SSC – Page 6 – the eighth nerve

Mei-ling Lee’s Sonic Horizons

Mei-ling Lee: composer, performer, storyteller & assistant professor at Haverford College

Music professor Mei-ling Lee was recently featured in the Haverford College blog highlighting her new course offering: “Electronic Music Evolution: From Foundational Basics to Sonic Horizons”, a course that provides students with an in-depth introduction to the history, theory, and practical application of electronic music from the telharmonium to present-day interactive live performances driven by cutting-edge technologies. Along the way, her students also cultivate essential critical listening skills, vital for both music creation and analysis.

In addition to introducing new courses this year, Dr. Lee also presented her paper “Exploring Data-Driven Instruments in Contemporary Music Composition” at the 2024 Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) National Conference, held at the Louisiana State University Digital Media Center on 5 April 2024, and published as a digital proceeding through the LSU Scholarly Repository. This paper explores connections between data-driven instruments and traditional musical instruments and was also presented at the Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology (WOCMAT) National Conference in Taiwan in December 2023.

Lee’s electronic music composition “Summoner” was selected for performance at the MOXSonic conference in Missouri on 16 March 2024 and the New York City Electronic Music Conference (NYCEMF) in June 2024. Created using the Kyma sound synthesis language, Max software, and the Leap Motion Controller, it explores the concept of storytelling through the sounds of animals in nature.

Danksagmüller at the Orgelpark

Virtuoso organist / composer / live electronics performer, Franz Danksagmüller is presenting an afternoon workshop followed by an evening concert of new works for “hyper-organ” and Kyma electronics at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam, Friday 7 June 2024, as part of the 2024 International Orgelpark Symposium on the theme of ‘interfaces’ (in the broadest sense of the word).

In his symposium, “New Music, Traditional Rituals“, Danksagmüller wrestles with the question of how new music might play a role in liturgy and religious rituals. While the development of the so-called hyper-organ reveals the strong secular roots of the pipe organ, which, after all, spent the first 15 centuries of its life outside the church, the pipe organ has also been significantly formed by its six centuries within the church, a church which inspired organ builders and organists to create the magnificent instruments that remain an important part of Europe’s patrimony today.

Is there a role for new music in the church? In their pursuit of “truth” do scientists and theologians share any common ground? Danksagmüller does not shy away from the “big questions”!

Vogel a finalist for the 25th Weimar Spring Days for Contemporary Music Prize

Cristián Vogel’s “The Siege of Mariupol” is a finalist for the 2024 International Composition Competition for Orchestra. All finalists — Thomas Gerwin, Ludger Kisters, Philipp Waltinger and Cristian Vogel, will be at the MON AMI YOUTH AND CULTURAL CENTER in WEIMAR 23-26 May 2024 to present their works to the audience as part of the 25th Weimar Spring Days for Contemporary Music. In addition to the jury prizes, the audience will have an opportunity to vote for the Audience Choice Award.

“The Siege of Mariupol” confronts the brutal realities of conflict through the sounds of modern warfare, electronic manipulations, and a melodic motif symbolizing lost souls. It is written as a testament to the memory, bravery and profound suffering of individuals caught in the relentless terror and conflict and implores the audience to bear witness to the brutality faced by those on the frontline.

“The Siege of Mariupol” is the final piece in a trilogy highlighting the interconnectedness of human experience, the impact of geopolitical events, and the life-saving and life-destroying potential of technology — all against a backdrop of survival in the face of mortality.

Click here for details on how you can attend the concert and cast your vote for the Audience Choice Award.

Interface to the flow state

The flow state (otherwise known as “in the zone”) is what every real-time performer seeks. Charlie Norton‘s research is on how to design musical interfaces to optimize the flow state.

Norton and colleagues, Daniel Pratt and Justin Paterson, describe their work in “Performance mapping and control: Enhanced musical connections and a strategy to optimise flow-state”, a chapter in the new book: Innovation in Music: Technology and Creativity, published by Routledge.

Norton’s goal is to design control interfaces that are independent of the target system and which do not require reconfiguration of the sound-generation structure for each new performance apparatus.

Employing Symbolic Sound’s Kyma sound-design platform as a host for generating a dynamic set of sound structures with a variety of control types, Max and Node.js (JavaScript) servers are then used to map, combine, and route control signals which can be assigned, merged, and swapped in real-time without interrupting the sound processing or performer flow. This system allows one or more performers and their director to interact with the same system, turning an offline logical configuration process into a real-time reflexive act.

Here’s a link to the abstract (and institutional access to the chapter text).

If you use Kyma and Max8 and are interested in beta testing MaxVCS, a zeroconf bi-directional portal for Max8 to control the Kyma VCS by parameter name, contact Charlie at this address.

Accessible Oceans Survey

Graph depicting the flux of CO2 between ocean and atmosphere as measured by the Coastal Endurance array off the coast of New England
Amy Bower (WHOI) and Jon Bellona (UO) invite you to participate in a survey for “Accessible Oceans“, a project focused on designing effective auditory displays to enhance the perception and understanding of ocean data for visitors to museums, aquariums and science centers, including those who are blind or have low vision. Your feedback is crucial in evaluating the effectiveness of their auditory display prototypes.

In this survey, you will listen to a series of auditory displays featuring data sonification, narration, and music. The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. Please note that this is not a test of your abilities; rather, it is an opportunity for you to contribute to the advancement of inclusive learning experiences for everyone.

You can participate in this study if you are 12 years old or older, understand English, and are physically located in the US. To participate, simply click on this survey link. Headphones are recommended for the best listening experience. The survey will be closed on June 1 2024.

NeverEngineLabs sets off car alarms in Santiago

Circle 6 of Dante’s Inferno contains the fiery tombs of heretical souls, and in the venue for NeverEngineLabs (Cristian Vogel) 6 April octaphonic concert — a car park six floors beneath the Earth’s surface in the Providencia area of Santiago Chile — the lighting appears eerily appropriate.

Pacamara Ristretto audio processing unit in the foreground, several people running mixing consoles in the background — NeverEngineLabs’ live setup in Santiago Chile 2024

Vogel, whose work focuses on experimental electronic music, electroacoustic music, and pushing compositional boundaries beyond style and convention writes “The sound check was a veritable wall of noise, never heard Ambisonics sound so intense… the subs were so full, car alarms were setting off on the floors above!

Cristian’s goals for 2024 and beyond are to explore socially relevant musical narratives that challenge the listener and expand the boundaries of what is possible in experimental electronic music.

Bruno in Brno

For composer Bruno Liberda, the train is his mobile studio (thanks to the battery-powered Pacamara).

This week’s journey, a mere one and half hours by train from Vienna, Austria to Brno, Czech Republic, finds him collaborating with students and faculty at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU), where students focus on developing their own artistic practice within the broader context of studies in history, theory, culture and society.

Entry to the Leoš Janáček Academy of Music

Bruno Liberda presenting the Kyma seminar

During the seminar, students had an opportunity to delve into Kyma with the benefit of Bruno’s experience and guidance. Topics included sound design using the signal flow editor, composing for live performance in the Kyma Timeline, and reactive programming with Capytalk.

Pacarana installed in the electronic music studio

Liberda dedicated a full day to the question top-most in the student’s minds: “How can we feed the sounds from a modular into Kyma?” Together they delayed, granulated and realtime spectralized / froze / singled-out individual overtones… in Bruno’s words, “we spectralized the hell out of it!”

Curious to hear some of Liberda’s music? L’après-midi im Stiegenhaus von Mozart, for various analog synthesizers, piano, Kyma, and organ pipes that Liberda claims to have found in Mozarts’ basement, was just released (4 April 2024).

Liberda requests that listeners please

listen with headphones (or on a good stereo system), otherwise you will not only miss the mysterious murmuring in the stairwell, but also all the shadows and fine cracks of light in the spatial structure, the top, bottom, front, back further left or right – everything quiet and surprising exploding in multifold time.
In a word: the soul of the piece!

misfold in Hamburg

misfold is a piece for pipe organ and Kyma electronics, commissioned by Franz Danksagmüller for org_art_lab in Hamburg 6-12 November 2023, a workshop dedicated to collaborations involving art, science, and the pipe organ. But not just any pipe organ…

The HyperOrgan that Franz helped design for St Nikolai church has been augmented with new timbres, percussion sounds, enhanced touch sensitivity and air-flow control, microphones placed among the pipes for electronic signal processing, speakers in the loft so you can blend the organ sound with electronic sound synthesis, and bidirectional MIDI control. The console in the loft has five manuals and a pedal board, each one controllable by a separate MIDI input channel, with the ranges and timbres controlled by the stops.

In keeping with the theme of the workshop (hyper-organ-art & science collaborations), the composer employed data from protein-folding simulations computed at Martin Gruebele’s lab at the University of Illinois to generate the sound and structure of the piece.

Why is it named misfold?

It feels like we’re at a tipping point, and it’s unclear which direction things will take. There’s a pervasive sense of instability across multiple spheres — political, cultural, technological, economic, climatic:

Will these instabilities continue to increase, resulting in a catastrophic breakdown?
Will we “mis-fold” into a familiar & somewhat comfortable, but sub-optimal state?
Or could we use this time of instability to explore possibilities that we haven’t thought of trying before and maybe discover a better way forward?

MISFOLD by Carla Scaletti from Franz Danksagmüller on Vimeo.

Coypu meets Paca in Shanghai

A coypu (aka nutria) is a semi-aquatic rodent and is the name given to a Pharo package for live coding developed by Domenico Cipriani (aka Lucretio). At the end of May, Lucretio will be performing with two rodents — his Paca and the Coypu package — at the 2024 International Conference of Live Coding (ICLC) in Shanghai, generating sounds and parsing OSC to control graphics in Kyma and using Coypu to program music on-the-fly.

Lucretio describes his 30 minute live coding performance for Pharo, Kyma and Processing as “a social experiment with euclidean geometries, hexadecimal beats and post-jungle patterns drifting from sparse broken drums and essential scaled-down soulful chords to bass-driven percussive timelines and recursive frequency modulated quirks… heavily influenced by the sound from South London and Detroit.”

Milani launches Cosmic Charges

Matteo Milani’s (Unidentified Sound Object) “COSMIC CHARGES” is a library of tonal blasts and impacts for video games, films, TV series, and more.

Each impact is split into layers, allowing a sound designer to decompose and reconstitute sub-timbres to create unique sounds.

Milani was inspired by innovative sound designers Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, and Gary Rydstrom to continue to push the boundaries of his own work. It was through Ben Burtt’s book, Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide, that Milani first discovered Kyma, which he used in this project to add musical layers to each impact — thus imparting a unique sonic identity and intensifying the emotional resonance and dynamics.

In addition to their SFX libraries, Milani’s Unidentified Sound Object offers a range of services including complex sound design, composition, multilingual localization, games and VR development, location recording, and more.