Prof Bret Battey's audiovisual composition 'Estuaries 4' was screened 27 Mar 2025 at Carnegie Melon University, Pittsburgh as part of a international selection of works presented by AV@CMU.
Prof. Bret Battey and PhD candidate Stefano Catena have chapters in a new book Collaboration, Engagement, and Tradition in Contemporary and Electronic Music: NoiseFloor Perspectives, just published by Routledge. The book’s contents have been developed from selected papers given at Staffordshire University’s NoiseFloor conference.
Bret Battey and Deniz Ertan (musicologist, educator and classical guitarist) have co-created a new audiovisual installation, ‘time, bruised, selves’, which is opening to the public at Leicester’s Phoenix Cinema and Gallery on Friday, Dec 6. It will run until late March. Continually transforming, ultra-detailed abstract imagery dances within a classical guitar sound world. The work is inspired by the perpetual procession of three intertwined states of being, as evoked by the title.
https://www.phoenix.org.uk/events/time-bruised-selves/
Also for the Phoenix gallery, Battey has curated a retrospective selection of films from the ten episodes of ‘Visible Bits, Audible Bytes’ that MTI has presented at Phoenix since 2010, bringing extraordinary digital audiovisual artworks from around the world to Leicester audiences. One reel focuses on audiovisual compositions from Montreal, and the other on works that blur the line between the abstract and the concrete. https://www.phoenix.org.uk/events/visible-bits-audible-bytes-retrospective/. This retrospective opens with and runs in parallel with ‘time, bruised, selves’.
Three DMU researchers will present music and papers at The University of Greenwich's Sound/Image 2024 Festival in November.
PhD student Stefano Catena will present his paper 'Organised space: the terminology problem of spatialisation' and Bret Battey's audiovisual Estuaries 4 work will feature in one of the concerts along with a paper he will give on that work entitled 'Estuaries 4: Events and Continuums'. Professor Emeritus Simon Emmerson is to present a paper ‘An imaginary Soundwalk’ developed from a talk given at the M4C-funded Spatial Audio Gathering at DMU in June, as well as diffusing his work Near and Far at Once in the opening concert. Battey's audiovisual installation Traces, Molten—first presented at the LCB Depot in Leicester as part of the 2022 British Science Festival—will also feature in the festival.
 |
| A still image from Battey's Estuaries 4 |
We are delighted that today two MTI PhD students start PhD funding with the AHRC-funded Midlands Four Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium of eight institutions in Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham and Coventry/Warwick.
Matthew London will be embarking on his PhD in the area of film music and sound design in a project entitled The Integrated Soundtrack: An analytical exploration of the auditory elements of music, sound design and dialogue within horror cinema, supervised by Simon Atkinson, Leigh Landy and Laraine Porter.
Edward Clijsen is completing a practice-led PhD on microtonality in music: Practical Explorations of Formalised Approaches to Microtonal Composition, supervised by John Young, Bret Battey and Duncan MacLeod (University of Nottingham).
They join a strong contingent of M4C-funded PhD students in music at DMU with Cristiana Palandri, Stefano Catena, Rob Chafer, Sam Topley and Ross Davidson all current M4C PhD candidates.
 |
| Edward Clijsen (L) and Matthew London (R) |
Bret Battey's audiovisual composition 'Estauries 4' has been programmed for the Musicacoustica Hangzhou Festival, China, which runs Sep 24-29 at the Zhejiang Conservatory of Music.
'Estuaries 4' has also been programmed for the Sound/Image Festival 2024 at University of Greenwich, where Battey will also present his audiovisual installation work 'Traces, Molten' and a paper on 'Estuaries 4'.
Prof Bret Battey’s audiovisual composition ‘Estuaries 4’ has been selected for screening at the Imagina AniFest in New York City at the end of December:
The jury of Prix CIME 2023 awarded Bret Battey's Estuaries 4 a Distinction in the Video Music category (along with João Pedro Oliveira for Coalescence).
Prof Battey's audiovisual composition 'Estuaries 2' recently screened at Montana State University (Sep 24, 2023) and 'Estuaries 4' at Iowa State University (Sep 30). Estuaries 4 is also scheduled to appear at the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney on October 10.
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.’