Category: Installation

Live percussion and electronics in Coimbra market square

Carlos Alberto Augusto‘s new piece — ECOS (Coimbra version) for 6 percussionists and 6 electronic tracks — will be performed for the first time on 23 June 2018 in the old market square in the city of Coimbra Portugal.

Commissioned by Sons da Cidade, a festival that annually celebrates the city of Coimbra (Portugal) as a UNESCO heritage site, Augusto’s ECO will have musicians and loudspeakers distributed in circles along the full length of the 106m square. The electronic tracks were produced entirely in Kyma and are based on processed recordings of melting ice and an old fog horn’s rotating mechanism. Percussion, performed by the Portuguese percussion group Simantra, and electronic sounds will be further processed by the large square’s own natural distinctive resonances and reflections.

Call for Proposals: KISS 2018 — Altered States

The Arts Division at the University of California Santa Cruz and Symbolic Sound invite proposals for talks, live performances and workshops for the 6-9 September 2018 Kyma International Sound Symposium — KISS2018: Altered States (and Ecosystems).

Altered States

State spaces, state of mind, state of the art, deep state, state machines, state of the nation, state variable filters, topological state, head of state, solid state physics, state of grace, state transitions, spin states, state of the union — whatever your definition of state, one thing is for certain: Sound and music can alter states.

Join us in the state of California as we explore the multifaceted concept of Altered States through talks, workshops, and live musical performances at KISS2018, 6-9 September 2018 on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Ecosystems

Atop a forested hill overlooking the Pacific ocean and Monterey Bay, on the tectonic boundary between the Pacific and North American plates (aka the San Andreas Fault), accessible from the San Jose or San Francisco Airports, Santa Cruz is shaped by the economic/technology ecosystems of Silicon Valley, the biological ecosystems of the Pacific ocean and the Santa Cruz mountains, and a continuation of the counterculture lifestyle and political protest movements of the 1960s — hence the sub-theme of the conference: Ecosystems. Whether “Ecosystems” inspires ideas for environmental music & field recording, ecosystemic feedback control systems, the human microbiota, or more abstract political/economic/social ecosystems, we welcome proposals involving “complex networks or interconnected systems” of sound and music.

Important Dates

26 March: Deadline for submissions
15 April: Notification of acceptance & start of early registration

For more information and to make a proposal, visit: https://kiss2018.symbolicsound.com/call-for-proposals/

VR_I: social, free roaming virtual reality


Gilles Jobin’s VR_I — an immersive virtual reality contemporary dance experience with a 3D sound track created entirely in Kyma.7 — has its world premiere from 6 to 10 October 2017 at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. Unfolding on multiple, parallel space and time scales, VR_I immerses you in a wordless experience of the continuum from infinite to infinitesimal, leaving you with a new sense of perspective on your place in the universe.

In partnership with Artanim Foundation and utilizing their motion-capture and VR technology, VR_I is a pioneering work in social, free-roaming virtual reality. As many as five people can enter the experience together and see their own and each other’s bodies as avatars sharing the same virtual world as the characters (the dancers).

In VR_I, music emerges from the environment: wind in the desert transitions to a humming chorus sung by giants; wind chimes in the art-filled loft organize themselves into 5/8 rhythms as columns rise up from the floor, only to dissolve back into wind chimes again as the columns recede; in the city park, bird songs are echoed in flute melodies, and cicadas transform themselves into rhythmic patterns over tambura-like drones.

Each spectator hears an individualized soundscape, and there is no way to really know what everyone else is experiencing (just like in real life). Sounds and musical elements are positioned in space and attached to objects, giving each spectator a unique mix as they move through the space, culminating in upwardly spiraling Shepard-tones that swirl around and lift up the listeners as they contemplate their own place in the continuum from infinite to infinitesimal.

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk

— from the Native American Diné Blessing Way

Choreography: Gilles Jobin
Dancers: Susana Panadés Díaz, Victoria Chiu, Tidiani N’Diaye, Diya Naidu, Gilles Jobin
3D Music & Sound Design: Carla Scaletti
Costumes: Jean-Paul Lespagnard
3d modeling: Tristan Siodlak
Animation: Camilo de Martino
3D Scans & Motion Capture: Artanim
VR Platform: Artanim

For tour dates and booking information, visit: vr-i.space

Architecture of Sound

RIETVELD PAVILION — Roland Emile Kuit’s new album published by Donemus — is now available on iTunes. The album was released in conjunction with the 9 July 2017 World Premiere at the sculpture park of the Kröller-Möller Museum in Otterlo in The Netherlands. With this work, Kuit makes a connection between sound and De STIJL’s ideas and architecture, using pure tones as spectral building blocks, stacking energies to build harmonic sound planes and placing them in space by dividing the spectrum and displaying it on a maze of speakers.

Photography: Henk Porck

Sonologist-composer Roland Emile Kuit balances on the interface between research, music and sound art, at a point he called “the new listening”. Using Kyma, Kuit warps time — influencing the present with events that will happen in the future and vice versa. He uses real-time analysis of the sound of acoustical instruments to create spectral compositions.

Experiencing the near-universe as sound

Robert Jarvis‘ sound art installation aroundNorth allows listeners to experience the near
universe as they have never heard it before. As the Earth spins on its axis, and day becomes night becomes day, our view of the near universe changes in terms of 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 a full revolution.
‘aroundNorth’ offers listeners an opportunity to hear this phenomenon in real time. As each star crosses equally spaced virtual lines emanating from Celestial North Pole, a corresponding sound is heard that maps the star’s position in the sky, size, distance from Earth, brightness and temperature, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed by our turning planet.

‘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.

Jarvis presented his installation on 15 October 2016 in a rather neolithic setting — the Beaghmore Stones Circle complex, preceded by an installation performance at Antrim Castle Gardens.

For more information, future showings, or to invite Robert Jarvis to create an aroundNorth experience in your city, see the aroundNorth web site.

NeverEngine on the Holodeck

Cristian Vogel is currently engaged in a four week artist residency dedicated to exploring the possibilities of Kyma and the 4DSOUND system at the ZKM Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The residency will culminate in a concert on 5 March 2016 featuring new work from Cristian along with Alyssa Moxley, an Athens-based artist specializing in experimental microphone techniques for field recordings. There will also be a presentation of Iannis Xenakis’ Orient-Occident, presented in 4DSOUND by system founder Paul Oomen.

Algebra as metaphor for Poetry

The Central Library of The Hague will be filled with mathematical functions for the ear and textures for the eye when Roland Kuit creates poetic quadraphonic formulas for Kyma and Karin Schomaker synthesizes images of abstract beauty. Visuals and sounds together create a flow of spatial and textural experience.

Sunday 07 February 2016, 14:00 – 14:50
Spui 68, The Hague, The Netherlands

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

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.

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