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Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium 2015

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Day 1 — Wednesday 19 August 2015

18:30–19:30 • Opening Reception and Installation

Venue: NAISA Space

Installation by Bosch & Simons — Mirlitones

Programme notes and biographies for the Thursday and Saturday evening Sound Travels concerts and for Bosch & Simon’s installation can be found on the NAISA website and in the Sound Travels programme booklet.

19:30–21:30 • Symposium Concert #1

Venue: Wychwood Theatre
Host: Steven Naylor

Alexis Langevin-Tétrault — Shapeshifter
Myriam Boucher — Cities
Robin Cox — START, for violin and tape
Felipe Ramirez Rodriguez — “Reto” (Challenge), for violin and stereo audio
Marie-Hélène Breault and Martin Bédard — Replica
Alexandra Spence — Nankai
Fernando Alexis Franco Murillo — Untitled #1
Martin Marier — Origami, live laptop performance
Jerod Sommerfeldt — Dharma in Excelsis

Robin Cox, violin
Lynn Kuo, violin
Marc Lalancette and Martin Marier, laptops

Alexis Langevin-Tétrault — Shapeshifter

Acousmatic music work focused on micromontage and on the relationship between analogue modular synthesizer, digital modular synthesizer, acoustic sounds and computer. Shapeshifter received Second Prize in the Destellos Foundation’s international electroacoustic music competition in 2014. The work was inspired by the poem “Séquences” by Gaston Miron:

« je vous magane, je vous use, je vous rends fous,
je vous fais honte
Vous ne m’aurez pas vous devrez m’abattre

[…]

les sommeils bougent, ma poitrine résonne
J’ai retrouvé l’avenir »

Alexis Langevin-Tétrault is a guitarist and an electroacoustic music composer. After dropping out from research in sociology, he now studies electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal. A regular of the scene and the studio, he has participated in different music projects, such as Alexeï Kawolski, BetaFeed, Recepteurz and Destaël. He has also composed music for short films and theatre pieces. His work was recognized by the Destellos Foundation in 2014.

Myriam Boucher — Cities

“Material to digital cities.
the world is reversed
inhabited space dies and reborn
ruin or dust
no matter
trace has resonance in us
a noise that lasts”

Myriam Boucher is a Montréal-based artist. Since 2006, she has extended her field of artistic projects in the North American music scene. From her early experiences as a keyboardist in various instrumental music projects through to her visual work, her works tend to elude classification. Since 2013, she creates electroacoustic music, videomusic, performance and audiovisual installations. Inspired by natural phenomena, she deals with sound and image from organic and synthesis materials. Her work has been awarded prizes in the JIM Electroacoustic Compositions 2015 Competition and Bourse Euterke 2015 in video (SAT). In 2015, her works were presented at many events, including the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, NoiseFloor (UK) and Understanding Visual Music 2015 (Brazil).
http://vimeo.com/user20638366

Robin Cox — START

for violin and fixed media
Robin Cox, violin

START is an intense work of rhythmic relationships coming close to, but never quite settling into stable patterns between live acoustic and electronic elements. It places upon the live violinist any temporal grounding or structural foundation sensed in relation to very quick, fleeting and highly syncopated rhythmic gestures of the electronic parts. The performer’s use of bone conduction clicktrack monitoring also ensures accuracy in executing these tightly integrated rhythmic relationships, at times even allowing for the sense of the live musician anticipating or leading the electronics in performance.

Robin Cox is a musician addressing intersections of acoustic and electronic sound, collaborating with artists of other media and researching new listening methods and environments. His current work examines how rhythm influences perception of pitch relationships and means by which timbre effects understanding of musical information. As an active violinist, he also pursues the composer/performer model, rigorously involved in technologies of production and performance as with compositional methods and notation. Dr. Cox is an Assistant Professor with the Music and Arts Technology Department at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). As director of The Robin Cox Ensemble and Iridian Arts, Inc., he has performed his music over 170 times and produced three critically acclaimed CD recordings. As a mixed-media collaborator, he has also created over twenty-five works with choreographers, video artists and playwrights.
http://www.robincox.net

Felipe Ramírez-Rodríguez — “Reto” (Challenge)

for violin and fixed media
Lynn Kuo, violin

“Reto” (Challenge) is an electroacoustic piece for solo violin and pre-recorded electronic sounds. The electronic part includes a multitude of original processed samples and computer generated sounds that work at times as accompaniment to the violin, while at others as a rich counterpoint to the acoustically produced music. At several points, most notably at the beginning, the listener can’t clearly differentiate the pre-recorded sounds from the actual violin. This sets the mood to create in the minds and ears of the audience the sense of a super instrument that continually changes, one that expands and metamorphoses into something new as the music goes on. Reto (“challenge” in Spanish) is a symbolic allegory of the composer’s experience as a first-generation immigrant in North America. A profound life-changing, taxing and oftentimes painful challenge, yet a precious opportunity for expansion and self-renovation.

Felipe Ramírez-Rodríguez is a prolific Colombian-Canadian composer who has spent almost the last two decades of his life in North America. His professional music output includes traditional concert music, computer generated and electroacoustic music, as well as several years in the commercial music business in the USA and his native Colombia. He was the recipient for three consecutive years of the Vittorio Giannini Scholarship for artistic merit at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. His music has been performed in several countries, mainly in the US, Canada and South America. Also, because of his many years as a successful business development professional while living in Miami, New York City and Toronto, he now manages his own organization that promotes cross-border business and cultural exchange opportunities. He has degrees in Music Composition from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (USA) and the University of Toronto (Canada).

Violinist Lynn Kuo has appeared as recitalist, guest soloist and chamber musician across North America, Europe and Asia. In demand as an interpreter of new music, Lynn has given numerous world premieres of acoustic and electroacoustic works written for her and various ensembles by composers from Canada, United States, Serbia, Croatia and Ireland. As guest soloist, she has performed with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, Thirteen Strings, Canadian Sinfonietta, Brandon Chamber Players, Nexus percussion ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Bulgaria), Cantus Ensemble (Croatia), Lviv Philharmonic, Lviv Virtuosi (Ukraine) and as guest soloist with Hungary’s gypsy orchestra, Rajkó Band. Lynn performs as Assistant Concertmaster of the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra and has also served as guest concertmaster, adjudicator, guest artist and lecturer at Canadian orchestras, universities, festivals and universities. A Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of Toronto, Lynn has recorded chamber music of Nino Rota for the NAXOS label and in 2014, released a debut CD with pianist Marianna Humetska entitled LOVE: Innocence, Passion, Obsession.
http://www.lynnkuo.com

Marie-Hélène Breault and Martin Bédard — Replica

The Replica project is implied by existential opposition between continuity and transformation contained in the maxim “eadem mutata resurgo” or “I rise again changed but the same.” The piece is realized only from flute sounds (mostly from the instrumentalist), old records and new materials generated during a first instrumental writing. Replication of these materials by a second media écriture created various parts in which are interpreted first, the instrument (flute) and its expressive potential, and secondly, the instrumentalist and its history. Replica in the dichotomous relationship between continuity and transformation is divided into four compositional methods: the contrast between the pure instrumental sound and its reconstruction, the design of new materials from old recordings, the gradual transformation of motivic cells and sonic objects based on repetition, and the duplication of the instrumental field to the electroacoustic media. On the way to instrumental utopia, the project took the form of an acousmatic piece.

Very active in the interpretation of contemporary music, flutist Marie-Hélène Breault has given many concerts in Canada and abroad. She has received grants from the Canada Council and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and received first prize for her interpretation of Kathinkas Gesang als Luzifers Requiem during the Stockhausen-Kurse Kürten 2006. Alongside her career in interpretation, she completed doctoral studies in musicology at the Université de Montréal.
http://mariehelenebreault.com

Following a course of five years, Martin Bédard graduated with high distinction from the Conservatory of Music of Montreal in electroacoustic composition. He recently completed a PhD in electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal. His works have been presented in national and international events and festivals. Besides his activities as a composer, he teaches at the Music Conservatory of Montreal and electroacoustic composition at the University of Montreal as a lecturer.

Alexandra Spence — Nankai

Nankai is an electroacoustic composition inspired by the beautiful, monastic region of Koyasan, Japan. Based on a field recording of the Nankai line train snaking its way up the mountain, Nankai takes the listener on a journey, sonically recreating the space and spirituality of Koyasan. Nankai is an attempt to recreate the space and spirituality of Koyasan. It is a subjective representation of a journey I took, and my subsequent experiences and memories. It is also an appropriation, placing borrowed and foreign sounds in a new context. Nankai is an attempt to replicate the experience unique to a particular person in a particular place and time.

Alexandra Spence is an electroacoustic sound artist and improvising clarinettist from Sydney currently based in Vancouver. She works within the fields of improvised music, electroacoustic composition and multimedia installation. Alex is interested in the relationship between humans and their sonic environments. Alex has performed and presented work in concerts, festivals and symposiums worldwide, including the 2010 and 2012 NOW Festival (Sydney), 416 Festival (Toronto) and the FKL Symposium 2015, (Besenello, Italy). In collaboration with visual artist Katrina Stamatopoulos, Alex has presented work at DAS2015 (Belfast), the 2014 Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium and Festival Images Contre Nature ’14 (Marseille).
http://afivepence.wordpress.com

Fernando Alexis Franco Murillo — Untitled #1

Untitled #1 is a study of repetition, from the creative process (stop motion and music) to the finished product.

It was at Concordia University that Fernando Alexis Franco Murillo discovered a new form of expression with electroacoustic music. His music is inspired from personal experiences and human emotions like love, sadness and anger. He is currently studying electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal under the direction of Louis Dufort.
http://soundcloud.com/alexis-franco

Martin Marier — Origami, live laptop performance

Marc Lalancette and Martin Marier, laptops

Origami is a partially improvised work about folding, unfolding and foldover. Both performers play the “sponge”, a cushion-like digital musical instrument developed by Martin Marier. Sensors inside the sponge detect the deformations. The data is then sent wirelessly to a computer that runs a sound engine. All sounds generated by the computer are played by the performers. The piece was composed by Martin Marier and Myriam Bleau during improvisation sessions, slowly fixing a structure while exploring the possibilities of the instrument. For this event, the piece will be performed by Marc Lalancette and Martin Marier.

Martin Marier is a composer and a performer who is mainly interested in live electronic music using new interfaces. He is the inventor of the “sponge”, a cushion-like musical interface he uses to perform his pieces. The main goal of this approach is to establish a natural link between gesture and sound in electronic music. He aims at improving the interaction with the audience and at making the process of composing more playful. His research on the sponge is the topic of the doctorate he is pursuing at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Jean Piché.
http://www.martinmarier.com

Jerod Sommerfeldt — Dharma in Excelsis

Tibetan Buddhist chant, audio artifacts from aliased signals, singing bowls, music boxes, small clicks and frequency modulation all play a role in this work that explores contrasts between sounds that are meditative and harsh, faint and present, delicate and grating.

Jerod Sommerfeldt’s music focuses on the creation of algorithmic and stochastic processes, utilizing the results for both fixed and real-time composition and improvisation. His sound world explores digital audio artifacts and the destruction of technology, resulting in work that seeks to question the dichotomy between the intended and unintentional. An active performer as both soloist and collaborator in interactive digital music and live video, he currently serves as Assistant Professor of Electronic Music Composition and Theory at the State University of New York at Potsdam Crane School of Music, and as director of the SUNY-Potsdam Electronic Music Studios (PoEMS).
http://jerodsommerfeldt.com

Day 2 — Thursday 20 August

19:30–21:30 • Sound Travels Concert #1: “Unstable Rationality”

Venue: Wychwood Theatre
Host: Bekah Simms

“Unstable Rationality” refers to Nicolas Collins’ practice of going beyond the cutting edge in his exploration of sound and interactive systems. His performance reflects a renewed interest in the quirky performance possibilities of unstable electronic circuits, especially damaged or misused ones, often in interaction with more rational computer software. Also included will be a performance by Matt Rogalsky that arose from recordings made in Kingston Penitentiary (first opened in 1833) before it closed.

Day 3 — Friday 21 August

14:30–16:00 • Symposium Concert #2

Venue: Wychwood Theatre
Host: Louise Harris

Adam Tindale — OSCILLATE
Benjamin Whiting — Melodía sin melodía
Steven Naylor — I Wish
Adam Vidiksis — Things That Live in the Whirligig, for multi-percussionist with live processing and laptop orchestra
Michael Lukaszuk — Ritus
Brian Connolly — Critical Bands
Michael Drews — End Times
Jason Bolte — Putt’n Around

Adam Vidiksis, percussion

Adam Tindale — Oscillate

Oscillate explores the concept of oscillating oscillators: an oscillator that oscillates waveforms as it computes samples. The suite explores progressively longer sequences of waveforms for the oscillators used in the compositions. Minimal effects processing is employed in the composition and production. Oscillate is a work-in-progress from a series of web EPs.

Adam Tindale is an electronic drummer and digital instrument designer. He is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Digital Futures Initiative at OCAD University. Adam performs on his E-Drumset, a new electronic instrument that utilizes physical modeling and machine learning with an intuitive physical interface. He completed a Bachelor of Music at Queen’s University, a Master’s of Music Technology at McGill University and an Interdisciplinary PhD in Music, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Victoria.
http://www.adamtindale.com

Benjamin Whiting — Melodía sin melodía

This piece was borne of an inspiration to blend sounds of found household objects — a staple of electroacoustic fixed-media composition — with those of an instrument associated with conventional means of Western music production, the transverse flute. Both sonic groupings carry with them certain implications that are challenged in this piece. At the start, the found objects and flute behave as they “should”, but their respective roles blur as the piece progresses, eventually reaching a kind of cooperative unity by the end.

I wish to extend my sincerest gratitude to Melody Chua, whose contribution of samples of her brilliant playing formed the backbone of this piece.

Benjamin D. Whiting received his BM in music composition and his MM in music theory and composition from Florida State University, and is now pursuing his DMA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an active composer of both acoustic and electroacoustic music, and has had his works performed in the United States and abroad. His works have been performed in festivals such as TUTTI, N_SEME, SEAMUS, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the College Music Society’s regional and national conferences, Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music, and in concerts put on by the organizations Soundiff and Pas-e. Whiting has studied with Scott Wyatt, Sever Tipei, Erik Lund, Erin Gee and Ladislav Kubik. Recordings of his work can be found on the ABLAZE Records and the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios labels.

Steven Naylor — I Wish

I Wish is a musical portrait of an inner space, in which unattainable longings, ambiguous desires and persistent fears jostle for position. The piece was constructed from a few vocal and instrumental fragments taken from the recording of a simple song of lament — Home, sung by Rita Rankin — that I composed several years earlier.

Steven Naylor composes and performs electroacoustic and instrumental concert music, and creates scores and sound designs for theatre, film, television and radio. His concert works have been performed and broadcast internationally; his theatre scores have played to live audiences of over five million, in 14 countries. Steven co-founded Nova Scotia’s Upstream Ensemble and The Oscillations Festival, and is a former President of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. He is presently Artistic Director of subText Music & Media Arts, an independent artist and Adjunct Professor in the School of Music at Acadia University. His first solo DVD-A of electroacoustic works, Lieux imaginaires, released on empreintes DIGITALes, was nominated for a 2013 East Coast Music Award. Steven completed a PhD in Musical Composition at the University of Birmingham (UK) supervised by Jonty Harrison. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
http://sonicart.ca

Adam Vidiksis — Things That Live in the Whirligig

for multi-percussionist with live processing and laptop orchestra
Adam Vidiksis, percussion

Spinning, spinning, spinning… we greet the wondrous creatures that live within the whirligig. This piece explores textures created through spinning, or that evoke whirling. As the whirligig goes round and round, I imagine a menagerie of creatures great and small that reside within. This work is based on a poem composed by my mother when she carried me, and I dedicate it to my newborn daughter. Things That Live in the Whirligig is for multi-percussionist with live processing and laptop orchestra, composed in Pure Data. “For things once seen are pulled within the whirligig of mind, where they are tamed and in the heart framed to be used over again in time…”

Adam Vidiksis is a composer, conductor, percussionist and technologist based in Philadelphia. Equally comfortable with both electronic and acoustic composition, his music has been heard in concert halls and venues around the world. Critics have called his music “mesmerizing,” “dramatic”, “striking” (Philadelphia Weekly), “notable”, “catchy” (WQHS), “interesting” and “special” (Percussive Notes), and have noted that Vidiksis provides “an electronically produced frame giving each sound such a deep-coloured radiance you could miss the piece’s shape for being caught up in each moment” (David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer). His compositions have been heard at many national and international conferences and venues, and are available through HoneyRock Publishing and PARMA Recordings. His music has received numerous awards, including from SCI and ASCAP. Vidiksis holds degrees from Drew, NYU and Temple University, culminating in a doctoral degree in composition. He currently serves on the composition faculty at Temple University.
http://www.vidiksis.com

Michael Lukaszuk — Ritus

The Latin word “ritus” can be used to discuss ceremonies, rites, habits or customs. The source material for this piece comes from both field recordings and computer-generated sounds. I started by capturing material that I considered ordinary. As my collection grew I began to incorporate recordings of musical instruments that are commonly used for ceremonial purposes. In this piece I tried to illuminate and blend the commonplace with the sacred to create an entirely new sound world.

Michael Lukaszuk is a Canadian composer of acoustic and electroacoustic works. He is currently pursuing a DMA in Composition at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music where he is in Mara Helmuth’s studio. Michael holds degrees in music theory and composition from the University of Western Ontario. His music has been performed at events such as the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, New Music Edmonton’s Now Hear This Festival, the George Enescu Festival and the Midwest Composers Symposium. He regularly performs electroacoustic music with the Cincinnati Composers Laptop Orchestra Project (CiCLOP).

Brian Connolly — Critical Bands

This composition explores the use of critical bands as a compositional tool with a specific focus on the application of beating and rough sensations in the creation of multiple textures. The time-scaling of material containing perceptual beats is employed to create pulsating idioms which are used to create a number of effects such as impulsive, almost “rhythmic”, material. Spectral masking is employed as a means of discontinuing an existing idea (the masked sound) while introducing another (the masker).

Brian Connolly is a third-year PhD student from Dublin with research interests in the application of psychoacoustic phenomena within composition. Since starting his PhD in September 2012 at NUI Maynooth under the supervision of Dr. Gordon Delap, Brian has composed the music for Keith Barry’s The Dark Side tour as well as having written and presented a documentary that explored computer music in Ireland for RTÉ Lyric FM, entitled Why Music Can’t Stay Still. Brian is also producer of the iTunes award-winning podcast series An Irishman Abroad.

Michael Drews — End Times

End Times (2012) is part of a series of works that focus on a single audio source that is digitally altered during a live computer performance. The result is a short piece that draws out and transforms salient quirks and characteristics inherent in the original sound source. Often the sound sources chosen for these pieces project an inner referential or nostalgic quality — composer Stefan Wolpe described this as the “haunted” nature of an object. As objects are deconstructed, their original contextual identity becomes obscured or even destroyed; however, the process of abstraction can act as a filter, removing surface characteristics to reveal latent qualities that are surprisingly revealing of the objects true nature.

Michael Drews is an artist who works with sound, video and live musical performance. His work explores our unconscious connection to genre archetypes and sonic and visual memes. Drews is a core member of the multimedia performance groups Big Robot and Mana2. Performances of Drews’ works have been featured at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, MusicAcoustica (Beijing), NYC Electronic Music Festival, Cinesonika International Film Festival and throughout the United States and abroad. Drews holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (DMA), Cleveland State University (MMus) and Kent State University (BA). He resides with his family in Indianapolis and is Associate Professor of Music at Indiana University-Indianapolis (IUPUI).
http://michaeldrews.org

Jason Bolte — Putt’n Around

Putt’n Around was composed in response to my friend David McIntire’s Putney Project. The work uses material derived from David’s early exposure to the EMS VCS-3, also known as the “Putney”.

Jason Bolte is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. He currently resides in Bozeman (Montana) with his wonderful wife Barbara and their two beautiful daughters, Lila and Megan. Jason teaches music technology and composition at Montana State University, where he also directs the Montana State Transmedia and Electroacoustic Realization (MonSTER) Studios. Jason’s music is available on the ABLAZE records, ELECTRO<>ACÚSTICO, SEAMUS, Irritable Hedgehog, Vox Novus, SoundWalk and Miso Records labels.
http://j.web.umkc.edu/jlbtfc

19:30–21:30 • Symposium Concert #3

Venue: Wychwood Theatre
Host: Alexandra Spence

Linda Antas — All That Glitters and Goes Bump in the Night
Elsa Justel — Cercles et surfaces
Hiromi Ishii — Ryojinfu
Louise Harris — pletten
Nick Fells — o ire, laptop performance
Shane Byrne — Tatemae/Honne
Linda Antas — Iridescence
Myriam Boucher — QUADr, for electroacoustic quartet

Electroacoustic quartet: Pierre-Luc Lecours, Myriam Boucher, Lucas Paris and Alexis Langevin-Tétrault

Linda Antas — All That Glitters and Goes Bump in the Night

All that glitters isn’t treasure — but it glitters nonetheless. Not everything that goes bump in the night does us harm, and in fact, many things are nearly equal parts “glitter” and “bump”. I am convinced that everything negative carries with it an equal measure of good, if only we have the skills to bear difficult things in constructive ways. The work is a reflection on appearance vs. reality — on our often distorted perceptions of good and bad, success and failure, direct cause and serendipity — and on all manner of assumptions. Faulty logic, ignorance and strong emotion can inhibit our understanding of the people, objects and situations around us, causing undue negativity, unfounded positivity and overall confusion about the causes of both happiness and suffering.

Linda Antas is a composer, digital artist, flutist and educator. Her compositions have been performed and broadcast around the world and are published on the Ablaze, TauKay, Centaur, EMS and Media Café labels. A Fulbright Fellowship recipient, Antas has also been recognized by the Musica Nova International Electro-acoustic Music Competition, the International Music Contest Cittá di Udine (TauKay Edizioni Musicali) and has received commissions from the International Computer Music Association and various internationally renowned performers. She serves on the faculty of Montana State University, teaching music technology, interdisciplinary multimedia courses and composition. Her current research involves audiovisual works, real-time signal processing and physical computing. She is currently Vice President for Membership of the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States.
http://www.lindaantas.com

Elsa Justel — Cercles et Surfaces

Circles and surfaces answers to the principle of musical gestures in space, creating a flow of seemingly chaotic sound patterns that approach each other and meet in arborescence creating a new order. The multi-track discourse contributes to create a polyphonic texture that accompanies the gestural movements in the space.

French-Argentinian composer Elsa Justel holds a Dr. in Esthetics, Science and Technologies of Art from the University of Paris. Working nowadays as independent composer, she has received commissions from the French state and different studios of Europe. She has been awarded in several international competitions of electroacoustic music, such as Prix Ton Bruynel (Netherlands), Bourges (France), Ars Electronica (Austria), between others. Her works have been published by empreintes DIGITALes of Canada and on compilations in France, the USA and Spain. She has been teaching at the University of Marne La Vallée (France), Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and giving seminars in several conservatories in Europe, the USA, Argentina and Mexico. As researcher, she has published articles related to electroacoustic music and visual music in some revues and books. In 2007, she created the Foundation Destellos in order to develop and promote the electroacoustic music, having as main objet the realization of the International Competition of Electroacoustic Composition.

Hiromi Ishii — Ryojinfu

This multi-channel sound-fantasy was inspired by a legend of a Japanese emperor who was religious — was devoted in Imayo (Buddhist chant) — but had to fight many battles. The material sounds are singing (solo) voice of Imayo, sounds and noises recorded at a Buddhist ceremony, and grain sounds of rice. These have mainly been processed using convolution, mutation, evolution and granular synthesis. The processed sounds were given different characters of movement and designed in a three-dimensional space. The sounds processed from the singing sources appear with variations (but never as the original sound), and lead a boy’s voice-like sound finally. The massive sounds relating to Buddhist ceremony move slowly to create a sound wall. The sounds taken from the rice grains move quickly and irregularly like flying living objects. This piece was composed during my residency at ZKM 2013 using the Zirkonium system.

Hiromi Ishii studied composition in Tokyo, electroacoustic music in Dresden and later at City University London where she was conferred her PhD. Her composition relates to Japanese traditional music in the sense of the sound æsthetics. Her pieces have been presented at music festivals worldwide such as Musica Viva (Lisbon), MusicAcoustica (Beijing), EMFF (Florida), EMUfest (Rome), Cynetart (Dresden), Punto y Raya, NYCEMF, and have been broadcast by the WDR and MDR. In 2006 (ZKM grant) and 2013 she was a guest composer at ZKM. Her recent works focus on multi-channel acousmatic and visual music for which she composes both music and moving-images in parallel. She has a portrait CD from Wergo. In 2011, she was invited by University of Cologne for a portrait concert. Ishii is currently living in a suburb of Cologne and is working as a curator of visual music.
http://www.hiromi-ishii.de

Louise Harris — pletten

“pletten”: squash, crush, flatten. pletten is a dual screen audiovisual work that is intended for playback on two opposite walls of a dark, square space but can also be exhibited side by side. The work is an exploration of simultaneous compositional process and the development of complementary sonic and visual forms on a micro- and macro-structural level. Ideally, the two screens should be displayed opposite one another, with the audience situated in the centre of the two, allowing them to engage with the sonic and visual structures being formed in a variety of ways, both within the work itself and in the way the work behaves in a confined space.

Louise Harris is an electronic and audiovisual composer, as well as a Lecturer in Sonic and Audiovisual Practices at the University of Glasgow. Louise specialises in the creation of audiovisual relationships utilising electronic music and computer-generated visual environments. Her audiovisual work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, including at AV Festival (Newcastle, 2010), Musica Viva Festival (Lisbon, 2011), NAISA’s SOUNDplay festival (Toronto, 2011), Strasbourg Museum of Modern Art (2012, 2013, 2014), Piksel Festival (Bergen, 2012, 2013, 2014), Linux Audio Conference (2013, 2014), Festival Novelum (Toulouse, 2013), Sonorities Festival (Belfast, 2014, 2015) and Sweet Thunder Festival (San Francisco, 2014).
http://www.louiseharris.co.uk

Nick Fells — o ire

laptop performance

o ire is a laptop piece that uses ambisonic spatialisation to create a sense of inward/outward, here/there, through and between. It comprises an improvised exploration of the spaces and surfaces inherent in a collection of old vinyl and gramophone records of my father’s, along with old Dictaphone tape recordings found from my childhood. These are combined in various ways with field recordings made in Glasgow and the Isle of Lewis. A sense of nostalgia and place is explored through these old and anecdotal recordings, and the layering of fragments, textures and resonances. At the same time, I’m interested in the way the media themselves have other hidden spaces and voices that are waiting to be revealed. The title of the piece is a redaction of the title of one of the gramophone records used, and the piece is dedicated to the memory of my father, Alan George Fells, who loved life.

Nick Fells is a composer based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is mainly concerned with refining improvisation with recorded sound and working with other performers to hone source materials and approaches. Primarily he strives to nurture delicacy in technologically mediated sound work whilst maintaining a “body” of sound. He teaches at the University of Glasgow, where he coordinates Master’s and PhD programmes in Sonic Arts as well as an undergraduate degree in Electronics with Music. Recent pieces have included ps[c]yched, for string quartet, electronics and bicycles, composed for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games cultural festival, Sublimation for Scottish Opera’s Five:15 series, and Rifts, a wavefield synthesis surround sound work made for Sony’s Creative Lab in Tokyo and remixed for the Game of Life system in Den Haag. He is a founding member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and co-directs the web archive/label project Never Come Ashore.
http://nickfells.net

Shane Byrne — Tatemae/Honne

The words “tatemae” and “honne” translate roughly from Japanese as the outer self and the inner self, respectively. This duality is expressed in the materials used to create this piece — roughly half of the sounds used were recorded (an unprocessed example is audible at the very start of the piece) and the rest were synthesized using SuperCollider. The concept of the sense of self is represented in the piece with looping and feeding sounds back into themselves and then manipulating the resulting output with real-time processing.

Shane Byrne is a composer of acoustic and electronic music and is currently a PhD researcher at Maynooth University focusing on interactivity and participation within electronic music composition. In 2013 he completed his BA in music technology with first class honours, and in 2014 completed an MA in creative music technologies, also receiving first class honours. His current work is focused on physical computing and the potential for human interaction to add to an overall immersive musical experience for both the performer and the audience. His work has more recently led him to investigate the potential for such interaction to facilitate and encourage learning amongst the learning impaired and the autistic community. He also works as a sound designer, Foley artist and mixing engineer. His first love is performance and regularly takes part in improvisation nights and occasionally plays gigs with several noise and progressive rock bands in Dublin.
http://soundcloud.com/shane-broin

Linda Antas — Iridescence

Iridescent (from Latin, iris: “rainbow”): displaying a spectrum of luminous colors that shimmer and change due to interference and scattering as the observer’s viewing angle changes. Pearls, beetles, butterflies, cuttlefish and other cephalopods, hummingbirds, bornite, bismuth, soap bubbles, opals, DVDs and oil on wet pavement all exhibit iridescence caused by redirected light. Colouration caused by micro- or nano-structures is referred to as “structural colour” and is a common cause of iridescence in the natural world. I was fascinated by the diverse manifestations of iridescence in nature and by the physics of iridescence, which links colour and structure. I was also struck by the poetry of it: it is only by looking at something from different angles that we fully appreciate its beauty and complexity. Iridescence contains textures that shimmer, or that were created with processes that parallel the diverse directions, angles, and fluctuations that produce iridescence.

QUADr, electroacoustic quartet: Pierre-Luc Lecours, Myriam Boucher, Lucas Paris and Alexis Langevin-Tétrault

QUADr is a live audiovisual performance of electroacoustic music. This project is borne of the imagination of four artists bringing together complementary practices: live electronics, musique concrète, computer music and generative visuals. Immersed in an innovative stage setup, the musicians interact with bicycle wheels, modular synthesizers, digital gestural interfaces… Parts of the stage are augmented with projection mapping of audio-reactive video while a big screen displays a resulting shadow play. Constantly changing the stage dynamic, the artists take up different roles and reveal new instruments, new interactions. Lecours, Boucher, Paris and Langevin-Tétrault, composers and performers of post-rock, acousmatic and electronic music, bring you a unique creation: dark and mature, at the forefront of technological experimentations and musical innovations.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist, Pierre-Luc Lecours began his musical career as a self-taught musician before studying electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal. He has participated in the composition and production of several albums and film soundtracks, theatre and digital applications. Although his work covers a wide range of æsthetics, Lecours always aims to create emotional impact and to create successions of images with his music. In 2014, his work was prized in the Destellos Foundation Electroacoustic Compositions Competition, in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers and in the CEC’s 2014 Jeu de temps / Times Play competition.
http://soundcloud.com/lecours

Lucas Paris is an electroacoustic composer, creative coder and multimedia artist. He develops his own digital tools and tries to push the artistic boundaries of current technologies so as to favour musical expressivity and spontaneity. He seeks to establish an intimate link between the composer and technology. While finishing his studies in digital music at Université de Montréal, he developed custom software for Herman Kolgen and Pierre Michaud. His works and his collaborations in the electroacoustic ensembles BetaFeed and QUADr have been show at BIAN 2014 Montréal, the UltraSons concert series, Montréal en Lumière FVMM. His work has been awarded by Klang! 2015 international composition competition.
http://lucasparis.ca

Day 4 — Saturday 22 August

14:30–16:00 • Symposium Concert #4

Venue: Wychwood Theatre
Host: James O’Callaghan

Thomas Rex Beverley — Dancing Tree, for electronics and video
Jon Fielder — Wind Chimes Clatter through the Mist and Fog
Louise Harris — ic2, for live audiovisuals
Lucas Paris — Candor
Monique Jean — T.A.G.

Thomas Rex Beverley — Dancing Tree

for electronics and video

Dancing Tree is product of my fascination with slow growth. The tree in this time-lapse video is about 300 years old, but is only 15 feet tall because of the desert environment where it grows. The music in this piece is a sonification of the subtle, but often frenetic movement of the dancing tree on one windy day in the desert of west Texas.

American composer Thomas Rex Beverly is a graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio (Texas), where he completed a bachelor’s degree in music composition. At Trinity, he studied with Timothy Kramer, David Heuser, Jack W. Stamps and Brian Nelson. He has had recent performances the So Percussion Summer Institute and the International Computer Music Conference. He recently graduated from Bowling Green State University in their Master of Music Composition degree programme, where he studied with Elainie Lillios and Christopher Dietz, and was a Music Technology Teaching Assistant.
http://www.thomasrexbeverly.com

Jon Fielder — Wind Chimes Clatter through the Mist and Fog

Composed in the electronic music studios of the University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 2014, Wind Chimes Clatter through the Mist and Fog explores the concept of manipulating a listening space through spatialized sound, moving sound and interplay between highly reflective reverb and dry sounds. Wind Chimes was originally realized for an 8-channel acousmonium system (built by myself and professor Bruce Pennycook), and was later revised to be presented in an 8-channel ring setup.

Jon Fielder is a composer of electroacoustic and acoustic music, all of which reflect his strong interest in timbre, texture, spatialization and narrative. His music is often inspired by his appreciation of natural landscapes and the sound world created therein. Jon also finds inspiration from his interest in various topics of science and mathematics (chemical reactions, psychopharmacology, Markov chains), from manipulations of the human voice — both spoken and sung — and from literature. Jon’s music has been presented and performed at the SEAMUS conference (2013), Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, Electronic Music Midwest, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, CEMIcircles Festival, N-SEME, NASA conference, the International Double Reed Society Conference (2012), the Northern Ohio Music Exchange (NOMA) concert at the Oberlin Conservatory, the Olmsted Festival of the Arts, and was included in the Alex Sramek call for scores for the Vox Novus 15 Minutes of Fame series.
http://jonfielder.weebly.com

Louise Harris — ic2

for live audiovisuals

ic2 is a live, audiovisual, beat-and-noise-based performance work. The intention is to create a symbiotic system, in which live decision making by the performer impacts on both the audio and visual components of the work but also in which both the audio and visual components can interact with one another, causing behaviours that are not directly controlled by the system performer. There is also an element of chaotic behaviour built into the system, causing unpredictable audio and visual outcomes. The latest stage in the evolution of the performance includes sonic and visual material directly generated by the activity of performer in the audiovisual outcome of the work.

Lucas Paris — Candor

This composition comes from a childhood memory. In rainy Brittany, my first improvisations on a piano. It was a naive exploration of harmony, discoveries and amazement at the different colours of the chords I seemed to be inventing. The expression of an emotive world that can’t be put into words. This feeling of musical candour is translated to the world of digital music making, although the composer uses processing in a transparent way in which individual effects do not stand out. All traces of how the Foley and field recordings were transformed are hidden so as to favour a poetic and imaginative space.

Monique Jean — T.A.G.

T.A.G. (Trottoir, Asphalte, Goudron [Sidewalk, Asphalt, Tar]) is a work inspired by crowds of demonstrators. And more particularly those energized shapes that become flood, drift and multitude. The mass drifts and undulates, subject to sudden bifurcations, breakthroughs, and tensions charged with colliding multitudinous, heterogeneous beings. The sounds, mainly synthesized, are simultaneously organic and urban in their subterranean movements, breakaways, accelerations, walls of resistance and dispersals.

As an electroacoustic composer and sound artist, Monique Jean is interested in the tensions, ruptures and clashes of sonic matter that produce a transmutation of the real into the poetic. This search for an organic substance takes various forms according to each project and technology at play: electroacoustic pieces, mixed music with live treatments, sound installations (Point d’attaches ou les infidélités rotatives) and live performance as part of the improvisers’ collective Theresa Transistor, and in solo. Her works have been played at Multiphonies (Paris), Akousma X (Montréal), Sonorities (Ireland), NYCEMF (USA), San Francisco Tape Music (USA), Festival Ai-Maako (Chile), Elektra (Montréal). In 2012, she was invited as artist-in-residency at Civitella Ranieri in Italy. Her most recent DVD Greffes received the Prix Opus 2013 in the section record of the year musique actuelle / electroacoustic music.

19:30–21:30 • Sound Travels Concert #2: “Revealing Origins”

Venue: Wychwood Theatre
Host: Elliott Fienberg

A performance of new works by Stephanie Moore and Wendalyn Bartley. Bartley’s work was commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art through funding from the Ontario Arts Council and originated from explorations made during last year’s Sound Travels Intensive. Stephanie Moore will be presenting a trilogy of new works called Lunar Cycle, which use fixed media and solo double bass performed by Adam Scime.

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