Exploring sonic and audio-visual practice
Thank you to everyone who came to be a part of #soundimage19! It was a weekend full of concerts, talks, screenings, performances unpacking the audiovisual and sharing ideas!
We had a really fantastic programme, with guests visiting us from all over the world. Below are some of the images from the weekend.
“Vacuus” is an acusmatic composition on a fixed support that describes the movement of the bodies in an empty space. The meaning of “Vacuus”, the Latin word, is in fact “Empty”, which identifies itself in the structure in the low frequencies and in the dark sounds, in the space so as to be perceived around the listener. “Space” is the key word of the composition, in which all the elements are positioned and moved around independent orbits, which approach and move away until they collide. Then start all over again, you can hear the rotating bodies approaching. Only at the end there will be the decisive battle, the creation. Thanks to the synthesis and sampling processes the sound follows the rotation in the space created by the reverbs and the dynamic compressions. Getting lost in the void is an instinctive reaction, one loses the real perspective, and one abandons oneself to wander about. “Spinning around and getting lost in the dark vacuity, confused by the total lack of importance and feeling.”
Feliciano Chiriaco is an Italian electroacoustic music composer. He frequents the third year of Electronic Music at the Conservatory U. Giordano of Foggia. He studied with N.Monopoli, R.Zanata, L.Gregoretti and C.Valentini. His music has been performed on numerous occasions such as KLG Festival, NYCMEF, MUSLAB in Madrid and in Mexico City, Atemporànea Festival in Buenos Aires. In 2017 he published “Rêve”, an audio-video installation, on the “Live” catalog, Paginaria Editions. In 2017 he composed “Studio Rimico N.1”, for the video-installation “Upgrade My Soul” by R.C.Giannotti. In 2017 he composed the soundtrack of “Andrea Firenze”, a film by A.Varano. In 2018 he published “Nocna Mora” for flute and live electronics. In 2018 he taught electronic music at the association “BeatHoven Music Academy”. From March of 2018 he collaborates as Sound Enveloper with “Engineering Samples”. From January of 2019 he works as Sound Engineer at “Moto Armonico” Recording Studio in Barletta.
South of the equatorial plane, near the great Cleft scarring the continent called Aquila (named after its eagle-shaped form), lies an unusual biome that has evolved to generate and survive great discharges of energy and fire. The forest is dominated by tesla trees, which under certain meteorological conditions, violently release explosions and lighting bolts of static electricity that ignite massive wildfires across the Pinion Plateau. Only the hardiest lifeforms like phoenix shrub, firewhip, amber lambent, glowbirds, and multihued gossamers are witnesses to the volatile conditions of these flame forests.
The materials used in this piece are inspired by Dan Simmons’s novel Hyperion and were produced using ambisonic and binaural techniques.
Seth Shafer is a composer and researcher whose work lies at the intersection of technology, new media, and art/science, with a specific focus on real-time notation, interactive music, and algorithmic art. Seth’s compositions have been performed internationally and across the USA. Recent performances include the 2018 International Computer Music Conference (Daegu, South Korea), 2018 Sound and Music Computing Conference (Limassol, Cyprus), 2017 Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (A Coruña, Spain), the 2016 Sound and Music Computing Conference (Hamburg, GE), 2015 Shanghai Conservatory Electronic Music Week (China), the 2014 International Computer Music Conference (Athens, GR), and the 2013 Festival dei Due Mondi Spoleto (Italy). In addition, his piece Pulsar [Variant II] for trumpet and computer was a finalist for The Engine Room’s International Sound Art Exhibition 2015 (London, UK). His sound installations have been shown at Kaneko (Omaha), the Perot Museum of Nature and Science (Dallas), Long Beach Museum of Art’s Pacific Standard Time Exhibit, and the Long Beach Soundwalk. Seth is Assistant Professor of Music Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He holds degrees from the University of North Texas and California State University, Long Beach. As a performer, Seth played tuba in the Golden State Pops Orchestra, co-founded and co-directed the Cole Conservatory Laptop Ensemble, and performed in various new music ensembles. He has also played in several popular bands including a performance on the Grammy-winning Vampire Weekend album Modern Vampires of the City.
The meaning of life. The meaning of the things we do.
The direction in which we move… where we are going.
Complications and complexities that are smoothed out with the passing, in one way or another, for the good, for the bad sometimes. Time is a fiction that surprises us.
After the action, the startles, the interventions and the infinite searches, the reflection, and a step after the previous one, among the thousands of the road.
Dr. Ricardo Dal Farra (Buenos Aires, 1957) is a composer and new media artist, educator, historian, and curator working in the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology. He is a Professor at the Music Department of Concordia University, Canada (http://goo.gl/SeuhUx) and founder-director of the Electronic Arts Experimentation and Research Centre – CEIARTE of the National University of Tres de Febrero, Argentina.
He has been researcher and consultant on electroacoustic music and media arts history for UNESCO, France; director of the Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technologies, Canada; associated researcher of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University, in the UK; senior consultant of the Amauta – Andean Media Arts Centre in Cusco, Peru; coordinator of the international research alliance DOCAM – Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage; and director of the Multimedia Communication national program at the Federal Ministry of Education, Argentina.
Dal Farra has presented his sound-art, electroacoustic and visual-music works in more than 40 countries, and recordings of his pieces are published in 23 international editions (including CDs by Computer Music Journal and Leonardo Music Journal, by MIT Press). Among others, he received awards and commissions from the Sao Paulo International Arts Biennale, Brazil; the National Endowment for the Arts, Argentina, the Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, France; the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale of the University of Padua, Italy; and the International Computer Music Association.
Funded by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology of Montreal, he created the largest collection publicly available of Latin American Electroacoustic Music, including a database with over 2,000 recordings of works digitally preserved, composed 1957-2007 by almost 400 composers, and +200,000 words (http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=556).
Dal Farra is founder-director of the international conference series Understanding Visual Music – UVM (held in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil), and founder-director of the international conference series Balance-Unbalance (held in Argentina, Canada, Australia, United States, Colombia, the UK, and The Netherlands) on how the media arts could contribute to solving the environmental crisis (http://balance-unbalance2018.org). He also has been leading art-science projects, like the three editions of the sound-art international contest organized with the Red Cross Climate Centre, and designed multiple art-science-technology educational programs.
Dr. Dal Farra was the artistic director of the Mexican electronic arts biennale Transitio in 2015, and a guest keynote at Congreso Internacional de Humanidades Digitales (2016) and SIGRaDi – Ibero-American Digital Graphic (2016), held in Argentina, and HDRio – I Congresso Internacional em Humanidades Digitais (2018), held in Brazil. He is an active member of several editorial boards: Leonardo/ISAST (MIT Press, USA), Organised Sound (Cambridge Press, UK), Journal of Research on Music Education (ADOMU, Argentina), Resonancias – Musical Research Journal (Catholic University of Chile), and organizations such as: Electroacoustic Music Studies Network, Colegio Latinoamericano de Compositores de Música de Arte, and Earth-to-the-Earth. He is also a member of the board of the Fulldome Festival (Jena, Germany), and ISEA International, formerly the International Society for the Electronic Arts. https://www.facebook.com/ricardo.d.farra
Banlieue cuivrée. Suburb brass. Crumbled concrete. The matter fragmentation, its chaos and energy, counterpoised to its implacable, pure and monolithic immobility. The cement shifted through the metal and the leather. The expression “banlieue cuivrée” comes from the will to represent the life of a cement magma with its morphed and dynamics fluctuations, its slackening and but also with its static poses sublimated in the urban architectonic context. Hence concrete. A specific matter. A “fact” surrounding our daily space. A rigid corporeality but that comes in liquid form. Concrete. Suburb. Banlieue. The colour grey. The composition has been built using exclusively concrete samples of metallophones and membranophones instruments. Brass is the dominant metal colour in the musical context, hence the second French term cuivrée. To this light a copper mass, alternating its breath in different ontological sound statuses, is the resulting terminological syntaxes.
Born in Perugia, Nicola Fumo Frattegiani graduated from D.A.M.S. (Academy of Arts Music and Show) at the University of Bologna, with a thesis on Luigi Nono’s work “Intolleranza 1960”. Later he has advanced Master’s degree on “The musical cultures of 1900’s” at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome, and a bachelor’s degree on “Electronic Music and New Technologies” (course electroacoustic composition) at the “Francesco Morlacchi” Conservatory of Music of Perugia. Currently Nicola Fumo Frattegiani is attending the Master’s degree of “Electronic Music and New Technologies” at the “Licinio Refice” Conservatory of Music in Frosinone (course audiovisual composition). His works have been presented at various national and international festivals including ICMC International Computer Music Conference (South Korea), NYCEMF New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, ICMC-NYCEMF (USA), SMC Sound & Music Computing Conference (Cyprus), Atemporánea Festival Internacional de Música Contemporánea (Argentine), Festival Futura Mondes Parallèles (France), Synchresis Festival Internacional de Arte Sonoro y Música Electroacústica (Spain), Evimus Saarbrücker Tage für elektroakustische und visuelle Musik (Germany), MUSLAB Muestra Internacional de Música Electroacústica (Brazil), Echofluxx International Festival of Experimental Film, Music, Dance and Poetry (Czech Republic), Audio Mostly a conference on interaction with sound, BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference, Convergence International Conference/Festival of Music, Technology and Ideas, Noisefloor Festival (United Kingdom), Diffrazioni Firenze Multimedia Festival, XXII CIM Colloquium of Musical Informatics, Venice Biennale of Architecture (Italy). Author and performer, his research deals with electroacoustic music, sound for images, video, art exhibition and in particular compositions for theatrical performance.
In January 2019, young students from Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur elementary school in Montréal took part in a little brainstorm: to imagine fantastic machines under the theme «Quatre machines pour sauver le monde» (Four machines to save the world). No limit, no other instruction, all ideas were welcomed. Based on their suggestions, I composed this piece, expressing with sound and music the devices thought out by the youngsters but also their surrounding environment. The work is divided into four parts which respect the original titles given by the schoolchildren :
1- Une machine volante qui fonctionne à la pollution et qui la transforme en air pur (A flying machine that functions with pollution and turns it into fresh air)
2- Une machine-robot en forme d’animal pour sauver les animaux qui n’ont pas de maison et qui sont dans la rue (An animal-shaped robot-machine to save homeless animals that live on the street)
3- Une machine pour envoyer toute la neige qui tombe ici au pôle Nord pour ne plus que ça fonde (A machine to send all the snow falling here to the North Pole so it doesn’t melt anymore)
4- Une machine-bateau-sous-marin pour nettoyer les océans (A machine-boat-submarine to clean the oceans)
Léa Boudreau is a composer and musician based in Montréal, Qc. Born in 1993, she nourishes a passionate relationship with sound since her teenage years. It was a time when she used to spend days as a hermit, listening and creating. Oh how few things have changed. Nowadays, she continues to create with performance and composition in which she hopes to explore the infinite possibilities of everyday objects and to express the thousand of ideas she has kept in her mind for a long time now. In 2019, she won the 3rd prize in the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s JTTP contest for her piece Quatre machines pour sauver le monde and in SIME competition (International Electroacoustic Music Week, Lille University) with her piece Recovery. She also received the Marcelle award 2019 from the Université de Montréal music department for the work she accomplished during her academic journey (prize named after Marcelle Deschênes who created the electroacoustic composition program in 1980). In 2017, she received the 3rd Hugh-Le Caine prize from the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers for her piece Dementia.
This acousmatic composition is about my re-interpretation of Indonesia music instruments (gamelan, bonang, saron, karinding, and sundanese flute) specific in West Java in minimalist direction. All sounds recorded by only one mic condensor and to computer-based digital signal processing for manipulation the raw materials in micro sampling, granular synthesis, change the pitch/octave, reverse, play at different speeds, and create droning sounds (less effect, only reverb). The composition, inspired by nature, organic structure, climate change, politic situation, and landscape around me here.
Fahmi Mursyid is a contemporary musician, composer, sound designer and producer based in Bandung, Indonesia. He began releasing recordings under various monikers and labels since 2011 – now. Fahmi uses found objects and computers to create the glitches, sampling, granular synthesis and electronic sound characterising his work.
…coins …foil …metal pan …cellophane …bubblewrap …noise
A collection of found sound objects originally explored in a hands-on creative workshop exploring sound, object and mark making at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. The recorded found sound objects from this workshop were repurposed for this eight-channel composition, Abstracted Objects.
Emma Margetson is an award-winning acousmatic composer and sound artist based in the Midlands, UK. Her works have been performed nationally and internationally and was recently featured on the British Music Collection’s #AComposerADay series, which showcased the profiles of 31 female composers and their unique contributions to composition in the UK. Emma’s compositional work is focused on developing novel compositional approaches that are actively geared towards increasing engagement with electroacoustic composition in order to reach wider audiences, in particular disadvantaged segments of the community, and younger people. Furthermore, Emma has collaborated with a variety of organisations across the West Midlands including the Ikon, Research & Cultural Collections at the University of Birmingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts and Sampad. Emma is currently in the final phase of studies for a PhD in Musical Composition from the University of Birmingham funded by the AHRC Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership under the supervision of Annie Mahtani and Scott Wilson. She is currently a member of BEER (Birmingham Electroacoustic Ensemble for Research) and her work has been published with Urban Arts Berlin, Sonos Localia and obs акусма AUDIOR 068.
Je connais pas les mots pour dire cela…
I do not know the words to say this…
David Arango Valencia is a composer from Montreal interested in acousmatic and visual music, electronic music and soundscapes, mixing various mediums that can express meaningful and immersive experiences.David has studied composition at Université de Montréal under the direction of Jean Piché, Robert Normandeau and Martin Bédard.
In a dark spacious room a projector throws colourful animations onto the black walls and translucent screens. Shapes playfully animate. An acousmetre’s voice wells up. According to Michel Chion an acousmetre is an:
[A]cousmatic character whose relationship to the screen involves a specific kind of ambiguity and oscillation… We may define it as neither inside nor outside the image. It is not inside, because the image of the voice’s source – the body, the mouth – is not included. Nor is it outside, since it is not clearly positioned offscreen.(Chion, et al, 1994, 129)
Walk into a space that treats the entire space as a painter’s canvas, like Hans Richter’s movie-canvas but with depth in real space.
Three frames showing the progression of the movie-canvas down and out of screen, revealing a small black rectangle.
The voice and the animation go beyond the frame; background changes with foreground, negative shapes change to positive shapes and evanescent illusions are created. Walk into the film, find your own path around the screens and see the animations from all sides. Create your own shadows. Come and be immersed in your own way.
Julie Watkins is a senior lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Greenwich. She worked as lead creative in prestigious Post-Production facilities in Soho and Manhattan. She designed concepts, led Technical Direction, Animation, Motion Graphic and Visual Effects Teams, for Commercials, Broadcast Graphics and Films. She taught at New York University. She joined the University of Greenwich in 2006, initiated a Film and Television degree and partnership with the BBC. She has MA (distinction) in Graphic Design from University of the Arts London. Supporting her visual music practice she has presented papers and shown work at DRHA 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 and Sound / Image 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, Seeing Sound 2018, EVA 2018, published papers in Body Space & Technology Journal in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and is now completing a PhD.