John Young's article 'The Sound Pool' / 'Le réservoir sonore' published

A short article by Prof. John Young 'The Sound Pool' / 'Le réservoir sonore' was published today in a collection of artists' statements Did You Say Sound Library / Vous avez dit sonothèque?  edited by Valentin Sismann in both French and English.

The collection includes statements from 23 composers on ways in which they gather, categorise and organise the sounds they make in the course of composing acousmatic music. It will be of interest to anyone working creatively with sound—in composition and/or sound design in many different settings.

The 50-page collection includes statements by François Bayle, Philippe Mion, Robert Normandeau, Elsa Justel, Hans Tutschku, Jonty Harrison, Elizabeth Anderson, Annette Vande Gorne, Tomonari Higaki, Ana Dall’Ara-Majek, Daniel Teruggi, Marco Marini, Armando Balice, Régis Renouard Larivière, Christine Groult, Denis Dufour, Jean-Marc Duchenne, Christian Zanési, Stéphane Roy, Lucie Prod’homme, Åke Parmerud and Young, as well as insight into the working methods of Bernard Paremgiani by Claude-Anne Parmegiani, Maxime Barthélemy and Marco Marini.

English version: https://valentinsismann.com/Vous-avez-dit-sonotheque-ENG

French version: https://valentinsismann.com/Vous-avez-dit-sonotheque

 

Valentin Sismann

 

 

MTIRG Symposium 9 April 2025

MTIRG members met on 9 April in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Lab for a day-long symposium to share research.

Presentations were given by:

Robert Chafer—Mixed Reality Spatial Audio Composition: a distribution platform for multichannel electroacoustic works
Matt Rogerson—Dromos/Autos: The Autistic Ontology as Performance
Edward Clijsen—Redividing the Octave for Expanded Tonal Spaces: Reflections on Recent Practical Explorations of Formalised Approaches to Microtonal Composition
Matthew London—The Integrated Soundtrack: An Analytical Exploration of the Auditory Elements of Music, Sound Design, and Dialogue Within Horror Cinema
Cristiana Palandri—Materialising sound-based composition: exploring multisensory perception and audience engagement between tactile and sonic spheres
Stefano Catena—Analysis and findings of Intention/Reception questionnaires on spatialisation in acousmatic music
Conor Snape—From Concept to Gameplay: Practical Approaches to IDM Derived Sound Effect & Adaptive Audio Design in Modern Video Game Development)
Joe Stillwell—A Study in Movers and Musicians: A Multidisciplinary Lens of Improvisation)
John Young—The Long and Short of Acousmatic Music).

Presenters at the MTIRG Symposium, clockwise, L-R: Edward Clijsen, Conor Snape, Robert Chafer, Joe Stillwell, Matt Rogerson, John Young, Matthew London. Centre: Stefano Catena, Cristiana Palandri

 

Louise Rossiter Concerts in Austria

On 13-14 December DMU PhD alumna Louise Rossiter will give four concerts in Gars am Kamp, Austria at The Temple of Sound in a collaboration between Austrian and British composers and as art of the series of concerts promoted by the Russolo Foundation in conjunction with the British Electroacoustic Music Network.

The concerts will feature music by Adam Stanovic, John Young, Jonty Harrison, Pete Stollery, Cameron Naylor and Louise Rossiter alongside a showcase of Gabriel Prokofiev’s Oscillations label. https://gars-electronica.art/en/

Louise will also be launching her new album Der Industriepalast - the culmination of her work exploring the infographics of Fritz Kahn. 

The CD will be available shortly from https://oscillations-music.bandcamp.com/music

 

John Young the Eastman School of Music Oct-Nov 2024

 John Young was guest composer at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester USA last week (28.10 – 1.11). He gave two lectures to groups of undergraduate and doctoral students and a 90-minute presentation on his work at the Eastman Composition Department seminar, as well as individual masterclasses for doctoral students. 

On the final evening of his visit John also presented two works in a concert hosted by the Eastman electroacoustic music department—EMuSE—sharing the programme with Eastman students and faculty members in the school’s new Hatch Recital Hall: the acousmatic work Arioso (2021) and a new work composed for Eastman DMA students Tremolo (2024) for bass clarinet, viola, piano and electroacoustic sounds.

Composers and performers in Hatch Hall after EMuSE concert 1 Nov 2024.

Edward Clijsen and Matthew London awarded M4C PhD Scholarships

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)

Russolo Competition 2024 in Leicester (and more!)

MTI again hosts the Leicester concert of the Prix Russolo for electroacoustic composition
VENUE: St Andrews Jarrom Street, Leicester, 6pm.

http://prixrussolo.blogspot.com/

Followed by another concert at 8pm, with music by Louise Rossiter, Adrian Moore, Philippe Blanchard and John Young.

ALL FREE!

Concert 1 - Finalists of the Prix Russolo International Composition Contest 2024 

28th September 2024 - 6pm

Strings (2023), 08:10 - Chuang Chuang Fan

Quantum (2023), 08:16 - Enrico Dorigatti

Les pieds dans la tête (2023), 09:55 - Jean-Marc Duchenne

¿Dónde está el espacio para el eufemismo del amor? (2023), 09:45 - Ana Gonzalez Gamboa

Quatre hymnes mous  (2023), 09:45 - Camille Lacroix

Long Long Fleuve Amour (2021-24), 08:00 - Iris Lancery

Alibi des voltigeurs (2012-2014), 08:09 - Roxanne Turcotte

***** Interval*****

Concert 2 - Blanchard, Moore, Rossiter and Young 

28th September 2024 - 8pm

 

wt_metals (2024),10:06 - Adrian Moore (World Premiere)

L’ange Gérard (XXXX) -  10:00 - Phillipe Blanchard

Three Spaces in Mid-air (2017) - 10:56 - John Young

Noche oscura (2023), 07:00 - Phillipe Blanchard

The Annunciation (2022), 10:18 - Louise Rossiter

wt_ceramics (2024), 08:34 - Adrian Moore (World Premiere)

 

New Article from Prof. John Young

John Young's new article 'Scaling Form' is now available in the latest issue (vol. 18, 2024) of the Firenze University Press journal Musica/Tecnologia.  The journal is open access. 

John's article investigates relationships between composers' sound materials and the duration or timescale over which a form is shaped in acousmatic music.  The article includes analyses of works by Francis Dhomont, Denis Smalley, Natasha Barrett and Gilles Gobeil, among others.  Other contributors to the issue are Lelio Camilleri (editor), Annette Vande Gorne and Daniel Teruggi.

John Young and Simon Perril @ States of Independence 2024

Profs. John Young and Simon Perril will give a talk and present their immersive audio installation Sun Set Deck Cogitation at the annual States of Independence festival of creative writing on 8 June, 10am-4pm in the DMU Clephan Building.

States of Independence brings together publishers and writers for a one-day festival of talks, performances and book stalls.  The keynote speaker this year is Louise Doughty.

Sun Set Deck Cogitation can be heard throughout the day in PACE Studio 1, and the presentation will also celebrate the launch of Perril's Two Duets with Occasion which includes the poetry used in the installation.

The programme for the day can be found here, and admission is free.

 

 

John Young and Cristiana Palandri at Noisefloor Lisbon

Prof. John Young and M4C PhD candidate Cristiana Palandri will be at the Noisefloor 2024 conference at  the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa.

Palandri will present her ambisonic composition Gemelli siamesi making use of the Escola's 15.1 channel dome audio system.

Young will perform two works, Arioso and Le Chant en dehors, and present a paper 'The Long and Short of Acousmatic Forms'.

Cristiana Palandri

 

John Young joins Philharmonia Community Board

Prof. John Young is joining the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra's Leicester Community Board. The Philharmonia have been associated with Leicester for 27 years as resident orchestra at De Montfort Hall, currently offering a season of seven concerts annually. Beyond their regular London concerts at the Festival Hall, the Philharmonia have similar regional partnerships in Canterbury, Bedford and Basingstoke. The Community Boards assist in steering the educational, outreach and public engagement programmes associated with the orchestra's partnerships.

The Philharmonia at De Montfort Hall

Art of Sound: interview with John Young in new book

An interview with DMU Professor John Young has been published in a new book—Art of Sound: Creativity in Film Sound and Electroacoustic Music.  The book, by DMU graduate Prof. Andrew Knight-Hill and Dr Emma Margetson, published by Routledge, contains interviews with and discussions between 17 creatives working in fields of music and film sound design. 

The book was launched in November 2023 at the University of Greenwich's Sound/Image Festival, where John Young also gave a solo concert in the Bathway Theatre, Woolwich.

 

 

John Young Launches Two CDs at Cultural Exchanges 2024

John Young (Professor of Composition) will launch two new compact discs at the 2024 DMU Cultural Exchanges Festival, in PACE Studio 1, 28 February, 2024 at 5-6pm.

The discs are published by the Montréal publisher Empreintes DIGITALes and will be available in CD and high definition download.

The first disc, Histoires de soldats (Soldiers' Stories), incorporates two works based on oral history recordings. An Angel at Mons contains John Ewings's eye witness account of an angel on the battlefield at Mons, Belgium, in August 1914. Ewings gave an interview about his life to the BBC Northern Ireland in 1980 at the age of  101, and sections of that interview are incorporated into the work with the BBC's kind permission. Once He was Gunner is a more extended work (56 minutes) based on interviews John made with his father about war experiences as an 8th Army soldier in Italy 1943-45.

The second disc, Espaces lointains (Faraway Spaces), presents six works composed between 2017 and 2023, Three Spaces in Mid-Air, Sweet Anticipation, Hidden Spaces, Arioso, Le chant en dehors and Filaments and Phases. Filaments and Phases is a collaborative work with DMU Professor of Poetic Practice Simon Perril and in 2022 Le chant en dehors was awarded the inaugural Prix Francis-Dhomont at the AKOUSMA Festival in Montréal.

Information and booking at https://www.culturalexchanges.co.uk/2024-lineup/professor-john-young
The full Cultural Exchanges programme for 2024 is at https://www.culturalexchanges.co.uk/2024-lineup

Young's SoundPlay awaded first prize in Musica Nova 2023, Prague

John Young's SoundPlay for piano and electroacoustic sounds has been awarded first prize in the instrumental category of the Music Nova Competition, Prague, and will be presented in a concert in Prague on 15 December, streamed on the Czech and Slovak Republic radio.  SoundPlay uses high definition audio samples taken from a very dilapidated upright piano that used to be located in the basement of DMU's Clephan Building. Young worked with digital transformations of these sounds to blend them with the equal tempered tuning of the concert piano.The work was premiered in Leicester in November 2022 by Swedish pianist Eva Sidén.

A link to the work is found here:

New work by John Young and Simon Perril at Electroacoustic Spring in Rethymno, Crete

John Young's new work Filaments and Phases (2023) will be premiered at the Electroacoustic Spring 2023 Festival in Rethymno, Greece on Saturday 3 June.  The piece is a further setting of a section of Simon Perril's poem Sun Deck Set Cogitation—also used by John and Simon in two installations: at the Historic Dockyard Chatham and at Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre, Leicester in late 2022 and March 2023 respectively—the latter as part of DMU's Cultural Exchanges Festival. Filaments and Phases is an 8-channel immersive audio work with Perril's reading of his text embedded as the sound is taken apart and reassembled into new and evocative sound forms.

https://mta.hmu.gr/en/activities/musical-events/electroacoustic-spring-2023/

 

 

John Young and Lala Meredith-Vula in collaboration

Prof. John Young has been collaborating with Prof. Lala Meredith-Vula (of the DMU Arts, Design and Humanities Faculty) to create a soundscape for her solo exhibition What I didn’t know I knew... which will be on show at the Gallery of the Ministry of Culture in Prishtina, Kosova.  The exhibition is curated by Edi Muka and runs from 6 April to 6 June this year.  What I didn’t know I knew... consists of the sculptural installation and a digitally projected continuous flow of images taken from the many different human themes contained within Meredith-Vula’s significant body of photographic work.  The video stream was created by Jim Boulton, also in Arts, Design and Humanities, and the sculptural installation consists of a haystack reflecting one of the striking themes in Meredith-Vula’s photography. John's soundscape provides a connecting naturalistic sound world for the exhibition and is diffused through the gallery.  This is the second collaboration between these two artists, having previously worked together to create a film Are You Everybody? integrating Meredith-Vula’s photographic study of post war Kosova and Young's electroacoustic work Lamentations.

https://www.facebook.com/Galeria.MKRS?mibextid=LQQJ4d 

https://instagram.com/galeriamkrs?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

 

 

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.

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

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

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