Day Four: Sunday 10 November
2-4pm: Talk 6
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
Simon Emmerson – An Imaginary Soundwalk
This paper picks up from my contributions to the Sound Art Brighton Festival (2022) catalogue essay (‘The global dérive flâneur’), to MuSA 2023 (Manchester) – ‘Imagination and Image (in sonic art)’ and to the Spatial Audio Symposium (Leicester 2024) – ‘Imagining space and place through sound and music’. In these I suggest that image, imagination and place are the most powerful tools for sound synthesis that we possess. I describe Near and Far (at Once) (2022) as an imaginary soundwalk, a multichannel acousmatic work which ‘walks us’ from the wind farm off Brighton’s coast, onto the beach, through the pier, the city, via loud and quiet places – real or imaginary – on up to the top of the Downs on a hot day. The imaginary listener is in constant motion across the dynamic landscape. A link between the sounds and scenes is the ‘murmuration’ of birds, humans, vehicles, insects, trees, atmospheres. These are both profoundly visual and sonic at the same time – how might this be captured or synthesised, and how best presented to the listener? The silent movie of a starling murmuration is (for me) already sounding. [SE]
Simon Emmerson studied at Cambridge and at City University, where he founded the electroacoustic music studio in 1975. He joined De Montfort University in 2004 where he is now Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Sonic Creativity. He has been a composer and writer on electroacoustic music since the early 1970s – most recently curating the Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music – Reaching Out with Technology (2018) and keynote at EMS Network Conference 2021 (Leicester) and at MuSA23 (Manchester). He was Edgard Varese Visiting Professor at TU, Berlin (2009-10) and Visiting Professor and Composer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Perth) in November 2016. Recent works include for: Inventionen (Berlin), Sond-Arte Ensemble (Lisbon), Musiques et Recherches (Brussels), BEAST (Birmingham) and for soloists Darragh Morgan (violin), Philip Mead (piano), Carla Rees (flute) and Heather Roche (clarinet). He is currently mixing an album of recent works for NMC (due 2025) and at work on a new project with The Six Tones (Sweden). [SE]
Fiona Sinead Brehony – How can creative engagement with rivers enrich our understanding of ‘Place’ as Cultural Heritage?
‘So from the river we acquire an idea of human community. That is one of its most salutary features, so deeply imbued that we scarcely notice it.’ (Ackroyd, 2007: 11)
Ackroyd P (2007) Thames: Sacred River. London: Vintage.
Fiona Brehony invites us to explore relationships to waterways using creative writing and re-sounding exercises using visual, audio and text-based archive materials. The force and vibrancy of a river (as physical river and time-capsule containing heritage) is a great opportunity to use embodied approaches to understand the scale of a river. ‘Phenomenology’ here refers to the engagement of phenomena (the river) as directly experienced. We will playfully engage in possibilities of being and being with the river; connecting personal objects used to serve tangible daily experiences, with seemingly intangible objects such as a river.
Fiona is incorporating archive materials into her own research to explore ecological and social histories of the River Irk in Manchester, UK. She is working both independently with materials to create audio and visual representations and engaging local people in creative workshops with archive materials. Fiona is interested in exploring Cultural Memory of places, which refers to the collective practices that societies use to build and uphold their relationship to the past and present.
Fiona is a Manchester based research-practitioner, working within spaces between Geography, documentary film, sound art and performance. Since October 2023, Fiona has been working on a PhD research project that engages in possibilities of rivers as Cultural Heritage, with a particular focus on river engagement in areas of regeneration.
Fiona’s personal values as a practitioner are entrenched with humanistic approaches to discovering ways of making environments more equitable. She is passionate about life and in exploring ways lived experiences can be filled with light and playfulness. Fiona’s art practice explores the relationship between history, memory and visual and written narrative. She employs a research-based approach, working across a range of media. Previous artworks have utilised specialist expertise, involving collaboration with scientists and composers, to create lyrical and inquisitive connections between people and their environment. Fiona’s work takes the form of creative documentary and audio-visual installations that are exhibited in galleries and museums.
Neolithic Cannibals – Deep Listening to the Unheard
Simon James will introduce the Neolithic Cannibals, talking about the mix of heritage, archaeology, deep listening and social aspects of the work.
Neolithic Cannibals is a socially engaged sound art project and exhibition commissioned for Brighton Festival 2024. It was created by young people from Whitehawk and East Brighton and local sound artist Simon James, with the support of ASE archaeologist Jon Sygrave. The exhibition mixes archaeology, sound art, and activism to transport audiences to a place where imaginative and fantastical sounds will invite deep listening to an area that can often be considered hidden and unheard.
The Neolithic Cannibals exhibition at Lighthouse Project Space recreated the Neolithic Camp – a place of communion, celebration and ritual, as a compassionate listening space inviting audiences to discover Whitehawk’s richness, joy, playfulness and hope, empowering local voices through rarely explored sonic expressions.
The project invites Brighton to listen – to step in to the centre of the gallery, within the concentric circles of the Neolithic Camp, to hear sounds recorded and created by young artists from over the hill. The fantastical and imaginative, the noisy, chaotic and playful.
The Neolithic Cannibals:
The artists are a group of young people from Whitehawk in East Brighton, uninhibited by experience or knowledge and any preconceived ideas of what sound art should be. They bring an instinctive, playful and raw energy; turning sounds inside out, carving new shapes, oscillations and resonances.
Supporting them is Simon James, a self trained sound artist and composer engaging in deep listening to the unheard and hidden – mixing environmental field recordings with electronic sources such as the Buchla Electric Music Box, which over 10 years of exploration and performance has become Simon’s main instrument. Simon’s skills with the Buchla have been called upon by Massive Attack, Toy Drum, UNKLE, and Max de Wardener and have featured extensively in Emmy award winning composer Andrew Phillips’ soundtracks.
Simon’s compositional approach is exploratory, playful and instinctive, focussed on timbral shaping, finding the sounds in between the sounds and exploring the relationship between these and field recordings.
Sound designs have been created for Heineken, Salesforce, Kaspersky, Dalmore Whiskey, Bushmills, Sheytan Jewellery and The Horror Channel, and in 2023 he produced a multi speaker gallery installation at the RIBA gallery in London. In 2019 Simon visited Shenzhen/Shanghai in China on a British Council residency, exploring the shapes and structures of architecture through sound and music. In 2023 Simon was the recipient of an Arts Council DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) award and used it to focus his practice around listening, the environment and community, which culminated in a residency in the Pyrenees with artists Mark Fell and Michael Von Hauswolff, where he created an interactive installation, ‘Can We Echo the Forest?’.
He has also recorded music as The Simonsound (with DJ Format) Black Channels (for cult soundtrack label Death Waltz) and under his own name for Lo Recordings and Castles in Space Records. An album of architectural resonance and Buchla electronics, ‘Sounding the Shadows’, is due for release on YYAA Records in 2024. He is currently developing an exhibition, ‘Neolithic Cannibals’, working with young people from the council estate where he grew up, for Brighton Festival, May 2024.
www.simonsound.co.uk | @thesimonsound
ABOUT CLASS DIVIDE
Class Divide are a grassroots campaign drawing attention to the deeply unjust educational attainment gap in Whitehawk, Manor Farm and Bristol Estate in Brighton and Hove
www.classdivide.co.uk | @divideclass
Stefano Catena – Organised space: the terminology problem of spatialisation
This talk presents and discusses the terminology confusion in the field of spatialisation. The term ‘space’ itself is used in a variety of disciplines, from music to architecture and to scientific topics, making it complicated to precisely determine its context. In music itself, it is very common to encounter ‘space’ with a different number of words that will drastically shift its significance, e.g. ‘pitch space’, ‘compositional space’, ‘timbre space’ and many others. This problemat is also reflected in the technological field: it is very common to encounter the phrase ‘spatial audio’, but it is also easy to misinterpret what this really means. In fact, the modern technological revolution of spatialisation toolsthat are available today, either hardware or software, invites a fragmentation of this musicological field. This talk wants to foster a conversation on the matter, introducing relevant examples and also considering the listening experience as a primary aspect that needs to be included in the analysis of space. Moreover, the term ‘organised space’ will be discussed as an all-encompassing definition for fixed spatialisation in the electroacoustic arts.
Stefano Catena is an Italian composer and researcher: he specialises in acousmatic music, ambient and multimedia installation, sound synthesis, spatialisation and sound programming. He graduated at Milan’s Conservatory in Electronic Music with the 110/110 cum laude with the thesis “The Virtual Acousmonium: a study on expressiveness of musical gestures”. He also studied in the USA at Montclair State University (NJ) with Nathan Davies and at the Hochschule für Music in Detmold with Fabian Levy and Andrea Valle. His works have been included and performed in some of the most important international conferences such as the Sound and Music Computing (SMC), Colloqui d’Informatica Musicale (CIM), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festical (NYCEMF), the Sonosfera in Pesaro, NoiseFloor in Stoke-on-Trent, Sonorities Festival in Belfast, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and more. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Music, Technology and Innovation from De Montfort University in Leicester under Peter Batchelor, Leigh Landy and Scott Wilson.