Prof. Leigh Landy in Czechia

During the week of 24 October, Prof. Leigh Landy will be in Czechia, including a residence at Masaryk University (Brno) involving a talk, a workshop and meetings with postgraduate students on their new sound design programme, and offering a talk at HAMU (the National Academy of Music in Prague) for interested people across the Academy’s community. 

The talks will concern Landy's two recent books, one co-authored with John Richards and one focusing on issues regarding sonic creativity in the future. The workshop will demonstrate how many of these ideas are illustrated in Landy's compositions. 

There has been excellent cultural and educational exchange (e.g., Erasmus) between MTI² and the Czech Republic in the past and this is a continuation of these excellent links.

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
 

The MTI² at the British Science Festival 2022

 

 

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.’

Battey's Estuaries 4 receives ICMA ‘Best Regional Music (Europe) Award' for 2022

Bret Battey's audiovisual composition Estuaries 4 was awarded the ‘Best Regional Music (Europe) Award' for 2022 from the International Computer Music Association, from a field of 362 works submitted to the Association’s annual conference.

Battey's Estuaries 4 receives 'Best Video' award, MuVi6

Prof Bret Battey’s latest audiovisual composition, ‘Estuaries 4’ (2021), has been awarded the ‘Best Video’ prize by MuVi6, an international exhibition of video and moving image on synesthesia and visual music. It will be screened in the MuVi6 conference at the University of Granada in October and will be featured in an associated online exhibition and a print book release.  

‘Estuaries 4’ was also recently screened at the Sound and Music Computing Conference (Saint Etienne, France), the NoiseFloor Festival (University of Saffordshire), the International Computer Music Conference (University of Limerick), and the COMMUTE Festival of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. It is also scheduled for September screening at the Over the Real video art festival in Lucca, Italy.

 

Newly Published: Bret Battey's book review of Ciciliani, et al 'Ludified'

Prof Bret Battey's review of Marko Ciciliani, Barbara Lüneburg and Andreas Pirchner (eds.), Vol. 1: Ludified: Artistic Research in Audiovisual Composition, Performance & Perception and Vol. 2: Game Elements in Marko Ciciliani’s Audiovisual Works. has now been published in Organised Sound 27(1). https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S1355771822000127.

 

New Work by John Young selected for AKOUSMAtique Competition, Montréal

John Young’s most recent work Le Chant en dehors (2022), realised in an 18-channel surround-sound ‘dome’ format, has been selected as a finalist in the AKOUSMAtique Montréal international competition, part of the Akousma Festival of Immersive Digital Music. Three finalists have been selected anonymously by a jury from 50 international submissions: the two other finalists are Nicola Giannini (Italy) and Panayiotis Kokoras (Greece). The finalists will spatialise their works in a concert in the Multimedia Room of the McGill University-based Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology on 14 October 2022. Two prizes will be awarded: the  Francis-Dhomont prize (chosen by the jury) and the Micheline Coulombe-Saint-Marcoux prize (chosen by the public).