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

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.