Day Three: Saturday 8 November
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
4-5.30pm: Screening 1
Stephen de Filippo – Spectral Breathing Apparatus
Spectral Breathing Apparatus is a fixed-media audiovisual composition for reedless oboe and electronics. The work focuses on breath, vocality, and bodily presence through a close integration of sound and image. By removing the reed, the oboe’s voice is stripped away, leaving behind the gestures of air, friction, and effort. Breath noise, saliva sounds, vocal fry, and ingressive mouth gestures become the primary sonic material, processed electronically and embedded in a textured, immersive environment.
Composed during COVID-19 lockdowns in collaboration with oboist Niamh Dell, the piece was developed through remote exchanges of voice memos, recordings, and technical sketches. The performer explores a set of unstable techniques that resist the conventions of classical tone production. Rather than suppressing these noisy, fragile sounds, the work centers them. The electronics amplify and reshape each gesture, building a layered sonic space where human breath and machine processing are deeply entangled.
The accompanying video, filmed in collaboration with Angela Guyton and edited by James Bradbury, captures the performance in intimate detail. Two fixed camera angles alternate: a close-up of Dell’s mouth and a side view of her hands. This framing reveals the tension and physical effort behind each sound. Viewers are brought into close proximity with the performer’s face and body, witnessing the materiality of sound as something visible as well as audible. The video invites a sustained encounter with breath, strain, and presence.
Stephen de Filippo is a composer and multimedia artist from Wadandi country in the southwest of Australia, currently based in San Diego. His work explores place, travel, displacement, and cultural identity. Initially trained in concert music, his practice has expanded into electro-acoustic forms incorporating field recordings, experimental performance techniques, and live electronics. His compositions often draw on environmental sound and personal experience, crafting immersive soundscapes that reflect themes of movement and dislocation.
Stephen’s music engages with questions of Australian identity, belonging, and cultural inferiority. His current research investigates the concept of cultural cringe in Australian classical music, exploring how composers express colonial anxieties in their work. This work was supported by a visiting fellowship at Harvard University’s Department of Music, funded by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the Institute of Australian Studies.
He has presented compositions and multimedia installations in concert halls, festivals, and experimental spaces across the United States, Europe, and Australia. His works reflect a detailed approach to performance and sonic texture, often shaped by recorded sound, bodily gesture, and digital processing. Whether exploring love, loss, or national identity, Stephen’s music remains grounded in a deep engagement with place and the complex ways it is sounded, remembered, and imagined.
Bekah Simms and Daniel Tapper – spore wind ii: swamp thing
A collaborative project between myself; experimental jaw harpist chik white; and creative music technologist and artist Dan Tapper, “spore wind ii: swamp thing” is an acousmatic stereo excerpt of a quasi-concerto for amplified jaw harp, ensemble, and 8.1 electronics with live mapped visuals. In this version, the second movement is extracted and a version of the live visuals constitute the fixed video.
Prior to its composition, I worked with jaw harpist chik white to catalogue his vast and unusual grotesquerie of a sound world, composing the work in a DAW with a mock-up so that he could memorise and play it live as a performer who doesn’t read Western notation. He is the titular swamp thing: a DIY noise musician from the marshes of Nova Scotia, creating otherworldly bodily noise with a bruality that eclipses the tiny stature of his instrument of choice.
JUNO award-winning composer Bekah Simms hails from St. John’s, Newfoundland and is currently based in Glasgow after nine years living and working in Toronto. Their varied musical output has been heralded as “cacophonous, jarring, oppressive — and totally engrossing!” (CBC Music), “visceral contemporary music that enfolds external inspirations with dazzling rigor and logic” (Peter Margasak), and lauded for its “sheer range of ingenious material, expressive range and sonic complexity” (The Journal of Music.) Propelled equally by fascination and terror toward the universe, Bekah’s work is often filtered through the personal lens of their anxiety, resulting in nervous, messy, and frequently heavy electroacoustic musical landscapes.
Bekah’s music has been widely performed across North America and Europe including at the Gaudeamus Festival, Wien Modern, TIME:SPANS, Music on Main, ACHT BRÜCKEN, and New Music Dublin, premieres at the latter which were twice described as “highlights of the festival” by the Journal of Music in 2021 and 2024. She has worked with some of the top interpreters of contemporary music internationally, including Crash Ensemble – with with whom she was artist-in-residence from 2022-2024 – Nikel, Riot Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, Eighth Blackbird, the Zöllner-Roche Duo, and Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. Bekah has also been the recipient of over 40 awards, competitive selections, nominations, and prizes, including a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2019 Barlow Prize, and the 2023 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. Her piece “metamold” was nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award.
Matteo Tundo & Pietro Dossena – Cyanotype
The audiovisual work Cyanotype structures a processual journey that evokes the idea of free fall as an unstoppable flow. Sounds and images unfold along a trajectory in continuous transformation, yet always connected to the initial generative event.
The evolving visuals give rise to an abstract landscape where one might at times discern icy formations or mountain peaks. However, this decoding is made more ambiguous by the appearance of glistening water reflections and lines dynamically shaped by the acoustic spectrum—almost as if they were a vibrating counterpart to the mountainous reliefs. Everything is imbued with the cold tones suggested by the title.
In this context, the entire musical component is generated from synthesized sounds: in particular, the use of physical modeling synthesis and frequency modulation creates both natural and artificial timbres, later sculpted through resonant filtering, granulation, and reverberation. The sonic environment is enriched with fluid, layered nuances that sustain the tension sparked by the initial gesture and carry the listener through a flow in constant metamorphosis.
Matteo Tundo is an Italian composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. His compositional research focuses on the perception and cognition of sound events, investigating the neural mechanisms underlying the signification of sound. His work centers on the integration of neuroaesthetics into musical composition, employing innovative technologies to enhance the listener’s perceptual engagement and sensory experience.
After his initial guitar studies, he devoted himself entirely to composition and new technologies, studying at the conservatories of Florence, Parma, and Lugano, and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He studied composition with Ivan Fedele, Giorgio Colombo Taccani, Javier Torres Maldonado, and Nadir Vassena, and electronic music with Marco Ligabue, Alfonso Belfiore and Michelangelo Lupone. He also attended specialized courses with Salvatore Sciarrino, Yan Maresz, Beat Furrer, Franck Bedrossian, Marco Stroppa, Mark Andre and others.
In 2024 he was composer in residence for the Divertimento Ensemble. In the same year, together with guitarist Pierpaolo Dinapoli, he founded the h[t] DUO, a guitar and live electronics duo, for which he is active as an electroacoustic performer
He has participated as composer in international festivals.
He teaches computer music at the Conservatory of Brescia, Italy.
Simon Rattigan – After Architecture
This work starts with two black and white photographs published in Architect’s Journal 11th October 1972, with the caption:
Not ‘before’ and ‘after’ but a contrast of images. Should perhaps Thamesmead fall somewhere between the two?
It is a report on the architecture and review of the town planning.
It appears as a single A4 journal page divided at the centre half with a street view at the bottom and the tree lined Ridgeway at the top.
The image was downloaded from the Thamesmead community archive online and transformed into a single channel video with a stereo sound.
The juxtaposition of these two images givies the impression of a before and after comparison though they are both from the same time, while one depicts a built up urban scene the other a natural environment. The Thamesmead estate built was in the late 1960’s of brutalist concrete with optimistic utopian social housing ideals. The Ridgeway is a footpath on the raised embankment that covers the Joseph Bazalgette sewer running between Plumstead (Greenwich) to Crossness (Bexley) Southeast London.
The common visual link which draws together the two images is the centrally aligned receding perspective within the picture plane. In this video the two still images are superimposed one over the other and a slow dissolve gradually reveals the image below creating a new composite image. A reverse dissolve unfolds, alluding to the cyclical nature of durational change and human and non-human exchange.
The duration of the dissolve and reverse dissolve is slow and continuous and limited to the duration of the sound composition, fixed to 8 minutes, recorded in a single take, improvisation.
These sound recordings are produced from The SOMA, Lyra 8 “organismic” analogue synthesizer. The designer describes as
“ uses some principles that lie in the base of living organisms. The way how LYRA’s modules interacting between each other and the behavior of the instrument resembles a live conversation.”
Simon Rattigan is a U.K. born film and video artist who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and is currently living in London. He Graduated from Chelsea school of art in London with an MA in fine art. He has developed his practice through researching the relationships of moving image, sound and language to explore sensory and autobiographical experience. His works transform found and new footage to interweave personal narrative with political and historical structures. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and made use of Museum displays and archival materials taking the form of installations, videos and books. In his work the materiality of digital media, film and video is processed and interlaced to evoke questions of authenticity, hierarchies of knowledge and cultural belonging. Occupying a hybrid ‘in-between space’ in which we materially and psychologically reconstruct and redefine our relationship to the past and other temporal conditions such as causality, potentiality and inevitability
He participated in Lux artists moving image critical forum, 2018 and Ethnographic Terminalia, New Orleans, U.S.A., 2011, The Nunnery, Structure texture future, 2015, Screened work at Whitechapel gallery, 2010 and SSFX festival, London, 2017. Transitional States, Campbell works, London 2019. Crania Sounds, Solo Show at Five Years Gallery, London 2019. Awarded best artists short film Mannheim Arts and Film Festival 2022. Chicago Underground Film Festival 2022. Radiophrenia, CCA Glasgow Scotland, radio broadcast with Glap Collective. Fisura, Experimental film and video festival / Mexico City. On Air-On Site / Radio broadcast across The Hague, Netherlands with Glap Collective. Vessels / Estuary Festival 2025, Film programme, screenings at Gravesend Pier and Wat Tyler Park.
Shane Byrne – Seachrán
Seachrán explores the fractured interior landscape of the wandering mind. The Irish term—evoking deviation, distraction, and delusion—frames a personal reflection shaped through memory and sonic trace. Audio materials are drawn entirely from field recordings and fragments of past performances gathered across East Asia, spaces once external, now internalized. The video imagery, sourced from sites of personal refuge, seeks to still the inner flux. Hybrid and auto-convolution processes embed these sonic memories within themselves, forming acousmatic textures that blur presence and recollection. In this work, sound both reveals and conceals—gestures emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure, mirroring the shifting contours of introspection.
Shane Byrne is a composer and educator working in the field of creative media. His areas of interest include audio-visual composition, spatial audio, human-computer interaction, and acoustic ecology.
His works have been performed internationally at festivals and conferences including ICMC, TIES, ISSTC, MUSA, SMC, iFIMPac, Sonorities, and KLG.
He is currently the program lead on the BSc in Music and Sound Engineering at TUS Midlands where he lectures in Electroacoustic Composition, Interactive Audio, Audiovisual Composition, Visual Creation, and Audio Electronics.
Matthew Schumaker – Temporary structures
Temporary structures are short works for piano and computer graphics that explore the connections between musical and visual lines. The pieces use algorithmic methods to seamlessly integrate musical and visual art, aiming for both fluidity and depth. In these two works, digital sculptural forms shift shape along coordinates defined by pitch, timing, and dynamics drawn from the musical gestures. This process creates a constantly evolving visual structure that reflects the music and is inspired by the philosophy and smooth forms of parametric architecture.
The premiere took place at the April in Santa Cruz Festival, where pianist Chia-Lin Yang performed alongside the accompanying computer graphics. The work has also been performed by pianist Eric Huebner at the Gassmann Electronic Music Series at UC Irvine, and by members of Dog Trio at the klub katarakt Festival for Experimental Music in Hamburg, Germany.
Beyond live performances, the work has been presented in various formats: as an installation featuring video and a synchronized Disklavier at the FFEMF Festival at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in Saint Augustine; as a wall-mounted video artwork at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville and at the Performing Media Festival in South Bend, Indiana; and as a screening at both WAVEFORMS, presented by the Museum of Science, Boston, and at the International Computer Music Conference, Boston 2025.
Matt Schumaker’s music engages with research into computer-assisted composition, interactive computer music with performers, and visual music. He received a doctorate in Music Composition from UC Berkeley (UCB), where he studied with Edmund Campion, Franck Bedrossian, David Wessel and others. Early on in his studies, Schumaker spent a formative year in Amsterdam, studying with Louis Andriessen. Later on, he travelled to France through UCB’s Prix de Paris program, where he worked closely with Martin Matalon.
In recent years, Schumaker’s music has been performed by the UC Berkeley Symphony, Radius Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Winsor Music, New Music Works, Eco Ensemble, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Schumaker’s music has also been presented at festivals and curated events, including by clarinetist Rane Moore at the Virtual SICPP 2020, by pianist Chia- Lin Yang at the April in Santa Cruz Festival, by members of Dog Trio at the klub katarakt Festival for Experimental Music in Hamburg, Germany, by clarinetist Joshua Rubin at the soundSCAPE festival in Blonay, Switzerland, and by pianist Eric Huebner as part of the Gassmann Electronic Music Series at UC Irvine. Schumaker’s multimedia work for music and computer graphics has been shown at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in Saint Augustine, and at WAVEFORMS, presented by the Music of Science, Boston.
From 2015-17, Schumaker was a Lecturer at UCB, teaching courses in computer music and music perception and cognition. During 2018-20, he was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT. In fall 2021, he joined the Music Department at UC Santa Cruz as assistant professor.
Ewan Peng – Peach Blossom Spring
“Past memories are nothing but strange tales we’ve invented.”
This audiovisual work explores memory not as historical truth but as a constructed mythology—specifically within the aesthetic of a Sinofuturist ritual. Rooted in the artist’s original track Peach Blossom Spring, the piece is driven by rhythmic tension and ceremonial textures, unfolding through the grammar of a forgotten cult documentary.
Visually, it draws on VHS-era Chinese aesthetics—distorted archival footage, low-resolution textures, and ritualistic children’s games filmed in surreal rural settings. Generated via AI processes (Sora), these images simulate a lost mythology that never existed, yet feels intimately familiar. Machines flicker like oracle devices; children perform inexplicable gestures around shifting metallic objects; the past appears not as memory, but as spectral simulation.
Peach Blossom Spring offers not a narrative but a trance: a sonic and visual hauntology of invented nostalgia, echoing the fragility of cultural memory, and the rituals we create to hold onto it.
Ewan Peng is a sound artist whose practice draws from the language of ritual and the architectures of electronic music. Through modular synthesis, field recordings, and custom-built interfaces, he constructs sonic rites—fragile zones where the body meets machine, and the unspeakable becomes audible. His work seeks to explore the intangible, the spiritual, and the liminal through immersive sound.