At the IRCAM Forum Workshops @Seoul 6-8 November 2024, composer Steve Everett presented a talk on the compositional processes he used to create FIRST LIFE: a 75-minute mixed media performance for string quartet, live audio and motion capture video, and audience participation.
FIRST LIFE is based on work that Everett carried out at the Center of Chemical Evolution, a NSF/NASA funded project at multiple universities to examine the possibility of the building blocks of life forming in early Earth environments. He worked with stochastic data generated by Georgia Tech biochemical engineer Martha Grover and mapped them to standard compositional structures (not as a scientific sonification, but to help educate the public about the work of the center through a musical performance).
Data from IRCAM software and PyMOL were mapped to parameters of physical models of instrumental sounds in Kyma. For example, up to ten data streams generated by the formation of monomers and polymers in Grover’s lab were used to control parameters of the “Somewhat stringish” model in Kyma (such as delay rate, BowRate, position, decay, etc). Everett presented a poster about this work at the 2013 NIME Conference in Seoul, and has uploaded some videos from the premiere of First Life at Emory University.
Currently on the music composition faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY), Professor Everett is teaching a doctoral seminar on timbre in the spring (2025) semester and next fall he will co-teach a course on music and the brain with Patrizia Casaccia, director of the Neuroscience Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center.
