Category: Event

IN SICH(T) emerging

On composer Bruno Liberda’s blog, you can actually witness the evolution of a new composition. “IN SICH(T)”, Liberda’s new site-specific piece, in the process of being written for Max Hegele’s memorial chapel in Vienna, includes performers who, in addition to playing their instruments, will be “playing the space”, exploring and transforming the many-seconds long natural reverberation and other acoustic characteristics of the highly reflective dome.

Follow along as Liberda adapts and expands the piece and develops his own notation specific to the space, and be sure to save the date of the premiere performance: April 20 2013.

SAE Milan offers free Kyma workshop

Award-winning sound designer Matteo Milani will lead a 2 hour introductory workshop on the Kyma sound design language in the great hall of SAE Milan on Thursday, 21 February at 18:30.  According to the workshop description:

Kyma is an open, real-time-controllable environment for the creation, modification, and combination of new sounds in ways that are totally different from a sequencer or digital audio workstation.  Matteo Milani will conduct you on an exploration of the innumerable possibilities offered by the system with which it’s possible to create your own patches or Sounds.  A Sound can be a simple audio file playback or reverb, but it can also be a complex combination of audio generators and modifiers, synthesis, re-synthesis, sampling recombined in infinite variety, modulating their parameters and entering into a dialog with one another.  By means of the Timeline it’s possible to compose the sound, assembling individual Sounds into larger structures, drawing functions to control the way parameters evolve over time.

Kyma is therefore a language for the generation and transformation of complex sounds with which it is possible to create your own plug-in, virtual synth, performance environment, interactive sound sculptures, each one with its own virtual control surface for the management of parameters in real time by means of the MIDI or OSC protocol.

Workshop instructor Matteo Milani is both a sound designer and an advocate for the sound design profession as a whole.  An active sound designer and recordist for film, advertising and mastering, he also writes for several popular audio magazines, and his blog Unidentified Sound Object has generated an international following.  Milani also composes music and experimental soundscapes for multimedia installations and live events as well as producing and distributing his own sound effects libraries. The workshop will be presented in Italian (Milani can also answer questions afterward in English).

The workshop is free, but spaces are limited.  Please register in advance to reserve your place by sending email to SAE with “Seminario Kyma” in the subject line.  SAE urges you to register as soon as possible as space is limited!

Voice as Controller: Music of Andrea Young

Andrea Young will be performing her newest compositions for voice and Kyma at CalArts California Institute of the Arts, 8 pm, February 13, 2013, as part of a presentation of her research into vocal feature extraction and its application to controlling live electronics in Kyma. The concert begins with a work for solo voice that exemplifies the parametic counterpoint singing techniques used to feed the unruly algorithms presented in the following works. Noise and oscillators are controlled by the voice, while contact mics and miniature mics make use of the differentiation between signals as yet another source of sound and musical data control.

The concert will also be streamed live via the ROD Webcast.

New Year’s Day with JPJ

On 1 January 2013, Fiona Talkington celebrates the New Year on BBC Radio 3 with special guest, multi-instrumentalist and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones performing live in the BBC’s Maida Vale studios. On this special New Year’s installment of Talkington’s Late Junction, Jones plays acoustic piano, lap steel ukulele, and Kyma-processed electric mandolin and lap steel guitar.  The show will air Tuesday, 1 January 2013 at 23:00 on BBC Radio 3 (after which it will be archived on the website for one week).  Happy New Year!

 

Sonic Screens Milan

U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi), in collaboration with O’ and Die Schachtel, present Sonic Screens, a concert of live electro-acoustic music on Saturday, December 1st at 8:00 pm.  Featuring premieres of two live Kyma pieces— Two Sound Pieces with Repertoire String Music by Agostino Di Scipio and Time Capsule by Federico Placidi.

Featuring sound spatialization, live interaction between electronics and performers, and including the venue itself as part of the interaction, the event will take place at O’ on Via Pastrengo 12 in Milan, Italy (5 €), with Matteo Milani as sound director. O’ is a non-profit organization that promotes various languages of art ​​through exhibitions, lectures, concerts, labs, performances and publications.

 

Jeff Stolet & Chi Wang open for Musicacoustica-Beijing Festival

Chi Wang at opening ceremony of Musicacoustica-Beijing (Xinhua/Luo Xiaoguang)

Two live electronic pieces for Kyma and game controllers were selected to be a part of the opening ceremonies for this year’s Musicacoustica Beijing festival on October 22, 2012: Chi Wang’s Sound Motion for Kyma and Kinect and Jeffrey Stolet’s Lariat Rituals for and Kyma and Gametrak controller.

Wang Chi’s Sound Motion is a multichannel interactive composition that utilizes Processing to analyze data captured from the user’s movement in space; that data stream is then used to control recorded, synthesized, and modified sound in Kyma.

In Jeffrey Stolet’s Lariat Rituals, fine positioning of the Gametrak in 3-space controls formants and other parameters of a synthesized male voice (as seen in this video).

Following the festival Stolet and Wang spent two weeks presenting seminars and lectures on Kyma at conservatories throughout China.

Jeffrey Stolet performs Lariat Rituals at KISS2012 in St Cloud MN

 

Charging into the abyss

John Paul Jones is once more joining forces with Supersilent, this time for a whirlwind tour of the UK, demonstrating yet again that “the prolific multi-instrumentalist finds bigger thrills in charging into the abyss than reclining into the rock stardom he achieved decades ago” according to Dave Kerr in a recent feature article for The Skinny.

Supersilent have only one rule: no rehearsals!  And according to the Village Underground, on this tour, “they intend to push each other further, harder, wilder and freer into uncharted sonic zones.”

NOVEMBER:
14th – Birmingham, Town Hall | www.thsh.co.uk
15th – Glasgow, The Arches | www.thearches.co.uk
16th – Manchester, RNCM | rncm.ac.uk
17th – Bristol, Arnolfini | arnolfini.org.uk
18th – London, Village Underground | villageunderground.co.uk

Jones, as well as Supersilent members Helge Sten, Ståle Storløkken, and Arve Henriksen, each utilize Kyma in their live, improvised electronics performances.

LA area performances by Phil Curtis

Composer Phil Curtis will be performing in two up-coming Los Angeles-area events, bringing his own brand of live sonic palimpsests to the work of two LA-area artists. On November 6, he’ll be providing live Kyma electronics for a performance of Anne LeBaron’s Floodsongs (2012), a choral setting of three poems by Douglas Kearney performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale as part of the last ever SCREAM electronic music festival at REDCAT on Saturday November 10 at 8:30 PM.

The following weekend – Friday through Sunday with two shows on Saturday – Curtis is performing as part of a Furnace, a piece conceived by Carole Kim at Automata in Chinatown. Shows are at 7:00 pm November 16-18 (extra show at 9:30 pm on the 17th). Automata is at 504 Chung King Court. This will be a big multimedia interactive extravaganza with Butoh dance, Experimental Music, and Live Video Projection! Seats are VERY limited, so advance tickets are highly recommended!

For more information and tickets, visit the ticketing site or the Furnace facebook page.

Willful Devices embrace the unpredictable

As anyone who works with computers or musical instruments knows: sometimes, even despite your best efforts, these devices can seem to have a mind of their own. Composer/improviser Scott Miller and Clarinetist/improviser Pat O’Keefe accept this fact and even celebrate it, in the knowledge that, within this unpredictability lies the potential for unimagined sonic discoveries.  Miller and O’Keefe will be embracing the unpredictable this Thursday, October 25 as Willful Devices (Scott Miller, Kyma; Pat O’Keefe, clarinets) present a 7:30 pm concert, preceded by an afternoon masterclass at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Both events are open to the public:

3:30 pm:  Master class on Contemporary Clarinet Performance Practice and Real-time Computer Composition Issues in Room 160, Music Bldg., SJSU, no admission fee

7:30 pm concert: ‘Electroacoustic Mayhem Created With a Clarinet, Interactive Electronics, and Plenty of Improv!’ (Rumors hint at guest appearances by Stephen Ruppenthal and Brian Belet, of the ensemble SoundProof) in the Concert Hall, SJSU, Admission $10/$5

Be there; or be predictable.