At the end of the 1970s Sam Wagstaff put together an extensive collection of photos taken between 1870 and the 1930s, including Mumler’s ghost portraits, Kirlian’s experiments, Darget’s “thoughts photographic pictures” and other pioneering photographer’s works attempting to demonstrate the reality of certain supernatural phenomena. These pictures, beside the historical and ethnographic interest, are strongly suggestive abstract pieces, and Wagstaff explained that the he had collected them to satisfy his own desire to contemplate and explore the “pleasure to see, as when we see people dancing from a window.”

With somehow similar hopes and fears, several people tried to start a communication within a non-human dimension, experiment known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), voice-like sounds not resulting from intentional voice recordings or renderings. They have been claimed to derive either from paranormal events, or from a kind of materializing of the subconscious (apophenia, or auditory pareidolia), or to be simply hoaxes.

In his short novel “It Belongs to the Cucumbers”, William Burroughs traces a similitude between his own writing technique of cut-up and Raudive’s “ghost voices” recordings, intentionally creating a mysterious aura around the subconscious process of creativity. Acousmatic music could be seen to be treading the same path; and maybe the same could be said for most creative exploration.

Artistic and musical research often brings results that are surprising not only for the viewer/listener, but also for the artist as well. Unexpected changes, distortions and deviations are a lively part of any creative and intellectual process; but sometimes they are also intentionally part of the project from the beginning.

In his debut as a director Shadows, John Cassavetes let the actors free to improvise on a scenario, something accustomed in the Italian Comedy of Art, but quite unusual in Hollywood. Besides exploring the issue of interracial relationships in a very simple and enlightened way, he also offers one of the best family rows in the history of cinema.

Occulto Fest involves artists and musicians that often focus on unusual, creative and diverted ways to collect and use data, be they recorded sounds, scientific data, legends, computer programming languages, novels, circuits or images found on the web. But this is not the full story; they also do so with wit, utilising well developed skills and with the critical and challenging approach which has always been the best part of any DIY philosophy.

Occulto Fest proposes an exploration of something between scientific experimentation, wonder, hoax, subconscious suggestions and physical reality, using music, videos and other media.

For more information: http://www.ausland-berlin.de

Lemurs Over Laptopia: Will new performance interfaces rejuvenate live electronic music? asks Thomas Bey William Bailey on Vague Terrain:

For roughly 160 years since Richard Wagner published his Artwork of the Future, Western audio culture has been forced to take sides on the issue of music and its relation to the other arts: should music be just one element in a fully-integrated artistic program, or should ‘absolute music’ unfettered by lyrics (let alone other sensory effects) run the show? … the ‘total artwork vs. absolute music’ debate has only accelerated in recent years, in which multi-functional and compact (yet visually bland) tools like laptops and digital samplers have muscled in on the territory previously commanded by ensembles of ‘mono-functional,’ yet visually arresting, acoustic instruments. Following Wagner’s suggestion for architecture to be built with music performance in mind, all the plastic arts have been mobilized to enhance the concert stage. More recently, electronic instruments or control interfaces have also been designed to that end, rather than just working as efficient sound generators.

Read on as this article describes the JazzMutant Lemur, a multitouch and modular controller that musicians can use to to design or download customized GUIs that match the color schemes and ‘mood’ of any given performance program; and Toshio Awai’s Tenori-On, which can
communicate to audiences using synesthetic ‘translations’ of light signals into audio data — both of which seem designed to deal with the perceived problems of acousmatic music.

Radio Fragments is a radiophonic project that aims to explore an auditory attention, different from the one usually associated with the experience of listening to the radio, making use of the spaces-in-between-words-and-songs that occur throughout the radiophonic discourse as its main reagent.

Its basic formula consists of an analysis-control mechanism (built in Super Collider) residing inside a computer to which a real-time mainstream radio broadcast is fed. This mechanism acts as a reversed-noise-gate, singling out what is usually ignored or avoided in a radiophonic context (whispers, stumbles, pauses, dead spaces and errors) and muting all the other sounds such as words or songs. These punctuating fragments become the raw materials from which Radio Fragments’ sonic concoction is brewed.

Recordings of Radio Fragments:

André Castro (b.1983) is a sound artist from Lisbon, graduated in Sonic Arts at Middlesex University(U.K). André’s practice has been shifting between two different universes. On the one hand, the computer music world, with its meditative textures, harsh noisy sounds, blips, and experiments with custom-built software in SuperCollider. On the other hand, a phonographic activity, in which he goes out with a microphone trying to capture the incredible aural diversity of our world and the voices and stories that hide in each person. Most of André’s work has in common the evasion of visual elements, an acousmatic sound that aims to subvert the dominance of the vision over the other senses. In recent years he has nourished a growing interest for the radiophonic medium, which has become a fruitful source of inspiration and for which he has been creating pieces since the last 3 years.

A significant part of his practice has been developed through
collaborations with other artists, such as the ongoing improvised music
duo with Martin Aaserud.

This year the main focus of the workshop is on perceptual processes. The project title — Halbinseln der Wahrnehmung/ Peninsulae of Perception — is a reference to a diary written by a person afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. The diary has been proposed as research libretto for investigations into differing perceptual channels and psycho-social research on autism, synaesthesia, music composition and real-time performance. The acoustic-musical dimension of the 2009 laboratory is complemented by research into design or wearable audiophonics and acousmatic architectures and sound perceptions.

The workshop brings together artists, scientists and researchers from different backgrounds committed to sharing their experiences and catalyzing multidisciplinary science-art collaborations. Special guests in residence at the summer lab are Stefan Scheib and Katharina Bihler from the Liquid Penguin Ensemble, an experimental music-theatre group that gained wide recognition through their award-winning radio music dramas. Their latest production, “Bout du Monde,” has just been selected radio drama of the month (June 2009) by the German Academy of the Performing Arts. Previously, “GRAS WACHSEN HÖREN - das biolingua Institut wir 100 Jahre alt” was awarded the prize for best german radio drama and the ARD Online Award in 2008. Their music theatre performance “Eurydike hinter den Grenzen” (2007) was shown at festivals in Luxembourg, Düsseldorf, Saarbrücken and other venues.

The laboratory is organized by theatre director and media artist Johannes Birringer who founded the Interaktionslabor in 2003 and currently holds a professorship in digital performance at Brunel University, London. “We have had many inquiries this year, as our subject combines research into media arts and psychology,” Birringer says, “and the lab also has a continuing commitment to challenging our assumptions about space and perceptual constructions. We look forward to the participants from Latin America, Great Britain, France and Switzerland who will join artists and educators from the region.” The lab ensemble plans to create a sonic installation in the 10KV, a former electric plant on the campus of the mine. The Interaktionslabor, which went on tour last summer to Belo Horizonte, Brasil, has become increasingly well known for its unique peripheral location, its independent, autonomous status, and the transcultural partnteships it has helped to build over the years.

The lab ensemble plans to create a sonic installation in the 10KV, a former electric plant on the campus of the mine. The Interaktionslabor, which went on tour last summer to Belo Horizonte, Brasil, has become increasingly well known for its unique peripheral location, its independent, autonomous status, and the transcultural partnerships it has helped to build over the years.
The activities are open to visitors, and information about the proceedings and the research process can be found here.

Peter Traub: Space as a compositional parameter features prominently in your work. Knowing that you studied with composers Jonty Harrison and Denis Smalley – who do significant work with diffusion and multi-channel systems – gives us some clue as to your interest in this area, but I’m wondering what really attracts you to working with spatializing systems, ambisonics, and diffusion?

Natasha Barrett: During my masters degree, electroacoustic composition and particularly acousmatic composition drew my interest more than purely acoustic composition. In an acousmatic context, as spatial elements yield to greater variation and malleability, simply composing within this framework made spatial elements more interesting and important. So my interest in spatialisation systems stems from the investigation of space in sound, meaning and purpose in a compositional context and ultimately the need to find ways to communicate this information to a listener outside the composition studio.

Excerpt from “Fetters”, 2002

Peter: In your interview with Felipe Otondo, “Creating Sonic Spaces”, you say of your work with live diffusion, “I enjoy it and I know that I can project the right thing in the music.” The last part of that sentence is what interests me. The “right thing” clearly varies by piece, but it implies a type of musical play with space and spatial gesture, and I’m wondering if you can speak to that. When you diffuse your own or someone else’s work, what do you listen for in the existing piece to help you determine how it should be spatialized? You mention on your website that you make diffusion scores when preparing to diffuse a piece – what goes into the construction of a diffusion score, and how does its content relate to the content of the piece you’re diffusing?

Natasha: By ‘the right thing’ I am referring to an understanding of the work’s larger concept of musical structure, setting or landscape, as well as information such as gesture, articulation and identity over various temporal frames. First the work needs to be understood in detail – or analyzed to make evident its internal workings. Then the performance act requires knowledge and training to project this understanding over the loudspeaker system.

Acousmatic works are diverse and there are countless ways to execute the performance. I can however explain my own basic procedure. First, I listen to the work at least twice in a good listening situation. Then I transcribe my own graphic score to visually capture the work as I hear it – layers, gestures, textures, motion directions, articulations, text hints to allusions or extrinsic references. It is important for this analysis to be hand drawn. A sonogram holds too much time-frequency information and not enough information connected to our cognition of the music. By drawing I also teach myself the work. The next phase is to imagine how I would spatialise the work over a ‘continuous space’ – i.e. a spatial projection free from specific loudspeaker positions or room size. Some concerns will include the speed and direction of a gesture, depth of a sound-field, layering of many spatial-fields, space within the sound itself as a voluminous form with shape and dimension rather than as motion, how the sound activates the listening space (room acoustic), how I could use space to draw attention to articulations that are structurally important and consider how clearly recognizable sounds may demand a specific treatment. The style of musical language and genre also come into play. In an ideal world this mental or conceptual performance would be substituted for hours of work in the real space, yet rehearsal time is never so luxurious. Besides, ‘out of real-time’ I can also rehearse the physical motion of performance – kind of like playing “air guitar” but instead “air diffusion”. In the real rehearsal the preparation is modified to fit the room and loudspeaker set up. Playing my own work is slightly different in that I can skip the initial learning phase.

Speakers distributed through a vertical space in “Adsonore”

Peter: This is very interesting, and I’m wondering if you tie certain types of diffusion gestures to particular pitch, timbral, or temporal elements? Are there aspects of pieces that contribute more than any other to how you diffuse them (i.e., its density, pitch content, already existing spatial information)?

Natasha: The diffusion gesture is normally context specific for each work. But having said that, as there are trends across compositions there are also trends in diffusion technique. For example, pitch is often a latent aspect of the composition creating continuums or planes. You hardly want to activate this material in a dynamic way drawing inappropriate attention. For large sound masses, in a decent size space, I normally find it most successful to place the material on distant loudspeakers where the volume can be pushed that little bit more than on closer loudspeakers. Room acoustics thus emphasize a powerful sense of energy and submersion. However, these two examples are not the most important aspects of the diffusion. For me the primary issue is to express and enhance that already existing in the work. As performers we are there to project and interpret but not recompose.

Excerpt from “Kongsberg Silver Mines” from the “Sub Terra” cycle, 2008

Peter: In his article “Sound, space, sculpture: some thoughts on the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of sound diffusion”, Jonty Harrison gives a passionate defense of the art of live diffusion over the BEAST system, a system you have spent time on as well. Unlike ambisonics, the spatializing techniques used in a diffusion system like the BEAST do not attempt to recreate a 3D sound field. Since you have worked extensively in both areas, could you talk about how you differentiate between the space of an ambisonics-capable listening space and that of a space used by the BEAST? Does your use or conception of space as a compositional parameter change significantly between these different systems?

Natasha: Ambisonics systems are interesting in that they allow the direct transfer of composed spatial information to the listener. Stereo diffusion over a loudspeaker orchestra is interesting in that the work is interpreted in performance, and although the composer-listener link is interrupted by the performer, diffusion may be advantageous in situations connected to concert space, loudspeaker equipment, listener location, and not to mention the type of composition involved. Also some motions are tied to the loudspeaker as a sounding device, which works best in diffusion, such as the frontal ‘punch’ spatial attack. I sometimes work with hybrid techniques combining an ambisonics layer and a diffusion layer specifically to take advantage of both. We should note that since the article you mention Jonty has also composed multi-channel works and BEAST has also been interested in ambisonics.
My idea of space as a compositional parameter does indeed change depending on whether I am composing an ambisonics work or a work for diffusion. Some ambisonics compositional techniques simply don’t function under stereo diffusion (for example multiple simultaneous motion trajectories through free-space). Other spatial techniques lose their sense of presence in stereo and need enhancing in other ways. Understanding these differences has created extra work for myself. Many concert organisers, understandably, prefer normal stereo for use in diffusion performance and in my pure ambisonics works I end up with two different mixes. Information lost in stereo phantom images needs to be re-articulated in other ways and ultimately results in a variation of work. Over the past few years I have restricted my use of non-hyrbid ambisonics to contexts where I can accurately dictate the loudspeaker set-up – in large-scale whole-concert works or in sound installations.

Installation for performance of “Agora” (2003), a collaboration with Birger Sevaldson.

Peter: As an American composer, we rarely hear diffusion concerts over here – although multichannel is the norm – and it seems generally accepted within the American electroacoustic community that the practice and art of live diffusion is something that happens in Europe or Canada (it does stem from a European tradition after all). Why do you think live diffusion hasn’t been accepted or practiced in the US in the way that it has in many other countries?

Natasha: I have no idea!

Peter: You have done a number of installations that work with different types of architectural space, such as “Sub Terra”, “Barely”, “AGORA: Boundary Conditions”. How does your conception and use of space change when moving from concert settings to installation settings?

Excerpt from “Sub Terra”, 2008

Natasha: ‘Barely’ and ‘Boundary Conditions’ are installations involving physical visual materials, which in conjunction with sound create the architectural space. These two works were made in collaboration with an architect and his research-design group OCEAN North. In these works the conception of space changes in that sound and physical materials interact and need to make sense. In particular ‘Barely’ and ‘Boundary Conditions’ address the audience as a mobile body, where their own choice of movement will influence how they perceive the work. In contrast to an audience sitting stationary throughout the work the moving listener gathers spatial information to improve their perceptual accuracy and experience the dimensionality of the work installed in the space. The material parts of installations serve a three-fold purpose: to influence the visitors’ motion and point to sounding information that they otherwise may not have found, to influence the original room acoustic, sound-field and propagation from the loudspeakers and to project the work which is temporally static in terms of the physical materials but set in motion by the visitors motion, this in contrast to the sound which itself develops in time as well as in relation to the visitors motion.

Installation of “Barely_Part-1″, a collaboration with Birger Sevaldson and the experimental design and architecture group Ocean North.

Peter: When creating installations in which the architectural setting is a prominent component, how do the different qualities of the site, such as resonance, visual appearance, history, and so forth, influence how you create the sonic component?

Natasha: The qualities of the site are important – the acoustic, smell, light, feeling of size gained through both aural and visual senses as well as the over all impression that the space imposes on the visitor. I don’t think that installations necessarily articulate the space more than concert works. Concert works are portable and adaptable for different spaces mainly by virtue of performance and normally address a concept of time and structure whereby the nature of the listener-space is but one of many important facets. Installations are less portable. Without the performance aspect the site needs to be carefully addressed and the approach to temporal form and material demands a listening (experiencing) strategy where the setting and the work are a more unified entity. This was particularly the case for Barely_part-1 and part-2. Yet the amount of work involved meant that some adaptability needed to be considered. Barely contains layers which function in all spaces, layers that are ‘very site specific’ for each space, and layers that are adaptable simply by re-orientating loudspeaker locations, relative volumes and relative frequencies. Barely_part-1 was installed in an enormous concrete, steel and glass industrial space dating from the Second World War. Barely_part-2 was redesigned and installed in a small and dry architectural gallery space.

Excerpt from “Barely_part-1″, 2007

Peter: When you say that “Barely” contains some layers that function in all spaces, some that are custom made, and so forth, what differentiates the custom made materials from the adaptable ones? Do the custom made ones contain elements specific to the resonance of the space, or perhaps its history?

Natasha: The ‘very site specific’ sounds were of two types: (a) the natural sound-layer within and outside the installation site and (b) sounds made with the specific room acoustic in mind in terms of frequency, volume and texture. In Barely_part-1 the natural sound-layer involved a little traffic noise, a building site, a kindergarten, weather sounds and people sounds mainly from outdoors filtered through the structure and acoustic of the building. Although referential sounds could connect to the function or history of the building, in Barely such sounds were related to the concept of the work and were instead amongst those sounds most portable between the two spaces.

Peter: Spatial listening is something that, on a primitive level, we are all very good at, but on a more refined musical level, it takes some training. Your ability to listen and compose spatially is highly refined, but how do you communicate spatial gesture, allusion, and so forth to an audience whose spatial listening abilities may not be as practiced?

Natasha: Accurate spatial perception is partly dependent on training to re-waken our ears in a world dominated by visual information – it’s an ability we have but don’t often use. However, when the spatial information is tied into an allusion or gesture we are considering more than space in isolation. Amongst other techniques, there are two methods I use to communicate spatial information to a ‘less practiced’ listener: one is to find what I’m after and then enhance or make it ‘hyper-real’. For example by increasing speed of a motion you draw the ear’s attention. The other method is to tie spatial information to a source bond or allusion that reinforces or at least addresses the space in some way. In other words, connect to our biological spatial abilities by amplifying culturally conditioned concepts.

Peter: Most composers eventually develop a musical language in terms of how they use pitch, timbre, temporality, and so forth. Do you have a spatial language, in that you use similar spatial gestures or constructions, or combinations of spatial gestures, between pieces to communicate particular meanings or experiences?

Natasha: Yes, I think so, but I hope I achieve a development of the language rather than simply passing ideas between works.

Peter: I guess what I’m trying to get at is what, if any, are the fundamental structures, forms, or gestures of that spatial language? Are the gestures tied to each other in some continuous form of musical language, or are they more tied individually to the sound material they’re moving around? Trevor Wishart wrote a section on spatial motion in his book “On Sonic Art”, and I’m wondering if you think about your spatial language in similar terms to how he describes and diagrams his taxonomy of various spatial gestures and movements?

Natasha: For me the spatial language mainly derives from the materials and ideas in each specific work. In the chapter you mention Trevor describes an array of spatial motions. On one hand such a description is useful to awaken composers to the details we are concerned with, but for my work I find a detachment from the sound in question problematic. Spatial information finds musical meaning when specific to, and developed from, the material as a totality. Sound contains an internal or inherent space in intrinsic terms and a connection to space in extrinsic or referential terms. These aspects need to yield to enhancement or be intentionally contradicted. I find it compositionally problematic to take a spatial formula at the outset and squeeze a sound into this formula unless I am composing with particularly abstract material or instrumental music (and I don’t think this is Trevor’s meaning either).

Speakers arranged for “Sub Terra” (2008).

Peter: In your interview by Felipe Otondo in the Computer Music Journal, you described your composition process as follows: “To some people, it may sound strange that I compose first in stereo or normal quad and then realize the ambisonics version once the materials, the timing, the counterpoint, and the flow are correct. Things do change when you compose the ambisonics field, obviously – when calculating Doppler shifts and filtering, pitch and volume changes! Then you have to go back and change the material – but to do most of the composition first in the more traditional format makes the complete process manageable.” I’m wondering, since manipulation of space is such a central characteristic of your work, is your work process dictated to some degree by the technology, i.e., that it would technically be very difficult to realize the spatialization earlier on, before a more final form is in place? I suppose the question I’m asking, in a general philosophical sense, is that if one uses space as a central compositional parameter, then how does one go about composing space at the outset, letting it dictate the form and materials that go into it? Is such an approach even practical?

Natasha: The reason for not working in higher order ambisonics in the development of the composition is due to the technical workload. For example, to work with 3rd-order ambisonics you either mix 16-channel files instead of mono or stereo files or add an encoder for every track in the mixing session. I am however currently developing materials recorded in A-format (Soundfield four-capsule microphone), attempting to keep all source and composed material in A-format and monitoring the output decoded (first to B-format and then to quad speaker monitoring). Interestingly it has been necessary to destroy some spatial sources and re-articulate space in other ways – i.e. reduce the original space to stereo or even mono and develop the sound in a different direction. It is a misunderstanding to think that space in music is simply a matter of motion trajectories, scenes and landscapes. In any case, I don’t think there is any major philosophical air about the approach. It’s all down to a combination of what’s practical and what you know through experience. After all, when sitting in the absolutely perfect listening location in a very good studio, a stereo sound reveals spatial information extremely close to 3-D, only that it is (predominantly) locked to the frontal image. Hearing and acknowledging this can be sufficient during the compositional process to allow a complete 3-D rendering later on (where the listener does not need to be located so accurately). Ambisonics room models and distance cues add another layer of complication, but one still needs to get the compositional ideas worked out. If stereo simply does not satisfy (such as inadequately projecting multiple uncorrelated motions) then I create real 3-D experiments, write notes, sketches, reminders, or even time-spatial co-ordinate tables to represent what I discovered and allow further development work in the stereo field. After the basic compositional ideas are in place the 3-D explosion is realized – and this is no quick or small part – it is a time consuming process where errors are found, ideas may not function and new issues raised. I have thought lengthily about this process and think that the only way for me to compose in higher order ambisonics from the beginning and throughout is when the nth-order file format is transparent to a user and when all processing and transformation software handles n-number of channels in the source.

Excerpt from “Trade Winds”, 2004-2006

Peter: In addition to your installation, concert, and fixed media work, you do live electroacoustic improv. How does your work in the other mediums influence and play into your performance during a live improv session? Does the site of play in your music change significantly when performing live?

Natasha: In improvisation I work with a live acoustic performer where I sample sound in real-time and manipulate this in various ways. The fact that the acoustic performer, and me too for that matter, are visually rooted on stage denies some types of spatial activity explored in my acousmatic composition. Also on stage behind the loudspeakers I am unable to hear the spatial picture the audience hears and it’s pretty difficult to second guess anything but coarse spatial information. Besides, my brain, controllers and MaxMSP patches are far too overworked with the issues of ‘real-time’ and meaningful improvisation, at least in my current state, to address space in any sense of refinement.

The discussions will explore some of the following areas: the roles of instruments (acoustic/ electronic/ mixed) as cultural and material producers of musical interaction; the sonic and verbal definition processes of authorities in the improvisation; the different fine-textured nuances of embodied communication in rehearsal/ performance processes; embodiment, collective authorities and electronics.

The Ouija board, developed by Thomas Gardner, is a new form of group musical instrument. Based on the real-time video analysis of the shadows cast by the hands of the performers, it reframes many of the conventions of traditional, tactile instrumental control.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=suJ9919MoKU[/youtube]

It allows the relationship between sound material from loudspeakers (location recordings, processed live sound, synthesised sounds) and the embodied act of performance to be investigated more deeply. This occurs both in a formal research processes and during performance, where the Ouija board acts as a bridge between acousmatic and traditional instrumental / vocal techniques.

The tactile quality of traditional acoustic instruments is in contrast to this remote, shadowy form of engagement. It is a negative instrument, between two worlds, casting a human shadow on the acousmatic curtain.

If you need any further information please contact Sarah Kaldor CRiSAP Research Administrators.kaldor [at] lcc.arts.ac.uk

RAVEN CHACON (b. Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States, 1977) is an American composer and artist. He is known for being a composer of chamber music as well as being a solo performer of experimental noise music. As an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, he is also one of the few American Indian classical composers and educators of “New Native Art.” Chacon has recorded many works for classical and electronic instruments and ensembles and has had many performances and exhibits of his work across the U.S. as well as Europe and New Zealand. He has received commissions from the University of Mary Washington and the ERGO Ensemble. He was a student of James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, and Wadada Leo Smith while he was studying music at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives in Albuquerque, NM and has served as Composer-in-Residence with the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project.

WILLIAM FOWLER COLLINS: Originally from rural New England and now living in New Mexico, William Fowler Collins (b.1974) is a musician whose work explores and synthesizes both musical and extra-musical elements. Improvisation, field recordings, electric guitar, lap steel guitar, laptop computer, processed recordings, micro-cassette tape recorders, and home-made electronic devices all play roles in the creating, performing, and recording of his music. In 2004 Collins graduated from Mills College, with an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media where he studied with Fred Frith, Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, and Pauline Oliveros.

LUPERCI is the aural work of New Mexico based artist Joseph Angelo. This work can be primarily categorized as drone noise with an emphasis on texture and repetition. All pieces are intuitively arranged with a focused intent. Thus far, general themes revolve around opening the currents of primordial chaos, acknowledgment of the cycles of destruction/creation, and the faint whisper of hope amidst despair. Joseph holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, and has been performing experimental music since 1999. In the fall of 2006 Joseph adopted the moniker Luperci to reflect the new style and approach that was beginning to emerge. Notable performances as Luperci took place at the Minima per Maxima Festival at L’an Vert gallery in Liege, Belgium, Salon Bruit in Berlin, Germany, and a live radio performance on “the no other radio network” show in Berkeley, California. Live performances utilize organic sounds such as sitar, harmonium, tamboura, chinese hammered dulcimer, bass guitar, and human voice. These sounds are electronically treated, manipulated, layered, arranged, and designed to provide the audience access to introspective and/or trance-like states.

Every day for the past year, Morneau has composed and posted a new sixty-second composition. That’s just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments. For this project, Morneau explored a wide variety of musical styles and techniques, including musique concrète, sine wave synthesis, digital sampling, 8-bit constructions, process music, acousmatic composition, and post-techno beat manipulations. He found the requirement to make a new, complete piece every day an exhilarating challenge, and reveled in the constant variety of ideas the project embraced. This project began as a challenge to compose more, and ended up as an audio diary of the past year.

Morneau chose to compose specifically for the internet because of an interest in its effect on the creation and dissemination of music and art. One-minute compositions are easy to download. The podcast format encouraged listener subscription. 60×365 was presented as a series of shorter pieces over time, in a particular order. However, this order was only one possibility. Some listeners waited until many pieces were posted and then chose their own path through the archive. Some listened with headphones, some with computer speakers of varying quality, some on a mobile device, some listened with friends, some listened alone.

The entire project will remain online at http://60×365.com where listeners can explore the archive by date, by title, and by category. http://5of4.com
http://60×365.com

Selections from 60×365 will be included in a radio broadcast as part of the 2008 Expo Brighton, a festival of sound art and experimental music in Brighton, UK. The festival will take place July 4-6.

Program Notes: You and Me, Going is the result of an imaginary unfolding — of a near-archaeological process through my recent work: of unearthing artifacts, brushing them off, finding new resonances with old things, and deducing / constructing narrative from emerging layers of association. My recent installations have required the capture and creation of vast libraries of audio material, much of which never found the right home. You and Me, Going is a landscape of these bits and a departure for me from working with algorithms to realize pieces that endlessly permute within stochastic bounds. For this project I wanted to refocus on the microscopic details of mixing and to discover how the more constructed basis for my recent works has been metabolised into intuitions and tastes. And so I returned to an entirely handmade approach. In one section of the piece, part of Agonism, a poem by Bethany Wright, is sung. The complete work is in the back of this program. (Micah Silver)

ScAS (ScotchAcoustic Session) was started in 2004 as series of live-acousmatic pieces based on scotch-tape sounds, recorded and edited by various types. It is a generative composition, so-called work-in-progress. The idea in the beginning was to limit sound source and to find structures for the following composition, starting from this material. In this way, it has such forms as: duo of sampler performance; sampler with dancer via MAX/MSP; and present 8-channel sound installation, which was made in Diapason Gallery in 2008, March

Bios:
Micah Silver’s work often finds its balance in the irreconcilable fascinations of time perception and a closeness to the sensuality of sound. His work is constructed as a site of self-examination, creating frictions between the perceptual bounds of practical society and the optimistically impractical possibilities suggested by the work.

Shows have been mounted by the Jersey City Museum, Artspace New Haven, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, The James Joyce Centre, Dublin and others. Silver’s scores and text has been published in Nuke Magazine (Paris), The Journal of the Valkenberg Hermitage (Berlin), and will accompany a DVD by Diapason Gallery for Sound (NYC). He recently completed a 12-channel sound piece commissioned by the MATA Festival (April 08) and is working on a large-scale installation for Mass MoCA (February 09) and a collaborative, evening length performance/installation with poet Bethany Ides.

Silver was born in 1980 in North Carolina but grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts. He studied music and sound art at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, and Ron Kuivila and privately with Raphé Malik, Lewis Spratlan, and Earle Brown. In addition to his work as an artist, Silver is music/sound curator for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Patrick K.-H. (aka Yakhontov Anton, b. 1980)
Visual-, video- and soundartist, composer, animator. During his childhood, he learned classical and jazz guitar, ballroom dance and visual art. Composed and performed classical and free-jazz music. Started to experiment with cutting tape at the age of 9, but did not understand the meaning of this media until he attend Theremin Center workshops in 1999, where he started to compose and perform concrete music.

From 2004 he was writing a lot of music and video for different theatre and contemporary dance projects, and turned to multimedia. Now his interests are more about self-organized dynamic systems, sound environment, and mixing early forms of video with post-digital technologies. As an example, concept of his last piece “Cinestetica” (2008, May) with choreographer Dina Khuseyn and media-artist D. Subochev is based on controlling video by sound and dance to produce special sort of animation in real-time by translating data from one media to another.

Member of Moscow Cyberorchestra. Many times marked with his creative fruits at different festivals: Altermedium -Moscow, Tseh- Moscow, Dialogue- Netherlands, Open Look-St.Peterburg, Touch-Arhangelsk, St Gallen -Austria, Interactiune-Kishineu, Russian Act- UK, Singapoore, Form of live-Moscow, Summer Lab “Dansstationen” - Sweden, Moscow International Film Festival, Noore Tantsu-Estonia, World Rose-Moscow, Moscow Autumn etc.

Special thanks to Andrei Smirnov, director of the Theremin Center

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring, Diapason has built on his efforts at Studio Five Beekman, a sound gallery he founded in1996. With two high-quality multi-channel sound systems Diapason’s listening environment draws a regular audience, and Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and other generous individuals. Diapason is a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

Sculpt is work for sensor gloves, interactive electronics and interactive projected image that explores the relationship between synthetic sound and synthetic image through the tactile nuance of human gesture.

Robert Griffin Byron won the A.B.C. Young Composer’s Award in 1995. Since then, Byron’s chamber music and orchestral works have been heard all across Australia, the United States, and Asia. His work has been performed by the most of Australia’s state orchestras. To date, Byron has received four commissions. In 1997 the West Australian Ballet commissioned the score for the ballet Orlando. In 1998 Future Films commissioned a soundtrack for an art film by Glen Eaves called Structures. The score won the A.B.C. Young Composer Film Award in 1999. Also in 1999 the Australian Ballet commissioned the full-length ballet Mirror Mirror. In 2002 the Ensemble Arcangelo commissioned the chamber work Kaleidoscope, with support from ArtsWA.

In addition to these commissions, Byron’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (Cobalt) was premiered by Michael Kieran Harvey in 1999 at the Calloway Auditorium, U.W.A. Byron’s dance work, Enlightenment, premiered in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Black Box Theater in 2004. Byron collaborated with Choreographer Liz Shea and Lighting Designer Robert Shakespeare, exploring interactive lighting, interactive sound, and choreographic movement. Byron gained second place in the Australian National Harp Composition Competition in 2004 for the work The Moon Methinks Looks with a Watery Eye. In 2006 Byron’s acousmatic work Hip or Hype? was performed at Pixerations in Providence, Rhode Island. His most recent work Swarm, for Perriott Ensemble and Interactive electronics, was premiered by the Boston-based group Dinosaur Annex in 2007.

Byron’s electronic works have been performed at numerous conferences, including the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Melbourne (2002), Perth SPECTRUM conference (2003), Western Australia Converging Technologies conference (2003), SEAMUS conference in San Diego (2003), THRESHOLD at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (2004), and Midwest IDEAS Festival (2004, 2005, and 2006). Byron won first place in the audio section at the 2004 and 2005 IDEAS Festivals.

Byron earned his B.Mus. from Edith Cowan in 1997. In 2000 Byron received a Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer’s Fellowship-in-Residence, where he continued his studies. He earned his M.M. in Computer Music Composition from Indiana University while on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006. At Indiana, Byron won the 2005 Dean’s Prize for Electroacoustic Composition. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in multimedia art at Brown University.