Author: SSC

Exploding Tickets at the Loft

The Exploding Tickets (Robert Landfermann – Bass ; Christian Lillinger – Drums ; Matthias Schubert – Saxophone ; Eckard Vossas – Kyma) are performing at the LOFT in Cologne on October 22, 2012 in a freely improvised, expressive, energetic, spontaneous and impulsive set of encounters between uncommon electronic sound experiments and natural instruments.

Eckard Vossas uses his Kyma system, controlled and tweaked by a Continuum Fingerboard and various other controllers like iPads and pedals, to create a unique individual style of improvised electronic music, sensitively modulating synthesized and artificial sound material with his fingertips, transforming and performing with the same expressivity as his acoustic improvisation partners with whom these sound transformations hold an intensive dialogue. It can be fascinating to hear how new and different the acoustic instruments – Saxophone, Bass, Percussion – can sound when they are confronted with experimental electronic timbres!

Concert at the LOFT starts at 20:30 (ticket information).

SoundProofing

SoundProof (Patricia Strange, violin; Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet, flugelhorn, & voice; Brian Belet, viola, voice, and Kyma processing) have just embarked on a multi-city tour of the midwest culminating in the opening concert for the EMM festival on October 11 2012.

EMM will also feature the world premiere of Belet’s new percussion/Kyma composition on Saturday October 13 and a performance of Hua Sun’s Impression of Tibet for Wacom Tablet controlling Kyma on October 12.

The full SoundProof concert schedule includes:

Monday, October 1st: Bowling Green State University (Bryan Recital Hall, Moore Musical Arts Center), 8pm

Thursday, October 4th: College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati (Watson Recital Hall, Corbett Center), 8pm

Tuesday, October 9th: Ohio University, Athens (Recital Hall – Gldn 400, School of Music), 8pm

Thursday, October 11th: Electronic Music Midwest festival – opening concert (Lewis University, Romeoville, IL), 7:30 pm

The concerts feature interactive Kyma pieces composed specifically for the ensemble by Brian Belet, Bruno Liberda, Stephen Ruppenthal, Jeffrey Stolet. Each concert also includes a ’15 Minutes of Fame’ set featuring one-minute works by 15 composers including Brian Belet, Mark Phillips, Scott Miller, and Michael Wittgraf.

Kyma Symposium in St Cloud

Fascinating papers, lively concerts, entertaining hands-on workshops, and conversations that carried on late into each night made KISS2012, the fourth annual Kyma International Sound Symposium, an inspiring and invigorating experience for all.

The symposium was covered by several local news outlets (click on photos to read the stories):

 

 

 

Hua Sun and Kurt Hebel perform the annual ritual for KISS2012

Here’s a slideshow of photos from the event:

 

For more details on the event, please see the official KISS2012 site and Kyma Symposium on Facebook.

A Midsummer Night’s Supersilent

Supersilent, described as the stylistic intersection of Miles Davis, Tangerine Dream, Sonic Youth and Stockhausen has been collaborating with influential bassist/producer/composer John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin, Them Crooked Vultures) on a new project that takes the group to a complex and intensely powerful sonic space. The group performed at the Hafensommer Festival in Würzburg on August 1, 2012.  Check out the photo gallery on the official Hafensommer blog (and look for a shot of JPJ, pick in mouth, controlling Kyma from his iPad).

In an interview with the Main Post, JPJ revealed to the interviewers that he had attended kindergarten in Würzburg, so this was something of a homecoming for him.

As critic John Kelman wrote of the collaboration at All About Jazz:

It sounded, in fact, as if they’d been playing together for years, as Jones moved around the neck to create, deep, visceral and snaking lines beneath Sten’s sonic manipulation, Storløkken textural excursions and otherworldly electronic melodism, and Henriksen, who moved from kit to trumpet growl to falsetto and harsher to pocket trumpet (…) All of Which makes Supersilent a unique experience (…) a definitive moment in the history of the festival (…)

Future Music’s Summer Academy of Electronic Music

Professor Jeffrey Stolet and post graduate teaching assistant Chi Wang

This year’s Summer Academy of Electronic Music, directed by Professor Jeffrey Stolet at Future Music Oregon, welcomed 5 faculty members from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Shenyang Conservatory of Music and the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.  The faculty members, along with students from their schools and from Peking University and the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, immersed themselves in Kyma, recording techniques, sound synthesis, and composition in a two week intensive seminar based on Professor Stolet’s text, Kyma and the SumOfSines Disco Club, now available in both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Professor Stolet was assisted this year by three of his current and former graduate students: Chi Wang, Jon Bellona, and Hua Sun (see photo on left).

The Summer Academy culminated in a final concert featuring 20 compositions, all completed by students over the course of the two-week course.

Professor Jeffrey Stolet, academy student Yang Fan, & Professor Yang Wanjun

If you missed the summer academy, you still have a chance to learn about Kyma.  During the fall semester 2012, Professor Stolet and his former masters degree student Chi Wang will be presenting Kyma seminars at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Shenyang Conservatory of Music and Sichuan Conservatory of Music.

JEDSound’s 100 Whooshes in 2 minutes

Sound designer Jean-Edouard Miclot has created an amazing Whoosh-Machine, capable of generating hundreds of sonic “whoosh” effects in minutes.  Have a listen!

In his sound design blog, Miclot not only explains how it works, he even provides a copy of the Kyma patch that you can download and try out on your own velocity-thirsty source material: http://jedsound.com/blog/?page_id=1020

Higgs’ Encomium

In Praise of Inference is a 60″ Kyma-generated sound bite celebrating the subtle and sophisticated thought process that goes into inferring the existence of a short-lived particle based only on the traces it leaves behind. Every sound you hear in the example is controlled or ‘modulated’ by data generated by computer models of the proton collisions expected to produce Higgs bosons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The sound bite works its way backwards in time, starting with the evidence and then gradually inferring the probable cause. At the beginning you hear two distributions, one on the left and one on the right, each with 500 gamma energy values (each gamma distribution is mapped to a 500-partial filterbank); over time, each gamma distribution morphs to a distribution of Higgs masses, all 500 center frequencies converging on the single high energy/mass value mapped to the high pitch at the end. In the middle, the (static) dR and pTt distributions (also represented by 500-partial spectra controlling filterbanks) fade in and out. Over this backdrop you hear some of the explosive and shivery mappings of jet data (see below).

At the very very end, you may hear a hint of an inference of the voice of the Higgs…

Please play it as loud as your speakers can handle (it sounds best with a subwoofer if you have one). The original is in surround sound but a stereo version was easier to post.

Where did this come from?
Experimental and theoretical particle physicists Lily Asquith and Michael Krämer, in addition to their regular research and teaching duties, have been collaborating with musicians this year on a special project to take the data from some of the quadrillions of proton collisions going on in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and mapping those data sets to sound. Not only are the researchers hoping to hear patterns in the data; they also want to share their passion for exploration and discovery with creative individuals outside of physics.

The project got started last year, when Asquith and composer Richard Dobson created the LHC Sound project, posting sounds and simulated data on the web and inviting musicians to sample the sounds and map the data. Asquith called one of the sets the Jet Game, the object of which was to be able to identify (using only your ears) which of the jets contained evidence of the Higgs boson. Carla Scaletti decided to map several of the jets to sound using Kyma, and the results ended up in the musical score she and Cristian Vogel composed for choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s Spider Galaxies.

At the beginning of this year, Asquith teamed up with Krämer and Scaletti to explore even more ways of mapping data to sound. So far, all the sounds have been generated using simulated data (the real data are top secret), but the trio look forward to having a listen to actual LHC data soon.

Minibus Pimps in London on Friday the 13th

Tridecaphiles can celebrate at Cafe OTO with the UK premiere of the Minibus Pimps on Friday July 13, 2012; doors open at 8 pm.  The first event in a new series at Cafe OTO co-curated by Norway’s Ny Musikk organisation and OTO projects will feature the Minibus Pimps – a new collaborative project between legendary UK musician John Paul Jones and prolific Norwegian producer/musician Helge Sten (Deathprod and Supersilent). The pair explore ravishing, intricate noise via a set-up of guitar/bass, Kyma, iPads, and more. The evening will open with an appearance by prepared piano/electronics and percussion duo, Steve Noble and Sebastian Lexer. Tickets are £10 in advance, £12 at the door.

Cafe OTO
18 – 22 Ashwin street
Dalston
London E8 3DL
UK