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  Cogitation—a 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

John Young and Louise Rossiter with the Wave Field Synthesis system at AΦE Labs