Day Two: Friday 8 November
Bathway Theatre
4-5pm: Concert 4 – Acousmatic + Live
Cameron Naylor – Here One Moment
A postcard to Wales.
Hiraeth can be interpreted a homesickness for a time and place that exists only in one’s memory. A nostalgia that rears its head at unexpected moments, shifting shapes as contexts change and memories form new meanings.
Using the home as an allegory for hiraeth, sounds were selected for their capacity to draw forth strong personal memories. These materials are recontextualised as we venture through the living spaces, becoming tinged with new emotions and associations as the environment shifts around them, each transformation revealing new emotional nuances of hiraeth.
Cameron Naylor is an electroacoustic composer and sound artist. His research focus is on compositional methodologies for musical storytelling in fixed media and installation settings. A recipient of the Presidential Doctoral Scholar, he is currently undertaking a PhD at NOVARS Research Centre. His music has garnered first prize in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition 2023, and the award of distinction at MA/IN23. Further afield his music has been performed and exhibited around the UK and internationally, including the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, 2023), and the G20 Summit (New Delhi, 2023).
Edmar Soria – Post Anthropocene Record No. X.01
In 1950, Alan Turing published his famous article entitled “Computing machinery and intelligence” in which, among other things, he proposed the so-called “imitation game” in order to establish a type of heuristic with which it would be possible to know whether or not a machine exhibits intelligent behavior. The article begins with the powerful and forceful question: can a machine think?
A little more than 70 years later and after the long road travelled in the study and development of artificial intelligence systems, a new question is proposed here:
Can a machine dream?
In that sense, this acousmatic work represents (from a speculative point of view) the experiential record of the first machine that was able to dream, some time ahead in a unknown future. And so, this works place us at the first person´s perspective of its first dream.
Edmar Soria 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). 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). 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).
David Piazza – Programma I
Programma I is an expression of turmoil through the exploration of an expanded and emerging gestural vocabulary. Obliques and swathes reveal a sonic universe where collisions, bursts and clusters interrogate the relationships between sound morphologies and movement.
David Piazza is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music based in Montreal. As an undergraduate at the Faculty of Music at Université de Montréal, he studied composition under Dominic Thibault and conducted research in concatenative synthesis. His interests lie in both composition and innovative approaches to sound spatialization and synthesis. Currently pursuing a Master’s degree in composition at the same institution, his research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Brona Martin – Margaret’s Story
This piece explores the oral history archive collection, Ireland 1951 and 1953 recorded by Alan Lomax. Within this collection, there are a variety of interviews with different artists such as poet and playwright Brendan Behan, banjo player and singer, Margaret Barry and musician Seamus Ennis. This work focuses on the interviews with Margaret Barry (b. 1917, d. 1989), where she talks about her life as a musician while playing and singing different songs.
Oral history archives can teach us a lot about sound and heritage offering us an insight into past traditions and soundworlds. Within these stories we can also learn about the relationships that people had with society, traditional music and other art forms. For example, Margaret Barry’s stories and the questions posed to her by Alan Lomax offer an insight into the expectations of women during the 20th Century and how Margaret Barry refused to conform both as a woman and as a musician.
Out of the many hours of recordings made by Lomax, Margaret’s Story presents a brief insight into the life of this wonderful musician while highlighting Margaret’s unique talents as a singer and banjo player.
The Oral History Archives are used with permission, from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity.
Dr. Brona Martin is an Electroacoustic composer and sound artist from Banagher, Co. Offaly, Ireland. Her compositions explore narrative in Electroacoustic music, acoustic ecology, oral history, sound and heritage and audio spatialisation techniques.
Brona is a Lecturer in Music and Sound at the University of Greenwich where she teaches on the MA in Music and Sound Design course on the module ‘Audiovisual Composition for Film, Games and Media.’
She is also a researcher within the SOUND/IMAGE Research Centre where she is involved in research activities such as:
- Exploring spatial audio applications and workflows in electroacoustic music and VR and gaming technologies.
- Project lead on The Record Shop and Black Music Project which explores the role of the record store as a community and social hub. Oral histories, film and audio and photographic memories will be compiled to create an educational resource, a publication, website and podcast series
- SOUND/IMAGE Research Centre Knowledge Exchange Lead
Huichun Yang – Summon
SUMMON is a real-time sound performance that questions the relationship and boundaries between the body and the machine within the sonic field. It is a generative ontological process of moving, hearing, being, and becoming.
Huichun Yang‘s work focuses on the body as instruments, engaging with haptic intra-action and exploring fictional soundscapes and voids emerging from noise, indeterminacy, and entanglement. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Digital Media at RISD.