Month: March 2015

QUANTUM in the desert: art, science, technology & collaboration

In April 2015, QUANTUM, the dance piece Jobin created inspired by his residency at CERN, will be touring northern Mexico including Culiacan, Hermosillo, Tijuana, Ensenada and Mexicali. Technical director Marie Predour will be running the live sound for the piece using a Kyma 7 Timeline.

Choreographer Gilles Jobin took a moment to talk a little about the piece, to explain his ideas on algorithmic choreography and to reflect on collaboration, art, science, and technology.

 

What’s interesting about technology is not so much the technology as a tool, but technology as a new way of thinking — as a different way to organize your work or to think about your work. The same is true when choreographers work with scientists or with musicians. There is a kind of exchange of practices that is enriching for everybody.

14 April Culiacan РFestival Danza Jos̩ Limon

16 April Hermosillo – Un Desierto Para La Danza

19 April Tijuana – Cuerpos in Transito

21 April Ensenada – Espuma Cuantica

23 April Mexicali – Entre Fronteras

27 April to 2 May Torreon – Gilles Jobin will be on the jury for Premio Nacional Guillermo Arriaga

Slow art, like slow food, gives you time to contemplate

You’ve heard of the “slow food” movement; now that concept is being extended to the experience of art. At the premiere Slow experience at the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, you can partake in talks in the cafe, soundscapes in the wintergarden, simmering food surrounded by ionic columns and Roman statues in the ceremonial hall and tours that get you close to the art. The first event is on Thursday March 26 starting at 17:00 and is based on the rather appropriate theme: “Time”.

The event opener is sound artist SØS Gunver Ryberg performing her new quadrophonic piece using a spatialized Kyma 7 Multigrid in the unique and beautiful surroundings of the Glyptotek Museum Wintergarden.

wintergarden

In addition to live sound art by SØS, you can hear Egyptologist Mogens Jørgensen talk about embalming and time or philosopher/author Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff discuss the nature of time; you can sample food laid out on long tables overseen by long-dead Romans frozen in marble; you can experience a new type of museum lighting that lets you get much closer to the art, and, most important of all — you can savor the time you’ve been given to contemplate the entire experience.

http://www.glyptoteket.dk/slow

Kyma 7 at SEAMUS

If you’ll be participating in the SEAMUS electronic music festival at Virginia Tech at the end of the week, you’ll have an opportunity to hear several performances in which Kyma 7 played a part, among them:

  • Every Problem is a Nail, Scott Miller
  • Imagined Destinies, Jeffrey Stolet
  • Violin Power, Mark Phillips
  • Youngman/Overholt, Jon Bellona
  • Number Vortex, Olga Oseth
  • Shin no Shin, Simon Hutchinson
  • Magic Fingers, Chi Wang

If you’re at the conference, you can cheer on your fellow Kyma practitioners and be sure to introduce yourself to them after the concert.

Reimagining a parched soundscape

In Reimagined : Synthesized Soundscapes of California, sound artist Micah Frank re-imagines the parched landscape of drought-striken California through field recordings collected on site and then spectrally dissected, manipulated and resynthesized through additive, granular and filter bank resynthesis in Kyma 7.

 

Through a combination of low rainfall and high temperatures, California is experiencing its worst drought in 1200 years. From September through October 2014, Micah Frank embarked on a soundscape ecology project to create a sonic profile of California parks, their biophonies and geophonies. But to his surprise, each park he visited was like a ghost world. Although he was able to capture geophonic sounds like wind and rain, there were almost no biophonic sounds of birds or other animals.

His starkly reimagined soundscape was generated entirely from the field recordings processed through spectral analysis and resynthesis.

Innovative pipe organ music in Hamburg

A new pipe organ has just been installed in the St. Johannis Harvestehude church in Hamburg, where the organist is keen to combine the organ with electronic instruments. In addition to several other interesting features, the new organ has speakers installed on the side and the organist has installed a half-size Continuum fingerboard on top of the console.

On Sunday, March 22, 2015, 19:00, two award-winning organists—Wolfgang Zerer of Hamburg and Franz Danksagmüller of Lübeck will present the inaugural concert on the new Mühleisen / Marcussen organ.  To celebrate the combination of tradition and innovation reflected in this new instrument, the program will be presented in two halves: Tradition performed by Zerer, and after the intermission, Innovation presented by Danksagmüller.  The full concert will be recorded by the NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk).

Danksagmüller, a longtime Kyma user and organizer of KISS2015 in Lübeck, will be placing microphones inside the organ and doing live Kyma transformations of the sound as well as controlling the organ via MIDI and a four-step sequencer in Kyma.  The program for the second half of the concert is:

  • Franz Danksagmüller: Sphaera
  • John Cage: Souvenir and Fontana Mix
  • Franz Danksagmüller: Improvisation
  • Franz Danksagmüller: machine organ

Admission is € 10 (with open seating) and you can get advance tickets at the box office

EZUFFPP#6 Film Festival in New York

opus caementiciumOpus Caementicium, a short, abstract cinematic ode to concrète by Karin Schomaker with a Kyma generated score by Roland Kuit will be screened in New York on March 13, 2015 at EZUFFPP#6 NY— a festival bridging experimental architecture, experimental film, and experimental music at Spectrum Space in NYC.

Described as “an experience of form, light, surface, sound and movement,” Opus Caementicium is “an attempt to transcend the mere material.” For the soundtrack, Kuit uses the Slipstick synthesis module to create pulses that are frequency modulated and fed into a Resonator Bank. These reflections of sound are then Time/Frequency shaped to create a beautiful concrete sound/music environment.

EZUFF is different kind of film festival that spans objective and subjective realms and bridges gaps among different scholarly traditions. They see horizons not boundaries. EZUFF is a ‘projectivist’ project playing with ideas of:

  • the projection of moving images – the film medium
  • the idea that the projections of moving image could be related to (or used as a pretext to address) actual & future ‘projections’ of the city/urban life

Using short experimental movies to make a link between contemporary urban forms of expression/representation and the political imagination for the city of today, EZUFF is about oblique ways to dig into present day urban cultures and imagine alternatives for the cities of tomorrow

aroundNorth around Northern Ireland

If the stars were a musical instrument, how would they sound? As the Earth spins on its axis, and day becomes night becomes day, our view on the near universe changes as reflected by the changing positions of the stars in the sky. One star appears to stay stationary (the North Star); and the rest take about 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete one complete revolution. Robert Jarvis’ aroundNorth is an eight-channel sound installation created entirely in Kyma 7 that offers listeners an opportunity to hear this phenomenon in real time. As each star crosses one of the equally spaced virtual lines emanating from Celestial North Pole, a sound associated with that star and its characteristics is heard at the corresponding position in the sky, its size, its distance from Earth, its brightness and its temperature, creating a mesmerizing sound map of the universe as viewed by our turning planet.

aroundNorth, will be touring Northern Ireland throughout the month of March 2015, culminating in the work’s permanent installation at Armagh Observatory. The tour begins on the shores of Lough Neagh, at Oxford Island, the first Dark Sky site in Northern Ireland, proceed to the top of Divis & the Black Mountain National Trust Park, and then on to Armagh. The installation will also travel to Colin Allotments in West Belfast before travelling to Derry for a special performance to coincide with the deep partial eclipse of the sun on the morning of Friday 20th March 2015. There will then be an evening performance in the sports grounds at St Cecila’s College before the final event at the spectacular Beaghmore Stones complex, near Cookstown in County Tyrone.

By mapping the parameters of the stars through the medium of sound, aroundNorth changes the way we think about our stellar neighbors. As stars move across the score’s virtual lines, brighter stars sound longer, fading in and fading out as they move across the score’s virtual lines, while fainter stars sound shorter; stars that are closer sound louder; hotter stars crackle corresponding to their heat; and, bigger stars sound deeper whilst smaller stars are higher sounding.

aroundNorth humanizes the astronomical, giving us an emotional key to help us relate the unfathomable heavens to our own experiences of time and space. With echoes of a Neolithic monument of ancient myth, the installation introduces us to a universe full of interest, encouraging us to think differently about the cosmos and our place within it.

Scroll down for a full schedule of when and where you can experience aroundNorth this month.

THU 12
Lough Neagh Discovery Centre, Oxford Island, Craigavon BT66 6NJ
FREE 7pm – 9pm

SAT 14
Divis & the Black Mountain, Divis Road, Hannahstown BT17 0NG
FREE 6.30pm – 9pm (Approx 20 minute walk to installation area)

TUE 17
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 2.30pm – 4pm

WED 18
Colin Allotments, Upper Colin Glen Rd, Belfast BT17 0LR
FREE 7pm – 9pm

THU 19
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 2.30pm – 4pm

FRI 20
St Cecilia’s College Sports Ground, Fanad Drive, Derry BT48 9QE
FREE 7pm – 9pm

SAT 21
Beaghmore Stones, Blackrock Road, Cookstown BT80 9PB
FREE 6pm – 9pm (Visitors required to walk over rough ground)

MON 23 & EVERY MON, TUE, WED, THU & FRI until further notice
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 9.30am – 5pm