Haverford College Department of Music presents a faculty recital by composer and performer Mei-ling Lee, with Keenan Zack (double bass) and Arta Jekabsone (voice).
This program explores where human experience, sound, and technology meet, transforming memory, voice, and movement into immersive sonic landscapes through data-driven instruments and live electronics. Rooted in myth, storytelling, loss, and longing, these works reflect on how technology can carry our stories and give voice to the unseen and unspoken.
HAVERFORD COLLEGE—MICHAEL JAHARIS RECITAL HALL
Friday, 20 March 2026 | 7:00 pm
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Live stream link: hav.to/rzc
Sound designer Javier Umpierrez has two sound-intensive films coming out this month and next.
Olallo Rubio’s Tormento stars Natalia Solián as an exhausted security guard with some guilty secrets on her first day on the job covering the graveyard shift at the morgue — what could go wrong?
Umpierrez’ sound design for the Tormento trailer is terrifying! He builds and builds and builds to a climax when it suddenly goes silent! Followed by a strangely disembodied closeup of Solián’s scream. Opens on 13 November 2025 only in cinemas.
Javier writes:
Tormento doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, so I had a lot of space to have fun with sound design. There are a lot of dissonant and tonal sounds, practically a score, and all the sounds were generated with Kyma. So fun to work with Kyma like this, a lot of density and grit , the director is beyond happy with the results.
In his trailer for Depeche Mode M, Umpierriez captures the insane excitement of a live DM show, the sounds of the massive crowd, and the music. Reach out, touch me! Dance is the cure.
Directed by Fernando Frías, the film captures Depeche Mode’s 2023 Memento Mori tour and the three sold-out shows in Mexico City attended by over 200,000 fans. DEPECHE MODE: Mdelves into the profound connections between music, pain, memory, joy, and dance.
Limited screenings begin on 28 October 2025 in cinemas and IMAX.
In recent months, composer Giuseppe Tamborrino has been using Kyma for a sonic exploration of feedback on recycled percussion instruments. When he started connecting these instruments to each other, he discovered a complex physical system that significantly increased their timbral capabilities.
Following the research of Agostino Di Scipio and his “acus-mate” concept — in which speakers become instruments — Tamborrino employed four Bluetooth 5.0 speakers as both instruments and drumsticks. This allowed him to send low-frequency sounds through a portable quadraphonic system in Kyma. Continue reading “Refractions on a complex system”
Carlos Alberto Augusto’s A Parábola (The Parable) is a cycle of pieces for instrument(s), a pre-recorded track, and the musician/actor’s spoken voice.
Augusto has produced four pieces of the cycle thus far: Akinesis for viola (2001); The Moment of Being (O momento de ser) for marimba, glockenspiel and small percussion (2007); A observação do Tempo (Observing Time) for snare drums (2023); and a new piece, for classical and baroque guitars, and small percussion, is about to premier.
Andrés Pérez performing performing Carlos Alberto Augusto’s A observação do Tempo
Composer/performer Anne La Berge was the featured artist for the 2025 SPLICE Institute — an annual Institute designed for performers and composers to study the integration of performance with electronics where she presented several performances, worked with student composers, and was invited to do an introductory session on how she uses Kyma in her work.
During the conference, she became a role model for students seeking artistic careers outside of academia.
Earlier in the summer, she was featured in the Cortona Sessions for New Music (20 July – 1 August, 2025 in Ede, Netherlands) — an educational program dedicated to the creation and performance of contemporary music, and a meeting place for emerging composers and performers seeking to collaborate, learn, grow, and create.
It’s a question at the top of everyone’s mind recently: When your current situation feels broken, should you stay and try to fix it? Or should you go somewhere else and start fresh?
Recently, Franz and Andrea were each (independently) recruited to join the faculty of a different university in another country. After much consideration, Franz chose to stay in his current position, and Andrea chose to travel halfway around the world to accept a new position. What factors entered into their decisions? In the interests of anonymity, let’s refer to the two options as the Stay option and the Go option.
“Light Time Delay” is a term-of-art used to express the comms delay between the earth and spacecraft. It’s also the stage name for Kyma artist Théa-Martine Gauthier’s live performance project, recently featured on Modular Seattle’s Modular Nights 13 April 2025, a free monthly event at the Substation venue in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
Opening with phasey delays and a rumbling sub, evocative of acceleration, the performance explodes into metallic rhythmic analog chirps paired with images evoking navigation, PC board layouts, and gravitational manifolds. Obsessively accelerating loops and fragments of texts close in on us in ever-accelerating spirals until the tension finally resolves into a watery, peaceful texture with floaty vocals, underlaid by ominous sub rumbling, electric frog creaks, and shimmery ringing filter chords over a deep thrumming fundamental, and concluding with a sense of wonder and reflection on the improbability of this experience we call “life”: Continue reading “Light Time Delay”
Composer/instrument designer, Chi Wang, was the featured guest artist at this year’s TURNUP Festival in Tucson Arizona on 21 March 2025.
After performing two of her compositions—Transparent Affordance and Fusion of Horizons — Professor Wang presented a public lecture about her work, including sound design demonstrations and live performance excerpts in Kyma.
Dr Wang’s graduate student Minho Kang also appeared on the festival program with The Mist, a fixed media piece where Kyma was used for sound design.
R U I S is one of several pieces that have emerged from Kuit’s years of research conducted with Kyma on the phenomenon of noise.
Part of a cycle interpreting our increasingly complex world of information, RUIS explores collisions, dialogs, interplay, patterns, spreading, merging — sometimes the noise is even pulled loose and spread into pulses in the twelve-meter-wide horizontal panorama, each tap shifting in space as an audio object.
A study in spaciousness and complexity, frequencies are stacked or moved through the space, sometimes configured in a static distribution, while at other times as pseudo-chaotic movements. Each loudspeaker can serve either as an autonomous sound object or as an intrinsic part of the whole.
Likewise, the listener can take a seat or move through the room, receiving continuously changing reflective angles of incidence at the ears.
