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Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium 2011

Programme Notes and Biographies

A co-presentation of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) and New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), the 5th Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium (TES) was held in parallel with the 13th edition of Sound Travels, NAISA’s annual Festival of Sound Art. The Keynote Speaker for TES 2011 was Jonty Harrison.

TES 2011
10–13 August 2011
Artscape Wychwood Barns
601 Christie Street, Toronto ON

Call for Submissions
Schedule Summary | Organisation
Detailled Symposium Schedule
Abstracts + Bios | Programme Notes + Bios

Opening — Wednesday, August 10

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20:00–22:00 • Symposium Concert #1

Martine Louise Rossiter — Black Velvet
Graeme Truslove — Portals
Tomás Henriques — Duality
Franz Rosati & Leila Bahlouri — Pathline #1
Robert Phillips — gucci might be

Martine Louise Rossiter — Black Velvet

Black Velvet was realised in the studios of The University of Aberdeen in early 2010. The work uses a can of Guinness containing a widget as its sole sound source. In realising this piece, my intention was to create a sound world completely different, and obscure to that expected from the sound object — one that would immediately draw the listener in — especially through diffusion. Black Velvet was created from a single source recording of a Guinness can during which I explored all avenues of potential for the sound object- such as opening the can, pouring the liquid, rattling the widget and finally crumpling the can. Black Velvet was announced as a finalist in the 2010 Musica Nova International Composition Competition.

Louise Rossiter (Hampshire, 1986) is an electroacoustic composer based in Scotland. She completed her undergraduate music degree at the University of Aberdeen, specialising in Acousmatic composition, under the supervision of Pete Stollery. Recently Louise embarked on the MMus (composition) course at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Robert Dow. She is also a founding member of Edit-Point, a group dedicated to the performance and dissemination of electroacoustic music. Louise’s research interests lie in acousmatic sound, acoustic ecology and sound perception. In autumn 2009, Louise collaborated with Ross Whyte and Claire Pencak on a dance production called Lisbon Diaries which was premiered as part of the Dance Live festival and again in the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh as part of a dance showcase entitled Pool. In the Musica Nova International Composition Competition 2010, Louise’s acousmatic work Black Velvet was announced as a finalist in the competition.

Graeme Truslove — Portals

The material used for creating Portals consisted of a large collection of sampled impulses, collected from a wide range of sound files. Some of these impulses were real-world sources — complete recorded collisions such as strings being struck and paper being crumpled, whereas other impulses were constructed from fragments of longer samples, which were cut and spliced to form synthetic “impossible” impacts. Portals is structured as a series of short, sharply-defined movements. Each of these was created from its own unique subset of the “global” collection of impulses, which functioned as a kind of sonic “DNA”, forming a distinct musical identity. Certain impulses were shared across several subsets, integrating them withinthe fabrics of numerous movements, acting as a means of creating coherence across the work as a whole.

Graeme Truslove is a composer and performer based in Glasgow, Scotland. His output includes: electroacoustic and instrumental compositions, theatre sound design, audio-visual installations and improvisation (performing on guitar and laptop). His work is largely concerned with conflicts between intuitive performance and the fixed-medium, often exploring how fixed-medium expressive and structural possibilities can be integrated into improvised performance and vice versa. His approach integrates multiple strata of musical time, ranging from macrostructure down to the formation of timbre itself, conceived in terms of the sonic grain.

Tomás Henriques — Duality

Duality is an improvised performance played with the Double Slide Controller, a new electronic instrument that won the 1st Prize of the 2010 edition of the Guthman New Musical Instrument competition which took place at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The Double Slide Controller is an instrument whose playing technique is based on the acoustic slide trombone. It has two independent slides and two versatile hand controllers that allow free motion in three spatial dimensions. In this performance the right hand slide generates the main melodic material with pitches being triggered by the breath of the player while the left hand slide is controlling the pitch of simpler drone tones.Several sensors built into the hand controllers allow the modification in real time of the sound of the drone tones. Delay and echo type effects on the main melody are also being used and are controlled by a joystick on the instrument’s right hand controller.

Tomás Henriques is a Portuguese-born composer, performer and researcher currently teaching at Buffalo State College. His compositions are regularly commissioned and played in concerts both in USA and Europe and consist of works for acoustic instruments, both large and small formations, as well as music for electronic and mixed media. His music is recorded by the Numerica and MisoRecords labels. Research in music technology has played a major role in his scientific output ever since he was a graduate student at the University at Buffalo, where he obtained his PhD. in 1997. Since 2006 he has been designing and building new digital controllers and electronic instruments. He was the 1st Prize Winner of the 2010 edition of the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition with his Double Slide Controller, an electronic trombone-like instrument. In 2009–10 he was a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, working in the area of real-time interactive music composition and also developing new interfaces for real-time speech synthesis.

Franz Rosati & Leila Bahlouri — Pathline #1

Pathline #1 is an Audio Visual performance based on digital noises, soundscape improvisations and generative graphics. The audience’s expectations are mislead by the structure of layered sounds which suddenly move from heavy textural and gestural moments to total silence. The audio part is connected to a visual reactive environment provided with its own behaviour, morphing from smooth and structured configurations to flickering skeletal and chaotic structures. The whole performance is based on a custom-made probabilistic / chaotic algorithmic software called HonegumiAV. Pathline #1 is about the “aestethic of discontinuity” and investigates the rules beneath the human perception creating an unpredictable evolving aural and visual environment without dropping a precise æsthetic and artistic idea. Visuals are directly inspired by contemporaray graphic scores like Xenakis’ Metastaseis and Pithoprakta and at the same time reminds to complex architectural sketches deformed by a mixture of digital and concrete sounds melted together in an extemporary composition. Pathline #1 in presented as 2‑ or 4.1‑ (quadraphonic + subwoofer) channel, and single, double or triple screen projections.

Franz Rosati is an electronic / electroacoustic musician and visual artist focusing his research and attention on real-time A/V performances and installations following an æsthetic idea based on discontinuity of aural and visual patterns trying to avoid any kind of repetition through the use of chaos mathematics, generative and stochastic processes. He uses his own custom made software developed in Max/MSP for real-time micro-montage and sound elaboration in the microscopic time scale to realize compositions and performances based on aural and visual matter’s metamorphosis. Graduated in Electronic Music with Professor Alessandro Cipriani, He also teaches Max/MSP/Jitter for sound design, interactivity and multimedia, focusing in computer vision techniques in several Workshops and Art / Design Institutes. He also developed Interactive Examples for Electronic Music and Sound Design, a book about theory and practice in Max/MSP. He also developed Interactive Examples for Electronic Music and Sound Design, a book about theory and practice in Max/MSP.

Robert Phillips — gucci might be

Girolamo Frescobaldi was reportedly the first to treat the passacaglia as a series of continuous variations over a basso ostinato (obstinate bass) during the early baroque. Previously, the passacaglia had been a much shorter song fragment played between song stanzas. The passacaglia derives its name from the Spanish pasar (to walk, to pass) and calle (street), as the passacaglia was often played in the street. Gucci might be shares some traits with the passacaglia: the basso ostinato, a colloquial sensibility, a certain didacticism, and our main character, Gucci Mane, is easily imagined passing us by on the street as he enters the night club, “singing his song.” He informs us that the East Atlanta Slum is where he’s from, and that he might be “rollin’” (taking pills — all vocal samples are from Gucci Mane’s pillz). Our protagonist then gets quickly lost in a vague, narcissistic and introspective confusion. While speculating on the ideal musical form to illustrate such a psychological environment, one might imagine that such a form would be fertile for explorations of the fragment, the repeat and the echo, the development of a cyclical pattern, a certain obstinacy, a self-destructive arrogance… The bassline of gucci might be shares some of its main pitches with the bassline of Arnold Schoenberg’s passacaglia Nacht (the beginning of part II of Pierrot Lunaire). The text, by Albert Giraud, seems to somehow relate to Gucci’s experience:

Like a cloud of magic spells
The horizon rests — mutely.
Out of the vapor of lost depths
Arises a fragrance, murdering all memory!

Thus we hear Gucci Mane and his cloud of magic spells — an ecstasy of apathy and mania; an escape into forgetting, stumbling, and variation.

Robert Phillips is an active musician and composer living in Buffalo, New York. He received his BA in music composition from the University at California, San Diego (2004) and is now finishing his doctorate in music composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo studying with David Felder. His music seeks meaning and expressivity by casting a wide web of reference involving text, language, unconventional instruments, sound samples, found objects and an interrogation of musical style. His works have been featured at many festivals and seminars including Donaueschinger Musiktage, June in Buffalo and Akademie Schloss Solitude; and performed by Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Chronophonie and The Ear Massage Percussion Quartet. Recent projects include Ohr, for string quartet and turntablist, with the JACK Quartet, and heterogeneous blends, a studio work juxtaposing a cappella material from Homeboy Sandman, Kool Keith, Bahamadia, and other hip hop artists with recordings by Alexander Sigman, Jacob Gotlib, Toru Nakatani, Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Adhoc and many others.

DAY 1 — Thursday, August 11th

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12:00–13:00 • Listening Session #1: 60x60 Canada

60x60 is a project made of 60 one-minute electroacoustic works by 60 composers arranged into hour-long multimedia presentations of various formats. The project is organized by Vox Novus in collaboration with the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. Established in 2003 by Rob Voisey, the project has been presented in a variety of formats in hundreds of concerts, shows, and installations around the world. 60x60 Canada 2011 is the third exclusively Canadian mix and is premiered at TES 2011 in the traditional 60x60 format — a fixed media presentation accompanied by a clock, with Tova Kardonne as host.

20:00–22:00 • Symposium Concert #2

Alan Tormey — Black Pudding
Wiska Radkiewicz and Andrea Cohen — City-Soundings
Otto Joachim — Elektronische Momente
Gustav Ciamaga — Prologue and Postscript (2003)
Gustav Ciamaga — Possible Spaces No. 4 (1997)
Gustav Ciamaga — The Computer in my Life (2007)
Christos Hatzis & Bruno Degazio — Harmonia (1980)
Alan Tormey — Black Pudding [repeated]

Alan Tormey — Black Pudding

This piece exemplifies live electroacoustic music performed by a combination of traditional instruments, MIDI devices and gestural interface sensor technologies in the context of a laptop ensemble. The work’s performance practice puts specific focus on artistic innovation in musical mapping strategies. The music’s technical origins come from the composer’s work as a performer in the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) as applied to both consumer technology (PLOrk has the luxury of custom hardware) and the paradigm of chamber music (the logistics of an orchestra often limit the technical difficulty of individual performance parts within PLOrk).

The instrumentation includes:

Performers will include the composer and two musicians drawn from the membership of Pittsburgh’s Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra (ELCO) — a semi-professional ensemblethat focuses on late modern compositions, post-modern improvisational works, and orchestral arrangements of art rock repertoire.

Alan Tormey is a composer, theorist, and electronic musician whose work encompasses multimedia, microtonality, and the use of gestural interface technologies as a means for the live performance of electronic music. Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and winner of the 2010 Story Prize, describes his music as “absolutely cool and unnerving” while the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that his “webs of sound” evoke “Renaissance polyphony shattered mercilessly and reconstructed with a funky beat.” Dr. Tormey has taught at both Grinnell College and Bucknell University, and holds degrees from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, the University of California at Berkeley, and Princeton University, where he received the PhD. Presently, he holds the position of Associate Creative Director with the Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra (ELCO), an organization devoted to the intersections between Art Rock, Free Improvisation, Post-Tonality and music pre-1750 with an emphasis on a Post-Modern approach to the Late Modern. He would like to buy the world a Coke.

Wiska Radkiewicz and Andrea Cohen — City-Soundings

City Soundings is a collaborative project in which a variety of cityscapes were recorded by several composers in different countries and collectively assembled into a unique composition. This work, composed in three stages, reflects and combines several compositional styles brought by all participating artists. To compose this collaborative work, we invited sound artists and composers from several countries to participate. Each person recorded and uploaded three soundscapes from their respective cities. After the bank of sounds was completed, we have asked each artist to compose and upload one or several short (maximum two minutes) fragments using all the sounds previously uploaded. In the last stage, the final composition emerged after each participant modified the piece in the predetermined order.

List of participating artists: Steven Brown (UK), Marek Choloniewski (Poland), Franziska Schoeder (Ireland), Victoria Estok (USA), Janete El Haouli (Brasil), Susanne Skog (Sweden), Brad Garton (USA), Andrew Hugill (UK), Andreï Smirnof (Russia), Malle Maltis (Estonia), Hernan Risso Patron (Argentina), Marie Wennersten (Sweden), Lidia Zielinska (Poland) and Andrea Cohen & Wiska Radkiewicz.

http://music.columbia.edu/soundson

Andrea Cohen is a pianist, sound artist and radio producer. Born in Argentina, she has been living in Paris since 1974. She is an author and performer of several musical theatre works in which musical and theatrical elements are integrated into a personal, pluridisciplinary language. She has also composed incidental music for theatre, video and radio, and has composed an opera, Fois il était une deux trois, played by children. As author of numerous radio programs and works, she has been collaborating with Radio France (France Culture) since 1985. In 2005, she was awarded a doctorate by the University Paris-Sorbonne, where she successfully defended her theses “Composers and Radio Art.” From 2007 to 2011 she was an Associate Researcher of the IOCT (Institute of Creative Technologies) at De Monfort University (Leicester, UK), where she developed the Soundson Program with Wiska Radkiewicz.

Wiska Radkiewicz is an electronic music composer, sound and video artist. She received training at the Music Academy of Warsaw, Poland (music theory), University of Paris-Sorbonne (musicology), Groupe de Recherches Musicales — Conservatory of Paris (electronic music composition), City University of New York (computer music composition) and Princeton University, where she obtained a doctorate degree in music composition. Her interests range from musical improvisation, electronic composition and music pedagogy to radio and video. From 2007 to 2011 she was an Associate Researcher of the IOCT (Institute of Creative Technologies) at De Monfort University, Leicester, UK, where she developed the Soundson Program with Andrea Cohen.

Otto Joachim — Elektronische Momente

Elektronische Momente [Electronic Moments] is a collection of around three dozen pieces ranging from just under a minute to sixteen minutes composed by Otto Joachim over about a decade and a half from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. For the CD release they were all been mixed to stereo, or rather, two channels, though many were composed onto four-channel cassette and thought of as being four-channel pieces. The instrumentation is mixed, but is 80% EMS equipment, stochastic, and real-time layered in nature.

Otto Joachim was about 65 when he started these “moments”, at a time when he had abandoned his tape-based electronic music studio in favor of the smaller, faster, more to his æsthetic cassette and EMS equipment setup. While he kept his older equipment around, his studio was now a single 19” rack six feet (2 meters) high. Shortly after this time, Otto began to focus more of his creative energy into the visual arts, painting and in time, sculpture. His visual works have much in common in the creative core with his EA works. A basic idea is explored with a strong sense of individual purpose — the form evolving as the work itself progresses. These pieces can be listened to in the dark as being sonic realizations of two- and three-dimensional ideas.

Otto Joachim died in the summer of 2010 about four months before his 100th birthday. Born in Dusseldorf, he fled the Nazi abduction of Germany in the early 1930s moving to Singapore and Shanghai. He moved to Montreal in 1949. It was in Montreal that he developed his reputation as the principal viola of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, taught viola and chamber music, started early music ensembles, built renaissance instruments and created the first privately owned electronic music studio in Canada. In the late 1960s he became the Canadian representative of EMS London and sold Synthis to a number of studios across the country. He was a longtime friend of Gus Ciamaga, and they both were in contact with Hugh Le Caine.

Gustav Ciamaga — Prologue and Postscript (2003)

Pierre Schaeffer (1910‑1995) was the founding father of the first enduring school or style of electroacoustic music: musique concrète. For my “in memoriam” Pierre Schaeffer, I have only utilized sounds from three late works of Schaeffer, his recorded voice, and a reference to the early renaissance genre, the Déploration — works written to honour recently deceased composers. Schaeffer’s compositional sound objects (objets sonore) are quoted at various times throughout the work, but as a rule are transformed into newer objects which determine the flow and texture of the composition. At the conclusion of the work, a “ghost” version of the Josquin’s Déploration on the death of Ockgehem is presented with a narrator paraphrasing the original text to suit the work at hand.

Gustav Ciamaga — Possible Spaces No. 4 (1997)

From a series of electroacoustic pieces, each exploring a singular mood and/or compositional strategy. (No. 4: Minimalism).

Gustav Ciamaga — The Computer in my Life (2007)

The original intent of this work was to have another “look” at some of the classic sounds found in musique concrète — the sound of a slamming door, spinning roulette wheel ball and a succession of spoken (meaningless) utterances. While examining the possibilities of these sounds, a possible surprise ending suggested itself (a re-working of a gamelan-like sample) and the conclusion of the composition was, in a sense, completed first. As in many of my works, the number of primary sound sources is limited; in this instance some fifteen sounds comprise the source library. These sounds, as is, or transformed, are combined or set into motion to create the narrative or form of the work.

Gustav Ciamaga (1930–2011) attended the University of Western Ontario (1951–54) while studying privately with Gordon Delamont. Further studies in composition were with John Weinzweig and John Beckwith at the University of Toronto (1954–56) and with Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero and Irving Fine at Brandeis University (1956–63). While at Brandeis he founded the Electronic Music Studio in 1961. He joined the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, in 1963 and became Director of its Electronic Music Studio in 1965. On sabbatical in 1970 he worked in several European electronic studios. During his tenure at the University of Toronto he chaired the Theory and Composition Department, served as Dean from 1977–84 and was also Principal of the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1983–84. In 1994, he retired as Professor Emeritus. Ciamaga was a member of the Canadian League of Composers and honorary founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. Ciamaga wrote a number of non-electronic works, including a mass and a string quartet, but most of his compositions in the latter half of the 1960s and in the 1970s employed electronic tape. Ciamaga’s works have been performed in Canada, the USA, and Europe. He has provided scores for films, the theatre, and TV documentaries. Curtain Raiser, composed with Louis Applebaum, opened the NAC in 1969, and Solipsism While Dying was premiered in 1973 by the Lyric Arts Trio. Ciamaga is a member of the CLComp, an associate of the Canadian Music Centre, and an honorary member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community.

Ciamaga produced approximately 24 tape compositions from the early sixties thru to the mid-80s. From 1986 onward he worked exclusively with computers, producing about 60 works, first using MIDI technology with hardware samplers and synthesizers, and then only digital audio processing. In the past couple of years he had been involved in the proofing and development of CDP6, the multi-channel DSP software from the Composers Desktop Project.
http://composersdesktop.com/GCiamaga.html
http://individual.utoronto.ca/ciamaga

Gustav Ciamaga passed away on Saturday June 11, 2011 after a long battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife Gwen Dunlop and daughter Kathryn Ciamaga. (Texts and performance material prepared by Dennis Patrick).

Christos Hatzis and Bruno Degazio — Harmonia (1980)

Conceived in 1980 by Christos Hatzis, Harmonia is an audiovisual work in progress. The realization of this project has taken place during the past 18 months by composer and audiovisual designer Bruno Degazio, animator Doug E. Smith and, more recently, by filmmaker and installation artist Henry Jesionka. Harmonia takes a one-dimensional string and in a Kepler-like fashion maps its harmonic properties on a two-dimensional plane and in time (a string, the two ends of which exist at two different locations in time.) In its present version, it consists of projection on a screen and a SurroundSound diffusion of the audio component. The audio and visual components are identical: what you see is what you hear. Future versions of Harmonia will incorporate 3D projection inside a geodesic dome (constructed by Henry Jesionka), (possibly) 3D binaural sound interface, and (possibly) electromagnetic stimulation of certain parts of the brain—all intended to stimulate an immersive artistic experience.

With two recent Juno awards and a SOCAN Award to his credit and a slew of new commissions by internationally recognized touring artists such as pop baritone George Dalaras, percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, violinist Hilary Hahn, soprano Suzie Leblanc, and the Pacifica Quartet and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra among others, Christos Hatzis is widely recognized as “one of the most important composers writing today” (CBC), “a contemporary Canadian Master” (the New Yorker) and “a Canadian icon and an international cultural institution” (See Magazine). Hatzis’ music is influenced by early Christian spirituality, Pythagorean and Hermetic ideas, his own Byzantine music heritage, world cultures and religions, and various classical, jazz and pop music idioms from the past and present. He is a believer in borderless culture and the uninhibited flow of cultural information. A professor of composition at the University of Toronto, Hatzis writes extensively on these and other related subjects and has just finished writing a memoir called Time, Consciousness and Revelation: An Autobiography of Stories, Confessions, Beliefs, Thoughts and Music.
http://www.hatzis.com

Bruno Degazio is a music educator, film sound designer, researcher and composer based in Toronto, Canada. His film work includes the special-effects sound design for the Oscar nominated documentary film, The Fires of Kuwait and music for the all-digital, six-channel sound tracks of the IMAX films Titanica, Flight of the Aquanaut and CyberWorld 3D, as well as many other IMAX films and television programs. His concert works for traditional, electronic and mixed media have been performed through out North America and Europe. As a researcher in the field of algorithmic composition using fractals and genetic algorithms he has presented papers and musical works at leading international conferences, including festivals in Toronto, New York City, London, The Hague, Koln, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Bruno Degazio is the designer of The Transformation Engine, a software musical composition system with application to algorithmic composition, sonification and interactive music. He currently teaches sound design in Sheridan College’s internationally renowned Classical Animation program, Oakville, Canada.
www-acad.sheridanc.on.ca/~degazio/aboutme.html

DAY 2 — Friday, August 12th

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14:30–15:45 • Listening Session #2

Max Alexander — Make New Human
Manuella Blackburn — Vista Points
Arne Eigenfeldt — Coming Together — NotomotoN
Campbell Foster — IDENTIFY
Norah Lorway — Louder
Steven Naylor — Automatopoiea: Study 1
Ben Ramsay — Décalage

Max Alexander — Make New Human

Make New Human uses audio taken from a live stream (over a very poor internet connection) of Owen Pallett’s set at the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, IL. The intermittent connection became the organizing principle of the piece, creating unpredictable moments of density and sparcity.

Manuella Blackburn — Vista Points

All materials used in Vista Points are derived from electric guitar sounds. Often the electric guitar sounds are left raw and then layered with processed materials. When these sounds interact, there are points of causality, conflict and turbulence. This work explores the effect of varying the distance between sonic events. When constructing the piece, contrasts between pressured and voluntary behaviours became a primary focus with the aim of achieving moments of activity and emptiness. The work was awarded First Prize at the 10th Musica Viva Electroacoustic Music Competition in Lisbon, September 2009. Thanks go to Carlos Charles Lopez for providing the electric guitar sounds for this project.

Manuella Blackburn earned a bachelors degree in Music at The University of Manchester followed by a Masters in Electroacoustic Composition, gaining a Distinction and the Peter J. Leonard Composition Prize. She has completed a PhD at the University of Manchester with Dr. Ricardo Climent’s supervision, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Manuella is now as a lecturer in music technology at Liverpool Hope University. Successes include First Prize for her work Vista Points in the 2009 Musica Viva Competition (Portugal) and Grand Prize in the Digital Arts Awards, Japan for Kitchen Alchemy. Manuella is also a member of The Splice Girls live laptop improvisation duo, who have been performing together since 2006. Together with Dr Diana Simpson Salazar they utilize tools built in Max/MSP to create messed up loops and shimmering soiundscapes. Highlights include a “sonic ferry” at the Sonic Arts Network, Plymouth and Florida (Atlantic Centre for the Arts, 2008).

Arne Eigenfeldt — Coming Together — NotomotoN

Coming Together is a series of compositions that can be summed up as “composition by negotiation”: autonomous musical software agents interacting to determine an ever-changing musical environment. Agents converge various musical parameters (such as density, volume, and pitch) towards a mutually agreed upon collection; however, agents can also choose to break away from the group. Coming Together: NotomotoN was inspired by the NotomotoN robotic instrument, created by Ajay Kapur. Given a composition’s overall duration, individual sections are calculated in which a rhythmic tala is interpreted by the agents, one of whom is the Notomoton, in unique ways. The human performer improvises over the dynamic environment, and his playing is interpreted by the agents in ways that affect the resulting music. Two other robotic instruments are involved, the MahaDeviBot, and GanaPatiBot, also designed and built by Ajay Kapur. This video is of the premiere performance, January 2011, with Daniel Tones as the non-virtual percussionist.

Arne Eigenfeldt is a composer of live electroacoustic music, and a researcher into intelligent real-time music systems. His music has been performed around the world and his collaborations range from Persian Tar masters to contemporary dance companies to musical robots. His research has been presented at conferences such as ICMC, NIME, SEAMUS, ISMIR, EMS and SMC. He is an associate professor of music and technology at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (Canada) and is the co-director of the MetaCreation research group, which aims to endow computers with creative behaviour.

Campbell Foster — IDENTIFY

IDENTIFY represents my most current æsthetic and technological research work, exerpts of which are presented in my paper “Electro-acoustic and Computational Feedback Synthesis” for TES 2011. The piece arose from an experiment in seeding a computational feedback system and loop. In order to enable system intelligently generated sound phenomenon for further study, a non-interferential approach to the generation and observation of sound phenomenon is used to avoid quantum observational effects and Unintended Consequences. Listen for the female voice as Emitter seed value, the Star Trek transporter sound (3:35), Blade Runner soundtrack (8:02), Pitch walkabouts in an overall upward direction, and the interrelated systems behaviour of sound attributes producing fractal sound phenomenon from the tabula rasa feedback loop.

Campbell Foster is a Canadian sonological researcher, composer, performer, interactive systems designer, educator and inventor of the Electro-acoustic Sheet Metal Feedback Phone. Campbell studied electronic music with Anne Southam at the RCMT in 1975, and at York University to earn a special honours degree in Electronic Music, Composition and Computer Science. Campbell was Music Director of Computer Music Research for Canada’s own Mcleyvier CMI (1982–86). His sonological research directive is to discover and research the methods, æsthetics and results of electroacoustic and computational feedback synthesis, to interactively deliver and impart the sonological research concepts, methods, techniques and discoveries of feedback synthesis through a Research Blog RS2, sound and media works, field instrument installations, exhibits, lectures and performances for the scientific and æsthetic communities.

Norah Lorway — Louder

The form of this work develops around the idea of hope and despair, both desperately trying to be heard over the other. There is constant interference between the two states, the intentions endlessly being suspended, never coming to certitude. A recurrent melody, which begins clearly, gradually becomes distorted to a complete fade, guides the piece to its end. The piece is based on various field recordings (laughter, cello, chamber orchestra, voice, wind, car motors, amongst others) as well as computer generated material, processed in MaxMSP and SuperCollider. LOUDER was composed in the (BEAST) Electroacoustic studios, at the University of Birmingham in the Autumn of 2010 in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Norah Lorway (b. 1985) is a composer, pianist and laptop performer from Nova Scotia, Canada (B.Mus Mount Allison University, Canada; and M.Mus University of Calgary, Canada). She has had works performed across North America, Germany, Australia, the Eastern Caribbean and the UK. Norah is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham where she is studying electroacoustic music. Her musical interests range from large scale instrumental works with live electronics, fixed electroacoustics, and laptop ensemble composition, software development and performance. She is currently an active member of the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theater (BEAST) and is a founding member and active performer/composer with the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble (BiLE),who perform regularly at venues around the UK and continental Europe. BiLE was also recently accepted to perform at the International Conference for New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in Oslo, Norway.

Steven Naylor — Automatopoiea: Study 1

Automatopoiea is a series of studies developed from the sounds of mechanical toys, or automata, built by designer-maker Tony Mann, an artist based in Devon, UK. Mann’s clever, kinetic pieces incorporate cast-off mechanical and electro-mechanical materials, chosen from a vast aggregation that spills beyond his studio and into a nearby barn. Each study in this series focuses upon the sonic idiosyncrasies of several of Tony Mann’s automata. The result ranges from the delicate highlighting of details to rampant commotion. Study 1 explores sounds produced by Aviator, Captain Webb, and Ratchet-Bird. Automatopoiea: Study 1 has been performed in the UK (BEAST: Voyages Sonores), in Montréal, Canada (Harvest Moon Festival), and in Halifax, Canada (Oscillations Festival of Electroacoustic Music).

Halifax-based composer / performer Steven Naylor composes for concert performance, and creates scores and sound designs for professional theatre, television, film, and radio. His personal work is presently centred on radiophonic and acousmatic works. He is also active as a pianist, performing music that blends improvisation and through-composition. Naylor completed the PhD in Musical Composition, supervised by Jonty Harrison, at the University of Birmingham, UK. Naylor is a former President of the CEC.

Ben Ramsay — Décalage

Décalage attempts to explore sonic interactions between organic and synthetically produced ‘real world’ materials. Unprocessed elements of the original recordings are evident in the arrangement, and are also used as the basis on which the rest of the sounds in the work are derived. At the heart of the piece lies a transformation, or shift. The organic gives way to the synthetic. The synthetic becomes acousmatic, and the natural slowly becomes unnatural as all reference to the original sound sources, and environmental cues, are stripped away. Familiar, brittle, erratic sounds, which are present at the beginning of the piece, mutate and give way to a darker, blurred and more vague audio world as the shift towards the synthetic takes place. The mutation from the ‘real’ to the acousmatic is further emphasised as the sounds develop from typical and ordinary to a more sinister, oppressive sound world.

Ben Ramsay graduated from Middlesex University, London, with a BA (Hons) in Sonic Arts in 2001, and is currently lecturing in Music Technology at Staffordshire University in the West Midlands, UK. His research is centred around acousmatic music composition and the exploration of compositional relationships that exist in modern forms of sound art. He is currently studying for a PhD in Electroacoustic composition at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Simon Emmerson.

20:00–22:00 • Sound Travels Concert: Places for our Ears to Go…

Works by Jonty Harrison, David Berezan, llya Rostovtsev and Nick Storring.

Places for our ears to go… features acousmatic compositions that exist on a borderline between instrumental abstraction and referential meaning despite some of the pieces containing no (or very few) environmental sounds.

Theatre Direct’s Wychwood Theatre, 601 Christie St #176
$15/$10/free to symposium participants

DAY 3 — Saturday, August 13th

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09:30–13:00 • Special Session: Networked Performance

Participatory Electronic Ensemble Performance (PEEP)

With Arne Eigenfeldt (Simon Fraser University), David Ogborn (Cybernetic Orchestra at McMaster University), Alan Tormey (Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra, Pittsburgh PA) and Eldad Tsabary (Concordia Laptop Orchestra)

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in interest and participation in participatory electronic ensembles — and above all, in laptop orchestras. Symposium participants with experience as organizers and facilitators of these ensembles will share their philosophies, techniques, stories and challenges, with an ear towards helping their own groups develop and new groups form (across Canada and around the world). All symposium participants are STRONGLY encourage to bring their laptop to this session — there will be the possibility to try software provided during the session and to perform as an ad hoc laptop orchestra.

20:00–22:00 • Sound Travels Concert: About TIME

Works by Chiyoko Szlavnics, Martin Messier and Yves Daoust.

Sound is expressed in time so it is no accident that there is a wide diversity of ways to reflect on time in sound art. In this concert, the theme of time opens a sonic investigation of some of our more well known symbols of time, and in other cases, the theme of time leads to a revisitation of old technologies.

Theatre Direct’s Wychwood Theatre, 601 Christie St #176
$15/$10/free to symposium participants

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