Luca Forcucci: Broadcast of De Rerum Natura

Doctoral student Luca Forcucci's piece De Rerum Natura was diffused in excerpt on Deutschland radio at the end of December as part of Newcomer Werkstatt.

John Young / Musica Nova Competition

John Young's piece X (2010) for piano and electroacoustic sounds has been awarded an Honorary Mention in the 2011 Musica Nova Competition in Prague.  The piece was composed for Welsh-based Xenia Pestova, and premiered by her in Bangor in September this year.

X will be included in a concert at DMU on 2 March 2012 as part of the University's Cultural Exchanges Festival.

Leigh Landy Premieres New ZKM Commission

In November, Leigh Landy presented two works in the main Kubus concert at the ARD Hörspiel Tage (Radio Play Festival) at the ZKM – this included his new ZKM commissioned work, Radio-aktiv, composed in 24-channels for the Sound Dome and his work, To BBC or Not. Both works contain samples taken from national radio recording which are recomposed. All three of his radio pieces, along with other works, will be presented during De Montfort University's Cultural Exchanges Festival in late February 2012.

He will also present a keynote talk and a composition at the Symposium for Performance of Electronic and Experimental Music (SPEEC) at Oxford University 6-7 January 2012.

Leigh Landy and MTI Concert at Musicacoustica, Beijing 2011

Leigh Landy performed in the opening concert at this year’s Musicacoustica 2011 festival in Beijing in October. A picture of Landy performing appeared in ‘China Daily’. He also presented an entire MTI concert at this festival.

Works by Bret Battey at The Big Screen Project, NYC

Bret Battey's audiovisual compositions Autarkeia Aggregatum and Mercurius featured over several weeks at the Big Screen Project in New York City, along with works by computer animation pioneer Larry Cuba and artist Makoto Yabuki. The 10,000-square foot outdoor multimedia venue in midtown Manhattan features a 30 x 16 ft. HD-format LED screen. The show was curated by Leaders in Software and Art.

Bret Battey - "Clonal Colonies" premieres in Delaware and NYC

Bret Battey's new audiovisual composition Clonal Colonies, a commission from New York's Avian Orchestra, was premiered by the ensemble in September in Delaware and at the The Cell, New York. The work is in two movements, for Pierrot ensemble, computer-realised sound, and video. A "clonal colony" is a group of genetically identical plants. Child plants are propagated by "runners" that emerge from a parent plant. This serves as an analogy to the "Variable-Coupled Map Networks" algorithm approach that Battey applied in composing the piece.

Luca Forcucci: Chinese Soundscape Research

The Electronic Music Foundation's "Ear to the Earth" website featured doctoral student Luca Forcucci's Chinese soundscape research this past August.

Summer 2011 Postgrad News

Yiannis Christofides's sound work for Water Rites, a video piece by Michael Kontopoulos, will be part of a group exhibition Speculative at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood, CA, curated by Christopher O’Leary and Zach Blas. The exhibition will run for three months. Links Speculative; Kontopoulos; Editorial at Rhizome.

Panos Amelides's fixed media audio piece Ritual Attacks will be performed at Pixilerations New Media Festival, which is produced by collaborators including Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. http://pixilerations.org/2011/ 

Luca Forcucci won a residency in Shanghai for 4 months, where he will be working on a new composition. His latest work, Transition, has been reviewed on the EMF website www.emf.org. The premiere of his piece Music for Brainwaves occurred in Riverside, California, and is reviewed here. Luca also gave also a workshop to the students of the Faculty of Music at Riverside.

Summer 2011 Keynotes by MTI Staff

MTI staff will be presenting keynote addresses at the following events: Simon Emmerson NZEMS/ACMA 2011 (Auckland, July) & ICMC 2011 (Huddersfield, July/Aug.); Leigh Landy “Technology and Aesthetics” Conference (Oslo, May), Forum for Innovation in Music Production and Composition (Leeds, May), EMS2011 (New York, June).

EU Culture Grant: "Composing with Sounds"

The MTI has been awarded an EU Culture grant. “Composing with Sounds” is a project in which the Sound Organiser creative software will be made available primarily for children aged 11-14 (but also to interested people of all ages). Its web environment will host the software, composed works and sessions (for remixing) as well as a social networking area. The MTI and the project partners — INA/GRM (Paris), ZKM (Karlsruhe), NOTAM (Oslo), Miso Music (Parede, Lisbon), and EPHMEE/Ionian University (Corfu) — will hold schools workshops and then two children per country will be paired with a professional composer to create works with the same sound material for performances in public concerts in all six countries. The project runs from May 2011 to April 2013.

Full House for Symposium on Form in Electroacoustic Music

Though it was held on a Sunday, we had a full house for the Symposium on Form in Electroacoustic Music, organised by Prof John Young. Our distinguished roster of presenters included Stephen McAdams (McGill University, Montreal), John Young (De Montfort University, Leicester), Bill Brunson (Royal College of Music, Stockholm), John Dack (Middlesex University), Jonty Harrison (University of Birmingham), Sean Ferguson (McGill University, Montreal), Simon Emmerson (De Montfort University, Leicester). The session concluded with summary and reflection from Georgina Born (University of Oxford), Jøran Rudi (NOTAM, Oslo), and Denis Smalley (City University, London).

NOTAM Visit Launches International Exchange Performance Series

On January 27th, MTI launched the 2011 part of its public events programme with the first of a new series of international exchange performances. Jøran Rudi is Artistic and Scientific Director of NOTAM, the Norwegian Centre for Technology in Music and the Arts. MTI has a memorandum of research exchange and Rudi is keen to collaborate with MTI on a wide range of developments, including software, conference & symposia and performances. The well attended concert in Pace 1 presented electroacoustic and audio-visual pieces by Jøran Rudi himself and by NOTAM visiting composers Natasha Barrett, Anders Vinjar and Risto Holopainen.