and electronic sound, film, dance, AR/XR, and theater. He is interested in the relationships between the real and the imagined – the ways in which the visceral world of sound and sound production inform our imagined worlds of sound, and the ways our imagined worlds, in turn, inform our concrete experiences. Performances of Ainger’s works have included the New York Philharmonic Biennial; the INA/GRM; the Royal Danish Ballet; CBGB; Late Night with David Letterman; the Goethe Institute; the American Film Institute; SIGGRAPH; Guangdong Modern Dance; and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). Awards include the Boulez/LA Philharmonic Composition Fellowship, the Irino International Chamber Music Competition, Musica Nova, Meet the Composer, the Esperia Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. As a sound designer he has worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Waveframe Corporation, among others.
Jules Rawlinson – w[i]nd: mediated, procedural and orchestrated spaces in a large scale virtual audio-visual installation
This presentation outlines approaches to creating mediated, procedural and orchestrated space in w[i]nd (Rawlinson, 2020), an interactive and generative audio-visual composition / installation. This project aims to be a rich and playfully immersive visual and sound art experience in a large-scale first-person Virtual Environment (VE).
The VE consists of a labyrinthine array of audio-visual exhibits of synthesised images and 3D models of wind instruments coupled with an electroacoustic soundscape of physically modelled synthesis and processed acoustic recordings that exhibit a range of characteristics of augmentation and abstraction. First person motion, underlying algorithmic parameters and triggers on exhibits are used as a mechanic to influence the sonic density and character of the soundscape.
The features in the images that are generated are at times smeared and simplified, at others glitched, complex and distorted, or liquid and abstract informing the aesthetic properties and features of sonic material so that pitch, amplitude and timbre are unstable, with rapid spectromorphological shifts between sustained material, sliding tones and fluttered and transient gestural articulations.
The work explores mediated spatial experience, open sonic form, timbre and character in non-linear interactive experiences and contributes to research into the use of sound and sounding objects as an approach to presence and immersion, orientation, navigation, interaction and ‘ergodic musicking’ [Oliva, 2019] in VEs. The research draws on architectural approaches to level design [Totten, 2014], ‘perceptual opportunity’ [Fencott, 2005] and stochastic and aleatoric approaches to indeterminacy.
Standalone applications for Mac and PC are available at https://pixelmechanics.itch.io/wind
Jules Rawlinson is a composer and performer that works with electronic sounds and digital visuals in solo and collaborative settings. His solo work includes SKR1BL (2016-19), Interval and Instance (2018-22), w[i]nd (2020), Pulsar Retcon (2021) and Yield Point (2021). Jules’ collaborative output includes A Requiem for Edward Snowden (2014-16) with Matthew Collings, Lie Still My Sleepy Fortunes (2018-19) with Raymond MacDonald and An Island of Sound (2022-23) with JR Carpenter. He is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Sound Design at The Reid School of Music in The University of Edinburgh. For more information visit http://www.pixelmechanics.com