The Grand Finale of the Composing with Sounds EU Culture Project

On the 26th and 27th of May, the Composing with Sounds EU Culture project led by the DMU’s MTI Research Centre reached its climax in the form of a two-day mini-festival at the famed ZKM’s Kubus theatre in Karlsruhe, Germany.

This project (5-2011 – 4/2013) consisted of two phases, a software development phase in which the software Compose with Sounds was developed and a phase in which schools workshops were held in the six participating countries – France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Norway and Portugal – after which time commissions were offered to two professional composers in each country. Furthermore, a number of students ranging in age from 9 to 17 all made compositions using this new software, some individually, in pairs and in larger class groups. In the final project months, schools and public concerts were held in all six countries. The DMU concert formed part of this year’s Cultural Exchanges Festival. Other concerts were also held, for example in the GRM annual series in Paris and at the Oslo Opera House’s Recital Hall.

For this final event, there were two full concerts of works composed within the project, a symposium with papers by major project participants (including the MTI’s Andrew Hill and Leigh Landy, project leader) and German specialists, such as Rudolf Frisius and Hans W. Koch. The final part of the symposium was a round table that included a public evaluation of the project in which, other than understandable criticism about the late software completion, strong praise was offered for this project that will allow for creativity in sound-based musical production to become much more accessible than ever for young people and amateurs of all ages. The final concert was of the project directors including two works that had been made especially for the Kubus’s Sound Dome (Ludger Brümmer and Leigh Landy) and others by Daniel Teruggi, Jøran Rudi and a première by Andreas Mniestris.

A double CD will appear with project compositions in the next few weeks and the project website will go public in late June: www.cws.dmu.ac.uk

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.

AHRC Grant for "New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic Music Analysis" Project

DMU's Music Technology and Innovation Research Centre has been awarded just under £300,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the 'New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic Music Analysis' project. This three-year research project will develop an analysis software package and an analytical toolbox relevant to the breadth of electroacoustic genres. This will draw together existing methods, engage the latest interactive and hypermedia tools, and apply them to a range of works to compare their strengths and weaknesses. This aims to illuminate both the procedures and the works. We will be better able to judge what analytical approach (or approaches) would be best suited to gain an insight and understanding of a particular genre of the music. The research will be undertaken by DMU Professors Simon Emmerson and Leigh Landy with musicologist and programmer Dr Pierre Couprie and doctoral student Mike Gatt. A number of new extensions, developments and refinements will result in a newly developed software application ('E-Analyse' derived from Pierre Couprie's iAnalyse) which can apply a range of possible approaches. (Image: Pierre Couprie's "iAnalyse 3")