Castrating the technophallus: CMR Special Issue on Di Scipio’s Audible Ecosystems

Contemporary Music Review has just released a special issue dedicated to “Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems”. Authors include Makis Solomos, Renaud Meric, Laura Zattra, Luc Dobereiner, Pedro Bittencourt, Owen Green and Julia Schroeder.

In an audible ecosystem, one or more agents enter into and interfere with a feedback loop, causing changes in the sound it generates while also adjusting and regulating their own actions based upon the changes. Di Scipio describes it as a double feedback loop, “one electroacoustic, the other ‘cognitive’: agents act in the loop system and the audible consequences direct their further actions”.

In Di Scipio’s contribution to the issue, he analyzes his Modes of Interference No. 3 for three or more guitars, amplifiers, and computer.  In that installation, Kyma is used for ring modulation and delays whose parameters are, in turn, recursively controlled by amplitude envelope followers tracking the audio output at various time scales.

By removing the human performers’ homo-erotic stroking of the electric guitar, Di Scipio’s intention was to castrate the technophallic associations of cock rock and, in so doing, come to terms with his own teenage experimentations with the electric guitar and rock music.

Improvisation Games

Jeffrey Agrell, educator/performer/composer and author of Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians, writes in his blog about a new experience he had recently: he performed with Mike Wittgraf who was processing his signal through Kyma and controlling the processing using a Wiimote + Nunchuck game controller.  Here’s an excerpt:

More video from their performance on youtube:

  1. http://youtu.be/k4F-ELZD4Yo 4:05
  2. http://youtu.be/NwRogbxIbyM 4:07
  3. http://youtu.be/lFBQV7wQXsI 5:59
  4. http://youtu.be/sRMazAfJVeM 4:53

Publikum, Komponist und Kyma

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In 1819, Diabelli provided a waltz theme and asked all the major composers of Vienna to compose a variation on the theme so he could compile all of them into a single Theme and Variations.  Beethoven indignantly refused to write a variation on such a “Schusterfleck” of a theme, and then, in irritation decided to show what you could do with such a banal and not very charming subject by composing, not one, but 33 variations with a playing time of over 50 minutes; he even demonstrated his own brand of humor in that Variation No. 22 is not a real variation but a quote from Don Giovanni (“Hab kein Ruh bei Tag und Nacht“).

Now in 2014, Viennese composer Bruno Liberda, intrigued with this idea of finding such a wealth of material within a simple source, proposes to create 31 variations on a theme provided by the audience!  All those who are present will witness the composition of a new piece.

Audience members will improvise sounds using brooms, scissors, paper, piano, wire, bell, cellophane, porcelain and other instruments which will be distilled by the composer over the course of the performance into motifs that become 31 overlapping variations.

Witness a new piece in the process of formation! Boundaries cancel… between emergence and the finished work, between a composer and an audience, between show and do.

See, hear, and experience together the process of composition!

Wo: Alte Schmiede, Schönlaterngasse 9, 1010 Wien
Wann: 30 April 2014, 19h

The Collaboratory

What if you could hear your music performed on a 500 year old organ that was once played by J.S. Bach? What if you could invent a new kind of live DJ set with Kyma and live percussion? Or work with an opera singer and a pop singer to develop new ways of transforming the voice in a live performance? What if you could spend several days experimenting with live Kyma-processing of strings, woodwinds, piano, percussion, and other acoustic instruments?

The Collaboratory is a “collaboration laboratory” where you can be part of a team of composers/performers/technologists inventing a new kind of live performance piece, live improvisation, live sound-track-to-picture performance, live DJ set or experimental live interaction involving Kyma and acoustic or electronic performers. The choices are yours, and the possibilities are limitless. Make a proposal and see what happens!

http://kiss2014.symbolicsound.com/the-collaboratory

A photographer, a composer & a dancer…

What happens when an artist, a composer, an actor, and a dancer meet in an art gallery? Find out next month, when Phil Curtis travels from Los Angeles to London to perform with photographer Kelly Nipper, actor Małgorzata Białek, and dancer Marissa Ruazol in Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture at the South London Gallery. The hour-long piece features  electronic music performed live by Curtis using a combination of Ableton Live and Kyma processing.   Curtis used 24 drawings based on Labanotation  as the inspiration for the score, transforming each page into a two-and-a-half minute segment of music.

Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture explores the spatial, expressive qualities of time when rendered in a photograph or a film.   It touches on the history of photography, the Black Forest, clocks, and the ideas of Rudolf Laban (an early twentieth century movement theorist). The piece opens on Saturday 1 March 2014 at 7 pm in the Main Gallery of the South London Gallery.

In the meantime, back in Los Angeles, Floodsongs, the album Curtis recorded with Anne LeBaron has just been released; it features Kyma-generated electronic sounds on the title track, LeBaron’s piece for vocal ensemble: Floodsongs.

National Illusion

Javier Umpierrez has just finished the sound design and music for a trailer for Ilusión Nacional, Olallo Rubio‘s upcoming documentary on the history of Mexico’s national soccer team, that conveys the passion and the politics behind the world’s most popular sport.

In the trailer, Umpierrez used Kyma to create and control the vast, powerful crowd sounds as well as other sound design elements. Starting with a recording he made of a full-capacity crowd in Aztec Stadium, he’s been utilizing Kyma’s SampleCloud and controlling pitch and amplitude in real time using Kyma Control on the iPad.

Umpierrez is also doing the score and the sound design for the film itself, so we can look forward to even more awesome crowd effects and inspiring music when the film opens in April 2014.

The Voice of Pi

Composer Franz Danksagmüller and soprano Berit Barfred Jensen will be in Copenhagen for the February 19th premiere of Danksagmüller’s new composition for voice and Kyma: sound of pi: flow my tears (for voice and continuo).

Danksagmüller will be performing the basso continuo part on a Continuum Fingerboard controlling Kyma sounds tuned to a special scale based on pi. Background textures will be granulated voices derived from the live solo voice.

It will be the first piece on Berit Barfred Jensen‘s solo voice recital at the Old Radio Hall at the Royal Danish Conservatoire in Copenhagen with the Holmes’s Baroque Ensemble and Søren Rastogi (piano). Music by Handel, Schubert, Grieg, Margarete Schweikert and Franz Danksagmüller.

Date: Wednesday 19 February 2014 
Time: at. 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Location: Conservatory Koncertsal, Julius Thomsen Gade 1
Admission: Free admission

 

 

Petits Personnages

Sound designer Gurwal COÏC-GALLAS was asked to create a language for the little creatures that appear in the newest version of The Beauty and the Beast directed by Christophe Gans. Gurwal used Kyma to create their charming bird-like language (here’s a brief example):

Take your favorite child (whether or not her name is Belle) to see the premiere of The Beauty and the Beast (played, respectively, by Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel) on 12 February 2014. You can see what the creatures (called Tadums) look like in the trailer:

What if the stars made music

Outdoor Culture presents Sounds of the Night Sky featuring Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation: aroundNorth, opening Thursday 20 February 2014 6.30-9.30 pm at the National Trust Stowe New Inn Farm Buckingham MK18 5EQ

This outdoor event will showcase the premier of Robert Jarvis’ new sound art installation, aroundNorth, a piece that was shortlisted for the 2010 PRS New Music Award.  A multi-speaker sound map of the stars driven by the turning of the Earth, aroundNorth uses Kyma to transform the night sky into a celestial music box rotating around Polaris, the North Star. As each star passes a virtual line in the sky, it triggers a musical note whose qualities are determined by the star’s spectrum, mass, brightness and distance from earth, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed from our rotating planet.

Visitors will be accompanied down Bell Gate Drive on foot and into the gardens of Stowe after dark, before entering the semi-wilderness of the newly-opened Lamport Garden where the sounds of moving stars will be created like a giant celestial music box! Dress for the outdoors and bring a flashlight!  Click here for more information and tickets.