Prof Battey's 'Three Breaths in Empty Space' @ Greenwich Sound/Image 2022

 

Prof Battey's audiovisual installation Three Breaths in Empty Space featured as part of the Sound/Image Conference and Festival at the University of Greenwich, Nov 18-20, 2022.

Prof Landy Chapter in 'El Callejón del Ruido'


Prof. Leigh Landy’s most recent book chapter has been published in November in the bilingual El Callejón del Ruido: Creacion, ideas y tecnologia – resonancias e impacto (1994-2019) celebrating 25 years of one of the most important Mexican new music festivals which takes place in Guanajuato. His chapter, after reminiscing over his visit to the festival during its early years, focuses on his latest composition, Aplican Términos y Condiciones, which has been commissioned by Mexico’s other major new music festival, Visiones Sonoras, in Morelia where its premiere will take place in March 2023. The chapter is entitled ‘Re-composing Mexican Radio’ and appears in the book first in Spanish (‘Re-compiendo la radio Mexicana’) and then in its original form.

 

Prof Landy Completion of Two Books

Prof. Leigh Landy recently completed two books which both went out for review over the summer. His The Music of Sounds and the Music of Things, co-authored with John Richards is still under review; however, his single-authored book, Experiencing Organised Sounds: The listening experience across diverse sound-based works (107k words, 26 ills and an online site for all audio and audio-visual media) has recently been contracted by Routledge (UK) and will be published in 2023.

 

Music from MTI @ the Silence Festival, Bari

Music by six MTI composers will feature in a concert at the Silence Festival of Acousmatic Art in Bari, Italy, on 18 December.  Pete Batchelor's Fuse, James Andean's Déchirure and John Young's Three Spaces in Mid-Air are works by staff members to be presented along with pieces by three MTI doctoral graduates: The stones can speak by Virginie Viel, Talasgair by David Holland and Tender glance by Robin Parmar.

The Silence Festival was established in 2004 to present an international spectrum of acousmatic music in concerts using the The m.ar.e acusmonium—an integrated system of 40 loudspeakers for immersive sound projection. Since 2010 the festival has been permanently based in the Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza, an exhibition centre whose aim is to stimulate interest in science and technology among young people.  This year's Silence Festival runs from 16-18 December. 

stimulate the interest of joung people in science and technology

Maggiori informazioni https://www.festivalsilence.it/about/stimul
stimulate the interest of joung people in science and technology

Maggiori informazioni https://www.festivalsilence.it/about/

created to stimulate the interest of joung people in science and technology

Maggiori informazioni https://www.festivalsilence.it/about/

Since 2010 they have permanent headquarters at the  "Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza",

a structure created to stimulate the interest of joung people in science and technology.



Maggiori informazioni https://www.festivalsilence.it/about/

Since 2010 they have permanent headquarters at the  "Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza",

a structure created to stimulate the interest of joung people in science and technology.



Maggiori informazioni https://www.festivalsilence.it/about/

Since 2010 they have permanent headquarters at the  "Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza",

a structure created to stimulate the interest of joung people in science and technology.



Maggiori informazioni https://www.festivalsilence.it/about/

John Young's 'Arioso' at the 2023 San Francisco Tape Music Festival

Prof. John Young's 2021 work Arioso has been selected for one of the four concerts comprising the 2023 San Francisco Tape Music Festival. The three-day festival—produced in conjunction with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University and sfSound—features international and Bay Area composers along with some classic compositions by Vangelis, Ennio Morricone, and legendary experimentalists Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti and Alvin Lucier. 

Arioso is based around a field recording made in Tappan Square, Oberlin, Ohio, which consists of an unlikely blend between the rich stridulation of crickets and the prosaic beeping of pedestrian crossing signals.  It was premiered at St. Ruprechtskirche, Vienna in June 2021, diffused by Thomas Gorbach.



Performing Critical AI - 27 and 29 November 2022

 

Performing Critical AI I: feedback, noise, corpus, code

Live coding algorithms, ensemble improvisation, biologically-inspired feedback systems, corpus hacking.

Sunday 27th November, 2pm **matinee**
Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin St, London E8 3DL, UK
Event info: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/peforming-critical-ai-i/

Attached to the European Research Council-funded project Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies led by Georgina Born, this is the first of two concerts showcasing artist-researchers experimenting with AI and complex systems models.

Artists:

  • Feedback Cell (Chris Kiefer and Alice Eldridge) featuring Ollie Bown
  • Anna Xambó
  • P.A. Tremblay and Owen Green


The performances will be followed by open Q & A and discussion with the artists about how and why they are using AI/machine learning.

Performing Critical AI II: body, space, action, agency

Prepared piano, handmade percussion, new compositions, and electronic improvisations situating AI with the listener in a unique 3D sound environment. Including new works by Aaron Einbond and Artemi-Maria Gioti. 

Tuesday 29th November, 8pm
Iklectik, 'Old Paradise Yard ' 20 Carlisle Ln, Royal Street corner, Archbishop's park, Lambeth, London SE1 7LG, UK
Event info: https://iklectikartlab.com/performing-critical-ai-ii-body-space-action-agency/

This is the second of the two concerts linked to the European Research Council-funded project Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies.

Artists:

  • Xenia Pestova
  • Maxime Echardour
  • Christopher Haworth
  • Sound-Image Research Group, University of Greenwich

Swedish Composer/Pianist Eva Sidén at DMU

Swedish composer/pianist Eva Sidén visited the Institute for Sonic Creativity to give a concert on 16 November in PACE Studio 1.  The concert featured two world premieres of works for piano and electroacoustic sounds: SoundPlay by DMU professor John Young and Pion d´échecs by Argentine composer Elsa Justel. Both works were commissioned by Eva prior to the series of COVID lockdowns that affected social interaction, travel and the arts industry. At the centre of the programme was French composer Tristan Murail's solo piano work Cloches d'adieu et un sourire, in memorium Messiaen, composed in 1992. The concert concluded with two works by Eva herself: Under for prepared piano and electroacoustic sounds, and Landscape Spirit, an installation work for surround sound audio, animated 3D objects and prepared piano—in which the audience was also invited to participate by adding material from the piano in real time. Earlier that day, Eva Sidén gave a workshop for staff and students on her compositional methods and her practice with prepared piano.


Eva Sidén and John Young in PACE Studio 1




Symposium Technoscientific Practices of Music - Helsinki 11 November 2022


 The symposium Technoscientific Practices of Music; New Technologies, Instruments and Agents is taking place on 11th November 2022 and will discuss the new music technologies as a process / practice / relationship that involves social and technoscientific transformations in view of music, science, philosophy, community of people, non-humans and life-world as a whole. It is not anymore a myth or urban legend, advanced AI technologies do challenge current practices of creative practitioners and offer a new perspective that redefines the relation between humans and AI. What does this say about the nature of AI and its ability to be part of the mutual incorporation? What “social connections” these AI creative agents build up in music practices, which leads to emerging aesthetics and meanings to appear that would not have been possible otherwise.

The invited speakers are:

Adnan Marquez Borbon (Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico)
Georgina Born (University College London)
Rebecca Fiebrink (University of the Arts London)
Owen Green (University of Huddersfield)
Michael Gurevich (University of Michigan)
Laurens van der Heijden (University of Twente)
Anna Xambó Sedó (De Montfort University)
Koray Tahiroğlu (Aalto University)

The full programme can be found here.
 

New work by John Young and Simon Perril at Sonic Cartography Conference


Sun  Deck  Set  Cogitationa new collaboratively realised work by John Young (Professor of Composition) and Simon Perril (Professor of Poetic Practice)—was premiered at the Sonic Cartography Conference: Soundscape, simulation and re-enactment on 28 October.  The event was held at the Historic Dockyards in Chatham and organised jointly the the Universities of Kent and Greenwich https://research.kent.ac.uk/sonic-palimpsest/sc2022/  Sun  Deck  Set  Cogitation  work is an acousmatic setting of Perril’s text of the same name which is derived from two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: a detailed notebook description of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil and a 1941 voyage on which he escaped occupied France. The collaboration condenses found-text and found-sound into a spatialised palimpsest, cut up and re-mapped into a unique meditation on experience in-the-moment. The work was realised through an invitation to create a piece for the Game of Life 192-loudspeaker wave field synthesis system currently installed in the studio of the AΦE dance company, which itself is based in the Chatham Historic Dockyards.  Wave field synthesis uses large numbers of densely arranged loudspeakers to generate highly realistic sound reproduction. DMU PhD alumna Louise Rossiter was also invited to create a new work for the wave field synthesis system at Sonic Cartography, focusing on the history of Everard's Brewery.

 

John Young's 8-channel composition Appartitions, commissioned in 2016 by the Distractfold Ensemble and premiered at the Bludenz Festival in Austria, also featured at Sonic Cartography in a concert on 30 October in the enormous 3 Slip space at the dockyards—a concert which included another DMU doctoral alumnus, Robin Parmar.

 

 

Composers in the final concert at Sonic Cartography in 3 Slip: L-R Annie Mahtani, John Young, Emma Margetson, Nadine Shütz, Cameron Naylor, Robin Parmar, Daria Baiocchi

Prof. Leigh Landy in Czechia

During the week of 24 October, Prof. Leigh Landy will be in Czechia, including a residence at Masaryk University (Brno) involving a talk, a workshop and meetings with postgraduate students on their new sound design programme, and offering a talk at HAMU (the National Academy of Music in Prague) for interested people across the Academy’s community. 

The talks will concern Landy's two recent books, one co-authored with John Richards and one focusing on issues regarding sonic creativity in the future. The workshop will demonstrate how many of these ideas are illustrated in Landy's compositions. 

There has been excellent cultural and educational exchange (e.g., Erasmus) between MTI² and the Czech Republic in the past and this is a continuation of these excellent links.



John Young wins Francis-Dhomont Prize in Montréal

John Young (Professor of Composition) has been awarded the inaugural Francis-Dhomont Prize in the AKOUSMAtique Competition for immersive digital music held at the week-long 2022 Akousma Festival in Montréal last week.  John's work—Le Chant en dehors—was created in the DMU Institute for Sonic Creativity's Diffusion Studio using a 16.2 channel 'dome' format.  Three works were selected from all entries for a final concert in the Music Multimedia Room at McGill University which comprises a system of 64 loudspeakers to form a totally immersive sonic experience.  The composer finalists spent four days in Montréal rehearsing their works in the performance space after which an international jury made the award. The Francis-Dhomont Prize carries a cash award of $4,000 and is named in honour of the eminent French electroacoustic music composer Francis Dhomont. A further audience prize of $1,500 was made to Italian composer Nicola Giannini.  The other finalist was Greek composer Panayiotis Kokoras, Director of the Centre for Experimental Music and Intermedia at the University of North Texas.  
https://mailchi.mp/akousma/concours_akousmatique_competition

                           The Music Multimedia Room at McGill University, Montréal
 

The MTI² at the British Science Festival 2022

 

 

The MTI² had a strong presence at September’s British Science Festival including a talk, a performance and a sound installation.

James Andean presented the talk Stories of Sound to an unexpectedly very large audience. This engaging talk recognised his passionate belief that the role sound has in our perception of the world often goes unrecognised. The talk focused on ‘sonic narratives’ which is also a focus in his compositions, unpicking the unique and incredible capacity that sound has for communicating actions, environments and meanings within our lives – transporting us to new and remembered worlds, as well as building a sense of the world around us.

Anna Xambó Sedó presented When Virtual Meets Reality, a research concert at the Manhattan 34 Cellar Bar on September 16, 2022, consisting of a presentation, performance and Q&A. The presentation introduced the practice of live coding and the music technologies that were going to be used in the performance. The performance was a live coding session using the self-developed tool MIRLCa. The audience was invited to participate in a live chat by suggesting words or 'tags' to be used by the performer to search sounds. The session concluded with a Q&A including the results of an online survey distributed among the audience. The performance can be seen online here. The British Science Festival writes: ‘the same code that creates the web pages and apps we use every day can be used to create music'. She sources her sonic material in real-time from an online collection of Creative Commons crowdsourced sonic samples, Freesound.org. All such concerts are one-of-a-kind performances as decisions are made during the performance and, of course, audience input will always be different. 

Bret Battey’s contemplative, audiovisual installation Traces, Molten premiered Sep 13-16 at LCB Depot as part of DMU’s collaboration with the British Science Festival. The ultra-high-definition video was rendered with custom software that uses thousands of individual optimisation search agents to create highly intricate, gradually transforming textures. Battey provided a quote from Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ as an epigram to the installation: ‘See ever so far, there is limitless space outside that, / Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.’

Battey's Estuaries 4 receives ICMA ‘Best Regional Music (Europe) Award' for 2022

Bret Battey's audiovisual composition Estuaries 4 was awarded the ‘Best Regional Music (Europe) Award' for 2022 from the International Computer Music Association, from a field of 362 works submitted to the Association’s annual conference.

Battey's Estuaries 4 receives 'Best Video' award, MuVi6

Prof Bret Battey’s latest audiovisual composition, ‘Estuaries 4’ (2021), has been awarded the ‘Best Video’ prize by MuVi6, an international exhibition of video and moving image on synesthesia and visual music. It will be screened in the MuVi6 conference at the University of Granada in October and will be featured in an associated online exhibition and a print book release.  

‘Estuaries 4’ was also recently screened at the Sound and Music Computing Conference (Saint Etienne, France), the NoiseFloor Festival (University of Saffordshire), the International Computer Music Conference (University of Limerick), and the COMMUTE Festival of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. It is also scheduled for September screening at the Over the Real video art festival in Lucca, Italy.


 

Newly Published: Bret Battey's book review of Ciciliani, et al 'Ludified'

Prof Bret Battey's review of Marko Ciciliani, Barbara Lüneburg and Andreas Pirchner (eds.), Vol. 1: Ludified: Artistic Research in Audiovisual Composition, Performance & Perception and Vol. 2: Game Elements in Marko Ciciliani’s Audiovisual Works. has now been published in Organised Sound 27(1). https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S1355771822000127.

 

New Work by John Young selected for AKOUSMAtique Competition, Montréal

John Young’s most recent work Le Chant en dehors (2022), realised in an 18-channel surround-sound ‘dome’ format, has been selected as a finalist in the AKOUSMAtique Montréal international competition, part of the Akousma Festival of Immersive Digital Music. Three finalists have been selected anonymously by a jury from 50 international submissions: the two other finalists are Nicola Giannini (Italy) and Panayiotis Kokoras (Greece). The finalists will spatialise their works in a concert in the Multimedia Room of the McGill University-based Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology on 14 October 2022. Two prizes will be awarded: the  Francis-Dhomont prize (chosen by the jury) and the Micheline Coulombe-Saint-Marcoux prize (chosen by the public). 


 


Presence at NIME 2022

 

 

Visda Goudarzi and Anna Xambó jave presented a paper and a performance at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2022 (NIME 2022, 28 June - 1 July), which has been virtually held at Waipapa Taumata Rau, Aotearoa / The University of Auckland, New Zealand.

The short paper “The Mobile Audience as a Digital Musical Persona in Telematic Performance” discusses a self-built mobile web app, personic, designed for distributed audiences to constitute a digital musical instrument. It can be read at De Montfort Open Research Archive (DORA): https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/22012

The performance “Ear to Waipapa Taumata Rau” is a live-coding performance by performers from two different continents remotely exploring the sonic components of Waipapa Taumata Rau. It can be watched on YouTube. The performance paper is available at DORA: https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/22071.

shreds by Gerard Roma and Anna Xambó @ ICLI2022 and WAC2022

 

Pulso performing shreds at the Web Audio Conference 2022, Cannes, France. Photo by Ariane Stolfi.
 
shreds is a collaborative live coding performance by electronic music duo Pulso (Gerard Roma and Anna Xambó). In this performance, the duo uses a self-built live-coding environment in JavaScript that shows two code editors, one for each performer. The piece has been presented online at the International Conference on Live Interfaces (ICLI 2022, June 20-23) in Lisboa, Portugal, and on-site at the Web Audio Conference (WAC 2022, 6-8 July) in Cannes, France. 

The performance presented at ICLI 2022 can be watched on YouTube. Further information about the performance can be found in this performance paper on De Montfort Open Research Archive: https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/22072

Anna Xambó Interviewed on FluCoMa Podcast #06

In Episode 6 of the FluCoMa Podcast, Jacob Hart talks to the musician, developer, researcher and teacher Anna Xambó. The podcast discusses a number of her research projects, and how they feed into her creative practice. Her use of MIR techniques for live-coding, and dealing with large, online, crowd-sourced corpora on a platform such as Freesound are notably discussed.
The podcast can be watched on YouTube. Further information can be found at: https://learn.flucoma.org/explore/xambo/

Battey's Clonal Colonies at Melbourne ACMI July 5

Bret Battey's Clonal Colonies I will screen July 5, 2022, at ACMI Melbourne, in 'Oskar's Legacy | Filmmakers Influenced by Fischinger' — in association with the Centre for Visual Music (Los Angeles). More information is available here


Leigh Landy @ Conference on Sound & Music Technology, Hangzhou

MTI²'s Prof. Leigh Landy has been invited to speak at this year’s Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) hosted by the Zhejiang Conservatory of Music and Zhejiang University, Hangzhou which will take place 10-12 June 2022. His talk is entitled, ‘Making Innovative Music with Sounds is for Everyone’. 

The conference url can be found at: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Qv5Ebql-tbQJ-R8E8aV1jA



John Young Concert at Klang! Festival, Montpellier 4 June

John Young will give a concert of four works at the Klang! Festival Saturday 4 June in the Salle Molière / Opéra Comédie, Montpellier, France.  The concert will include two world premieres: Hidden Spaces (2019) which presents sound portraits of three locations—Refsta (Sweden), Montréal and Dobbiaco (Italy) —and Le Chant en dehors (2022) an 18-channel immersive audio composition. The programme will also include Arioso (2021) and Three Spaces in Mid-Air (2017). The Klang! Festival is organised by the Maison des Arts Sonores, Montpellier.

https://www.electropresence.com/fr/even/44320/klang-electroacoustique-2022-ambrose-seddon-john



A Statement by Music, Technology and Innovation (MTI²) Staff Against Proposed Job Cuts & Call to Action

In its 22 years of existence, Music, Technology and Innovation (MTI2) has been a fixture of De Montfort University’s cultural and academic life. It is recognised for world-leading creative practice and scholarship, as recently demonstrated by it being ranked among the university’s top three units of assessment in REF2021.

The MTI2 Institute for Sonic Creativity’s significance has considerable reach, having established international partnerships all across Europe and beyond (Canada, Mexico, China, Japan), while it also holds the editorship of the international journal Organised Sound, published by Cambridge University Press.

We were one of the very first departments to introduce Music Technology to the UK university landscape, taking a leading role in developing the subject. Our alumni have since developed a strong track record all across the music industry in an impressively wide range of careers and roles as well as contributing to Leicester and the region in entrepreneurship, community arts, education, and local music and arts industries. Our current students continue to benefit from these foundations and have expressed high levels of student satisfaction, as evidenced in the 2021 National Student Survey.

Despite MTI2’s high international, national, and local profile, the university has chosen to consciously disinvest and imperil this legacy, citing financial pressures. Five full-time positions (professors, reader, senior lecturer) are proposed to be made redundant, amounting to a reduction of our teaching and research staff by 42%.

We contest this proposal, which, amongst other shortcomings, 

  1. does not recognise the significant contributions MTI2 continues to make, 
  2. ignores the impact the pandemic has had on limiting research activity, and 
  3. employs student-to-staff metrics that take none of our research students into account.


Call to Action - What you can do

As the period of consultation of the proposed redundancies ends on 17 June 2022, please take action before this deadline.

As alumni, current students, family, friends and the wider public:


If you as alumni and members of our academic peer network want to support us even more, please consider:

  • Writing a letter of support addressed to our senior management. We call on sympathetic parties to write to our senior management to share their concerns:
    • Professor Katie Normington, DMU Vice-Chancellor - katie.normington at dmu.ac.uk 
    • Professor Shushma Patel, Dean, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media - shushma at dmu.ac.uk 
    • Dr James Russell, Head of the Leicester Media School - JRussell at dmu.ac.uk

This statement was written collectively by the Music, Technology and Innovation (MTI2) Institute for Sonic Creativity staff team.




 

Ear to Waipapa Taumata Rau - NIME2022 Performance Premiere, Thu. 19 May 2022

 


Ear to Waipapa Taumata Rau by Visda Gourdarzi & Anna Xambó 

Free Online NIME2022 Performance Premiere

Thursday, May 19th, 2022, 10:00 AM CDT (UTC -5) // 16.00 PM BST (UTC +1)

Livestream : https://www.twitch.tv/gvisda

 ‘Ear to Waipapa Taumata Rau’ is a live-coding performance by performers from two different continents remotely exploring the sonic components of the location of the NIME2022 conference - Waipapa Taumata Rau. The improvised performance is based on processing sound generated by crowdsourced field recordings from Waipapa Taumata Rau from Freesound.org. The piece is a premiere for NIME2022 and a free interpretation of John Cage’s ‘A Dip in the Lake’. The defining feature of this piece is although the conference participants, listeners and performers are globally distributed, by listening and contributing to the whole composition they could feel in location by their ears. The audience can also interact with the piece live visually and sonically on their mobile devices.

 




 

 

 

Leigh Landy - Visiting Professor residencies

Next week MTI² director Leigh Landy will be in residence as Visiting Professor in Northern Ireland (Belfast, Derry) at Ulster University: 

https://www.ulster.ac.uk/research/topic/music-drama-dance-performing-arts-film-and-screen-studies/visiting-professors 

Prof. Landy will then be Visiting Professor in residence at the University of Bournemouth in mid-June.




Leigh Landy keynote @ NoiseFloor '22

Next week (May 12th & 13th), MTI² director Leigh Landy will be the keynote speaker for NoiseFloor 2022, with a talk titled 'Art for Art’s Sake vs. Art for Life’s Sake', as well as presenting two of his compositions:

https://noisefloor.org.uk/keynote-speakers-2022/

In addition, MTI²'s Professor of Audio-visual Composition Bret Battey's latest work, Estuaries 4, will be performed, as well as a talk by MTI² PhD student Stefano Catena.



John Young's 'Arioso' wins 2nd prize at 2022 Destellos Competition

 MTI²'s Prof. John Young's acousmatic composition 'Arioso' has won 2nd prize at the 2022 Destellos Competition:

http://www.fundestellos.org/pageone.htm

Congratulations to John, and to the other winners!



Associate Professorship for MTI² alum Katerina Tzedaki

MTI² Doctoral alumna Katerina Tzedaki has recently been promoted to Associate Professor in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Hellenic Mediterranean University in Crete, in the Department of Music Technology and Acoustics. 

Katerina completed her PhD at De Montfort in 2012, supervised by Professor Simon Emmerson. Her work in electroacoustic music composition is especially focused on soundscape research, acoustic ecology, and soundwalking practice, as well as electronic musical instruments and interactive music systems. She is a founding member of the Hellenic Association of Electroacoustic Music Composers and of the Hellenic Society for Acoustic Ecology.

www.ktzedaki.net 



Battey's 'Estuaries 4' Scheduled for NoiseFloor and ICMC 2022

Prof Battey's audiovisual work Estuaries 4 has been chosen for screening in the Staffordshire University NoiseFloor Festival (12-13 May) and the 2022 International Computer Music Conference (Limerik, Ireland, 3-9 July).


 

 

 

A Full Weekend of BEAST @ Centrala Concerts

 

This weekend starting from today, Friday 11th March, there are a series of concerts at Centrala in Birmingham.

The show will be kicking off on Friday at 7.30pm with immersive performances by Milad K. Mardakheh and Anna Xambó Sedó. The evening will also feature short performances by BEAST MA composers: Henry Eady, Michael Ryan, Joshua Dowling and Sam Bland.

On Saturday there will be two more concerts. On Saturday at 7pm the improvising laptop trio, Raw Green Rust formed by Jules Rawlinson, Owen Green and Dave Murray-Rust will serve up humorous abstract glitch-dub from promiscuous audio processing. On Saturday at 8.30pm there will be a performance featuring Dushume (Amit D. Patel), Maria Witek and Jake Williams.

The full weekend ticket to the three concerts as part of BEAST @ Centrala can be found at: https://bit.ly/3hvmN50

Do come along!

 


Bret Battey's 'Estuaries 4' @ Tempo Reale

 The latest audiovisual work from MTI²'s Bret Battey, 'Estuaries 4', will be included as part of the 'LAMPI | Rassegna di audiovisioni' event at Tempo Reale, in Firenze, Italy, and streaming online TONIGHT, Thursday 10th March, at 7 pm Italian time. 

The concert will stream on Tempo Reale’s channels (Facebook & Instagram @temporealefirenze) 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca47qu6NWVp/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/temporealefirenze/photos/a.504532732907013/5601933096500259/

More info: https://temporeale.it/news/lampi-rassegna-di-audiovisioni-i-parte/



International Women's Day 2022 at MTI2


 

We are happy to be part of the International Women's Day global celebrations to annually commemorate the women's cultural, political and socio-economic achievements as well as to raise awareness of the women's rights movement.

Today the MTI2 is involved with / contributes to the following activities:
 

LIVECODERA: a global live coding community gathering on International Women's day from 12:00 (GMT+1)

Website: https://livecodera.glitch.me

A global gathering of women livecoders, both musicians and visualists, who will be showcasing their work as well as organising open jams and talks. The space can be experienced on YouTube at https://youtu.be/tk70oJ_cfR8 or on Mozilla Hubs at https://hubs.mozilla.com/focK68L. The lively flyer has been designed by Flor de Fuego and Joana Chicau using Olivia Jack's Hydra and is adapted from Lynn Randolph's 1989 painting "Cyborg", used in Donna Haraway's book cover of "Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature".

Emerging Audio Technologies by Dr. Rebecca Stewart at 15.00 (GMT)

Dr. Rebecca Stewart from Imperial College London will be giving the inaugural talk "Audio Threads: physical interfaces and interactions with audio using textiles" at 15.00 GMT as part of the Careers in Music and Audio Technology series curated by Dr. Sven-Amin Lembke

Abstract: Digital audio allows for the separation of the mechanism generating sound from the device controlling the parameters defining it. We have become accustomed to controllers consisting of plastic boxes with dials and faders, but what if we broadened the materials used to include fabric and thread? This talk will introduce the intersection of audio and electronic textiles (e-textiles) and discuss how we can construct new audio interactions.

Bio: Dr Becky Stewart is a lecturer in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London where she researches body-centric technologies centred around e-textiles and audio interfaces. She completed her PhD with the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London in 2010, her MSc in Music Technology from the University of York in 2006, and BM in Music Engineering Technology and Computer Science from the University of Miami in 2005. Before returning to academia in 2015 she co-founded Codasign, an arts technology education company which led technology workshops with creative institutions. Throughout her career she has been working to make technical topics like coding and electronics accessible to those trained in the creative industries.
 

female:pressure IWD 2022 playlist curated by Ana Maria Romano

Ana Maria Romano is a Colombian composer and interdisciplinary sound artist. Her creative interests centre around acoustic and electroacoustic media and participation in interdisciplinary projects involving contemporary dance, videodance, performance and live arts. Her creative interests stem from the intersection of gender, sound and technology, listening, soundscape, noise, experimentation, improvisation, cyberspace, body and the political dimension of the creative. Ana Maria Romano has carefully curated a playlist for female::pressure.

Founded by Vienna based Electric Indigo in 1998, female:pressure is a transnational online database and network of more than 2800 women*, AFAB, transgender, transfeminine, transmasculine, intersex [+gender optional], genderqueer, gender nonconforming, a-gender and/or non-binary DJs, musicians, composers, producers, visual artists, agents, journalists and researchers working in the realms of electronic music and visual arts. 

The link to the playlist will be provided as soon as the playlist is published.


Battey Interviewed on 'How to Enjoy Experimental Film' Podcast


In interview with Prof Bret Battey has just been released as part of the How to Enjoy Experimental Film podcast series by Daniel Adams. The discussion covers aspects of Battey's audio-visual technique and aesthetics and its relation to the history of both classical music and what is sometimes called 'visual music'. The podcast can be heard on Spotify and through other podcast providers.

Call: Convergence 2022!











CONVERGENCE 2022: ...Making it UP!

De Montfort University
Institute for Sonic Creativity—MTI2
Leicester, UK
22-25 September 2022

Convergence 2022 will be a festival/conference celebrating new work and ideas in music and technology. Following the inaugural event in 2019, we now call for work to be included in Convergence 2022.

Submissions in the form of creative outputs, performances, artist talks and research papers related to all genres of music and technology are welcome.

https://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/research-faculties-and-institutes/technology/mtirc/convergence-2022.aspx

21st century musical creativity rides on the convergence of many streams of musical cultures, styles and value systems.  The previous century’s passage through modernist and postmodern imperatives, mixes and meetings of cultures has propelled us into a state of glorious collision, where tradition and innovation coexist in fusion and confusion.  New technologies are a central element in this creative ferment - from immersive multichannel and audiovisual environments, expressions of artificial intelligence and transmedia storytelling to human-machine interaction and hardware hacking. 

How might we make sense of this multiplicity of creative endeavours? What are the tensions and synergies we feel amongst the creative approaches of practitioners and between the insights of theorists and critics? What, if anything, might we sense is our relationship with the ideals and cultural products of the past?  How does the collective imagination of artists, engineers and listeners collaboratively shape the way we form our future? 

We also want to address the following questions:

In what ways has creativity been influenced by the distinctive possibilities of new technologies?  

How do we recognise what is new in our field and what makes it new?

How might we trace the roots of electroacoustic music’s practices and theories and how might they compare across different cultures? 

Do we still have, or need, a theoretical canon in music—and did we really ever have one? 

How might notions of modern and postmodern be reflected in the sonic arts?

Does the technology of music build bridges across musical and other artistic cultures, or has it made a wall around itself?

What new conceptual tools do we have or need for understanding relationships between digital sound and image?

How do we improvise with music technologies?

Do we have, or need, new ways to write about digitally mediated music to express our relationship with it?

Across cultures and diverse creative agendas, how do creative people find each other and form effective communities?

How might audiences connect what they hear in electronic/electroacoustic/computer generated music with more familiar languages within popular music, folk music, classical forms, or jazz? 

Do we have, or need, a map for these many new directions, or are we making it up?

For enquiries
John Young, Convergence 2022 Chair
E: convergence[at]dmu.ac.uk

Keynotes

Our keynote speakers for 2022 are Joanna Demers and Tim Garland.

Joanna Demers is Professor of Musicology at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California.  One of today’s most authoritative and interesting thinkers on music and technology she is author of Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford University Press, 2010); Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press, 2006); Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World (Zero Books, 2015) and; Anatomy of Thought-Fiction: CHS Report, 2214 (Zero Books, 2017).

Tim Garland is a world-renowned jazz musician: saxophonist, composer and arranger. A former member of Chick Corea's bands Origin and The Vigil, and with over 40 albums and a Grammy Award to his credit, Garland is internationally respected across jazz and classical music as performer, composer, orchestrator and educator in genres spanning symphonic and small combo blends of notated and improvised music-making.  Tim Garland’s Duology, with Jason Rebello (piano) will perform in an evening concert at Convergence 2022.

Submissions

We welcome submissions from all researchers, composers and artists whose work involves or seeks to understand relationships between music, sound and new technologies.

Links to submission portals follow each submission category below.

The deadline for all submissions is 31 March, 23:59 BST.

All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed, and acceptance notified by early May 2022.

Research Papers

https://de-montfort.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/convergence-2022-papers-posters

Scholarly papers on any aspect of the application of new technologies to music are welcome, including, but not limited to:

Compositional methods

Improvisation

New performance practices

Audiovisual practices

Virtual and augmented reality

Artificial intelligence

Live coding

DIY electronics

Hardware hacking

Sampling/sampling culture

New interfaces for composition/performance

Perspectives on theory and analysis

Case studies of works

Studies on sonority and sound design

Listening behaviours and audience reception

Auditory perception and psychoacoustics

Spatialisation

Collaborative processes

Software design

Educational initiatives in music and music technology

Approaches to neurodiversity in music

Cultural contexts

Situatedness in music

Ethnographic perspectives

Music and gender

Audio testimony and storytelling

Historical studies

Music in cross-arts contexts: dance, drama, live art, etc

Radio art

Music and environment

Sound ecology

Papers will be allocated 30 minutes in total, 20 minutes presentation (including any audio/video examples offered) plus 10 minutes for questions.

Abstracts should be no more than 3,800 characters in length and clearly summarise the aims, methods and results of the research.

Posters

https://de-montfort.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/convergence-2022-papers-posters

Submissions should be in the form of a link to summary document, no more than two A4 pages in length, minimum font size 11point and may include example images.  Any additional technical requirements should also be specified. The content should summarise the research aims, methods and outcomes clearly and concisely. Selected poster presentations will be supplied by conference delegates in A1 format, and should be designed to be legible from approx. 1.5m.

Artist Talks

https://de-montfort.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/test-convergence-artist-talk

Artist talks provide a space for those presenting a piece at Convergence 2022 to express speculative or provocative aesthetic, technical or contextualising ideas relating to their work. These should be no more than 12 minutes in duration, with no more than two slides, and may include audio/video examples. Abstracts should be no more than 2,500 characters in length.  A collective Q&A will be held at the end of a session.  Proposing an artist talk (or not) will not influence the music /performance/installation or papers/posters selection process.

Music / Performance / Installations

https://de-montfort.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/convergence-2022

We welcome all forms of music made entirely by or with the assistance of digital or other electronic technologies—with or without conventional instruments eg. acousmatic, audiovisual, live performance with computers, mixed instrumental-electroacoustic works, hardware hacking/DIY, etc.  

Performances demonstrating a novel approach to acoustic sound sources are also welcome.  Submissions from performers (solo or ensemble) offering repertoire not of their own creation/composition are welcome.

We will accept up to two submissions in this category per applicant, but will limit final selection to one work per person.

Multi-channel compositions that are suitable for the DMU PACE Studios can be considered. The PACE 1 array supports up to 33.2 discrete channels, including stereo diffusion).  

A further 8.1 channel array will be available in PACE Studio 2.

Preference may be given to music with a performance duration of no more than 12 minutes.

Convergence 2022 will not be able to supply performers for works submitted—instrumentalists must be supplied by composers and it will unfortunately not be possible to offer fees to performers.

Bespoke materials or resources, such as modified instruments or hardware essential to the work to be performed must be supplied by participants.

In the application portal below, please include a permanent web link appropriate to the nature of your work (eg Website, Google Drive, Soundcloud, Dropbox, Vimeo – please do not use a time-limited method such as Wetransfer).

For acousmatic/audio only work, include files used in performance and a stereo version (binaural is acceptable) as well as a sound projection plan for multichannel works.

For work involving traditional instrumentalists/live performance include a score, where relevant, and indicative recording/realisation.

For work involving other forms of performance (eg. hacked hardware, live [performance] art focused, live coding, D/VJ-ing, mixed media), please provide an online video link (Vimeo, etc) in addition to a brief statement of concept.

For audiovisual submissions (fixed media), please include a link to a streaming site (eg Vimeo) for submission-review purposes. AV work selected for Convergence 2022 must then be provided as MP4 or MOV containers, normally with H264, H265 or Apple ProRes compression, up to 1920x1080 resolution, 25 or 30 FPS, and audio at least 48kHz/16 bit, in up to 7.1 format.

We welcome installations with a clear focus on audio content and a limited number may be presented at Convergence 2022, depending on the required resources and suitable match between available spaces and the nature of the work. In your submission please include a full description of content and concept, visual layout, example images (still or moving), an indication of suitable types of spaces and a stereo audio example.