This year's fest will feature events and creative works by Natasha Barrett and Tarik Barri!
There will be Live Performances by Timothy Cleary, Diggers (aka Eric Barry Drasin), Emilie Craig, and Sean Winters. The Acousmatic & AudioVisual concert will feature works by Natasha Barrett, Mariam Gviniashvili, Ernst van der Loo, Enrique Mendoza Mejia, Sean Winters, Nicola Giannini, R.A. Jones, Krzysztof Gawlas, Natalia Quintanilla, Brook Vann, and Mary Letera. Paulus Van Horne will be curating and spatializing sounds for the afternoon "Listen" session, and Brad Gallagher is the mastermind behind the "Touching Sound" motion capture event. Join Sean Winters to learn about spatial audio and ambisonics, and hear demonstrations of the immense capabilities of B2's new immersive sound array. Both 3D sound art and ambisonically encoded field recordings will be used to demo the creative possibilities of this state-of-the-art facility.
Time: Monday, March 6th 9:30 am - 10:30 am
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Join Sean Winters to learn how to interface with B2's 44 channel high density loudspeaker array using Ableton and Max for Live. Various creative approaches will be explored including sending sounds straight-to-speaker, and also encoding/decoding with ambisonics and other sound diffusion algorithms.
Time: Monday, March 6th 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
Join Sean Winters to explore the outer limits of what B2's 44 channel high density loudspeaker array is capable of. Using a Digital Audio Workstation (Reaper) and VST Plug-Ins (IEM, ICST) is one of the only ways to encode Higher Order Ambisonic soundfields. Applications of immersive soundfields in the context of Critical Media Making, XR, Game Engines, and Live Performances will also be explored.
Time: Monday, March 6th 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Enter into a playground of Motion, Sound, and Light! 3d motion capture technology, ambisonic sound diffusion, and intelligent lighting will be combined to create a playful immersive experience in which your movements will trigger sound and light. The playground features three interactive modes: Rumpus Room, Timbre Moods, and the Spotlight Granulator. Each mode uses a different approach for generating sound and light cues based on your movements. All are invited to come explore this immersive space and learn about the technologies involved!
Time: Tuesday, March 7th 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Brad Gallagher: Brad Gallagher is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose practice engages with the concept of sympoiesis, or "making with." He explores how movement generates complexity, creativity, and cognition by developing interactive installations and performance interfaces.
Join us for a lights-out listening session in the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio. Stereo tracks by (un?)renowned sonic artists, curated by Sean Winters, will be spatialized on the array.
Time: Wednesday, March 8th 9:30 am - 10:30 am
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Join us for a lights-out listening session in the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio. Stereo tracks by (un?)renowned sonic artists, curated by Paulus Van Horne, will be spatialized on the array.
Time: Wednesday, March 8th 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Join Tarik Barri (Berlin, DE) for this hybrid/remote event as he talks about a few Immersive AudioVisual collaborations and discusses the various conceptual approaches and technical workflows for producing Immersive AudioVisual content. He will discuss the conceptual side, toolsets used, and lessons learned from previous projects, and also share some of the cutting edge possibilities of VideoSync -- an emerging toolset at the forefront of Live AudioVisual Performance. The session will be moderated by Mary Latera (Colorado, USA), an audiovisual artist who is working on the development side of the VideoSync project with Tarik. Check out Tarik's work here.
Time: Thursday, March 9th 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Tarik Barri: Tarik Barri is an audiovisual musician and software developer. He programmes his own software to develop new tools for audiovisual performance and composition. Using these tools, Barri explores new synergies and aesthetics in combinations of image and sound. An often recurring idea in his work is that of "visual music", not as opposed to "regular music," but as an intrinsic part of it. He notes that music is a type of motion that's deeper than pure sound or visuals, it's a movement within our consciousness that can both be evoked by, and expressed through different senses and media. Sound is particularly powerful in this regard, but it's vital to also acknowledge and respond to the huge role that visual expressions can have in enhancing, altering or negating the musical experience. His work takes on various forms like installations, videos and AV performances where he frequently collaborates with artists like Thom Yorke, Paul Jebanasam, Sote and Robert Henke."
Mary Letera: Mary Letera is an intermedia artist, performer, and software developer who creates with light, sound, and dance. As a software developer, currently working on the VideoSync project with Tarik Barri and other developers in Europe, she enjoys seeing technology highlighted with the specific intention of encouraging deeper embodied experiences. Mary's practice incorporates movement and programming via motion-capture technology to produce video, audiovisual, and mixed-media performances, injecting the organic into the predictable and sometimes sterile world of coding.
Join Natasha Barrett (Oslo, NO) for this hybrid/remote event as she gives a rare glimpse into the compositional process behind two of her latest Higher Order Ambisonics acousmatic compositions. First we'll have an opportunity to listen to the work on the 40.4 speaker array, then Natasha will talk about how the pieces were created. "My inspiration comes from the immediate sounding matter of the world around us, as well as the way it behaves, the way it is generated, and by systems and the traces that those systems reveal. These interests have lead my work into worlds of cutting-edge audio technologies, geoscience, sonification, motion tracking and some exciting collaborations leading into the unknown - involving solo performers and chamber ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for new music and the way it can touch the listener." -Natasha Barrett Check out the artist's work here.
Time: Friday, March 10th 11:15 am - 12:05 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Natasha Barrett: Natasha Barrett (1972) is a composer and performer exploring new technologies and experimental approaches to sound in a broad range of contemporary music, including concert works, public space sound-art installations and multimedia interactive music. She is internationally renowned for her electroacoustic and acousmatic music, and use of 3D sound technology in composition. Her work is commissioned and performed throughout the world and has received over 20 international awards including the Nordic Council Music Prize, the Giga-Hertz Award (Germany), five first prizes and the Euphonie D'Or in the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Awards (France), two first prizes in the International Rostrum for electroacoustic music and most recently the Thomas Seelig Fixed Media Award for 2023. She collaborates with performers, visual artists, architects and scientists and is also active in performance, education and research. "
Artists from around the world present immersive acousmatic and audiovisual compositions. All of the works are Colorado premieres, most are USA premieres, and some are world premieres. None of the pieces have ever been played publicly on B2's 40.4 spatial array.
Time: Friday, March 10th 7:30 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Natasha Barrett Sensory Sleep and Dream Awake: Many years ago, excited and overwhelmed with what was possible with computers and composition, I jumped into using sources that appeared musically new. Of course, after listening and learning, I found other composers had got there before me! I left some of these sounds in the 'possibly interesting' archive, and water droplets were amongst them. But now in 2022 it was time to revisit the ideas I left behind with new ears, new knowledge, new tools and new dreams. The result is a two-part work composed in higher-order Ambisonics: 'Dream Awake' and 'Sensory Sleep'. The titles reflect my mental state before and after long studio sessions during the quiet hours of dawn. A Norwegian Arts Council project designed to illustrate the creative process of acousmatic composition to a Norwegian music scene, provided the opportunity to realise what I had imagined many years ago."
Tarik Barri Miss Trutti Finally Found Her Gem: Many years ago, excited and overwhelmed with what was possible with computers and composition, I jumped into using sources that appeared musically new. Of course, after listening and learning, I found other composers had got there before me! I left some of these sounds in the 'possibly interesting' archive, and water droplets were amongst them. But now in 2022 it was time to revisit the ideas I left behind with new ears, new knowledge, new tools and new dreams. The result is a two-part work composed in higher-order Ambisonics: 'Dream Awake' and 'Sensory Sleep'. The titles reflect my mental state before and after long studio sessions during the quiet hours of dawn. A Norwegian Arts Council project designed to illustrate the creative process of acousmatic composition to a Norwegian music scene, provided the opportunity to realise what I had imagined many years ago."
Mariam Gviniashvili Chaos and Awe: Chaos and Awe"" is the title of the exhibition of some 50 paintings curated by Mark W. Scala at the Frist Art Museum. The artists in the exhibition dramatically reflect the effects of globalism, mass migration, mass control, and radical ideologies - forces whose unfathomable scale and powerful influence can terrify us. The exhibition became the inspiration for my audiovisual work with the same title. The work explores themes of fear, control, deception, discrimination, struggle, and survival, expressed through the choice of black and white, rapidly changing, striking visual scenes and an ear-splitting, dense sound material. Commissioned by the Heroines of Sound Festival, supported by the Norwegian Arts Council. "
Ernst van der Loo Kýkloi alpha & beta: Composed in a mixture of 6th and 7th order ambisonics and commisioned by Electric Audio Unit for the 2 day Electric Edge Festival at and in coörporation with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter at Høvikodden, Norway. The piece is dedicated to - and is celebrating - the 100th birthday of Iannis Xenakis. Countering the common reflex to mimic Xenakis’ mathematical composition techniques, Kýkloi Alpha & Beta is more concerned with the violence of his sound world. The sound materials for this composition are mainly generated by means of analogue modular synthesis. The materials have then been processed through various multichannel convolution based techniques resulting in transformations of their spectral and spatial properties. These techniques are not so much focused on the movements of single sound sources but rather on envelopment by means of static placement of different spectral/timbral parts of sound materials over a spatial field. One of the properties of this technique is that when one alters the frequency spectrum (ie. by filtering) one creates a movement through said sound field."
Enrique Mendoza Mejia maybe pain: In this piece, I want to draw a metaphor between how we perceive sound and emotional pain like loss or rejection. Scientists have proven that emotional and physical pain is processed by the same neural circuitry, with consequences on how we deal with emotional pain. Besides the objective data of how our physical and cognitive systems work, many subjective factors affect an individual’s experience of sound and pain. The objective-subjective dichotomy is simply inevitable. Musically, the idea is to use the bow as a saw knife that wants to go through the contrabass incessantly like an objective stimulus triggering the electroacoustic processes being subjective in emotional meaning. Several copies of the contrabass together with the electronic sounds are spatialized to create an immersive sonic experience that basks in painful times"
Nicola Giannini Rebonds: Rebonds is a playful piece that explores the boundaries between rhythm, pitch, texture, and space. The work is inspired by the rhythmic figure of the rebound, a recurrent figure in electroacoustic music, characterized by the repetition of an element at a progressively increasing speed. The goal is to create sound choreographies, exploring sound spatialization possibilities. The work was composed at the Université de Montréal and during a residency at the Sporobole art center in Sherbrooke, in Quebec, Canada."
R.A. Jones Sahrazad: Duban | The Eccalobeion | Dunyazad R.A. Jones’s “Sahrazad” is the debut release on Random Walk, a multi channel record label founded by Visible Cloaks’ Ryan Carlile. Sahrazad is a prismatic journey through a mercurial landscape created by generative systems whorling wild streams of synthesized sound. Each track is a new world and an invitation to investigate how our ears listen and engage with music. The album comes in a 7.1 surround sound blu-ray format, bringing an autonomy and motile freedom for sounds to surface, hide and swirl around your body in an omnidirectional manner. “Sahrazad” is loosely based on “One Thousand and One Nights,” a collection of folk tales strung together by a narrator who begins a story without ending the preceding one in effort to avoid her death. Similarly, each of the nine tracks on Sahrazad are riddled with layers that blossom and surge into another world of object-noise abstractions. It is the album’s cyclical constitution that accepts birth and death as the same and allows the listener to explore the nonlinear matrices of it. R.A. Jones is a New York-based composer, producer, and educator. Jones is a current member of electronic, avant-garde band P.E. and releases music as Jha Bones. He was previously involved with Eternal Tapestry, Jackie-O-Motherfucker, and Parquet Courts. He has been featured on albums released on labels such as Rough Trade, Mississippi Records, Blackest Ever Black, and Wharf Cat. “Sahrazad” is mastered by Montreal-based sound engineer Dominique Bassal. The physical release is a blu-ray 7.1 surround sound disc with audio-only option. Digital streams are available in Dolby Atmos, a 360-degree spatialized audio format"
Krzysztof Gawlas Quintet: The electro-acoustic piece Quintet was created in collaboration with the instrumentalists of the Orchestra of New Music (Alicja Molitorys – flutes, Jadwiga Czarkowska – clarinets, Dorota Adamczak – piano and Łukasz Bebłot – double bass). The fifth instrument here is a modular synthesizer, operated by the composer. In works for instrumental ensemble and electronics, the electronic layer is often created through the processing of the acoustic instruments’ sounds. In the case of this piece, we have the opposite situation – the original layer is the part of the modular synthesizer, and the instrumental layer, created from individual samples, recorded by instrumentalists, and attached using the concatenative method (AudioGuide, Ben Hackbarth and others, http://www.benhackbarth.com/audioGuide/index.html) takes the role of the processor. This method allowed to achieve a high degree of coherence between the two layers, further emphasized by placing all sound sources in a common ambisonic space. The piece is realized and submitted in third order ambix (ACN, SN3D) format, and intended for multichannel loudspeaker dome."
Natalia Quintanilla Abejas: While hiking in Los Dinamos, a National park located in the South of Mexico City, I realized that a bee kept following me. In the beginning, I found myself annoyed by her, but then I realized it was my instinct that made me annoyed. If I paid attention, I would realize that she was harmless; she was just minding her own business; she was fragile and beautiful. I was following her. Finally, she landed on a flower, and carefully, I started to record her. Reading about the life cycle of a queen bee and its larva, I wanted to create a piece that captures the fascinating journey of the selection process of a queen. I created my material by exploring all the different sounds from an accordion in addition to the creation of sounds using the analog synthesizer’s sequencer."
Brook Vann Ataraxic Blue: The sound is an experiment in motion as an indicator of taking up space. The sound was created from data sonification of motion capture data. The motion is of expanding extremities and moving back in on oneself to stay afloat in a body of water. However, in a body of water the sense of gravity is altered so the sense of falling decreases. Even within a fluid space, the body motion is inconsistent; thus, the sound breathes with nonnormative breaks that separates it from the harmony of music. “Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life, but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction” (The Queer Art of Failure p.185)."
Mary Letera Eclipse: Every 6 months the Moon passes through the shadow of the Earth, creating a Lunar Eclipse. To humans who believe that “as above, so below”, these events have been perceived throughout history as initiators of disruptive change and calamity, perhaps owing to the darkening of the Moon during its brightest phase. But what if change is needed and necessary, and as natural as the shedding of leaves in autumn? What if instead of an initiator of change the Eclipse is actually an invitation to change - to rest, reflect, and release what is dead? It was with this in mind leading up to the November 8th, 2022 Eclipse that I created this meditative work."
Sean Winters trains n grains: One source and two techniques were used to compose this study for ambisonic diffusion: 15 seconds from a field recording I made of a tram outside the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, granular synthesis (Granulator II by Robert Henke), and sound spatialisation (E4L by Envelop). To understand our physical environment we must look at it closely. Look at it. closely. Look at it? The eyes can be helpful but, perhaps, we can breakthrough and further realize the true nature of our physical environment by listening to it closely. And not only by listening to exotic, hard to capture sounds, like sending microphones to the surface of mars. Maybe revelations can be found in simple everyday sounds, like trains. Furthermore, it’s possible that the materiality of sound is actually fragile and illusive. While the fruit is growing it is inedible, and as it decays it can become moldy and treacherous; conceivably there’s only a brief window of time in which a sound is actually ripe, and maybe only a brief instant in which it has achieved its absolute peak flavor. Perhaps thoroughly examining a sound through the process of granular synthesis can help us navigate – and reflect upon – the hundreds of thousands of discrete moments that represent a sound's life cycle, from pollination to disintegration. "
Timothy Cleary, Eric Barry Drasin, Emilie Craig, and Sean Winters will each present live performances that utilize both the 40.4 spatial array and B2's immersive projection capabilities.
Time: Saturday, March 11th 7:30 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Timothy Cleary Skyflyer (Collage #2): Timothy Cleary is a composer and artist based in Brooklyn NY. He composes music for film and makes experimental music and audiovisual artworks. He is dedicated to engaging with stories that create space for discovery and extract magic from the ordinary, uncovering narratives that emerge from the subconscious and materialize as experiences that we don’t have language for (yet). Recent projects include the score for Blood Memory, an experimental documentary capturing the world of Icelandic Fisherman (dir. Halston Bruce) and Blinkers, a collection of audiovisual works pairing ethereal yet distantly familiar imagery with an ambient collage of drones, chance based musical gestures and field recordings. Timothy Cleary activates the 40.4 system with interview excerpts, semi-improvised score, and immersive video to mine the fragmented mythology around outlaw biker and record-setting parachutist, Robert “Norton” Thomas. Norton, Cleary’s maternal uncle, disappeared in 1982 after an engine failed on the aircraft he was copiloting over the Pacific Ocean. "
Diggers Headgames: Diggers is an audiovisual project by Eric Barry Drasin featuring compositional scores about failed cybernetic utopias. It is a reference to several counter cultural communities that resisted capitalist property relations existing between mercantile England and San Francisco in the 1960’s. It also references western funeral rights and the realization of suffering as the underlying causal relationship that connects sentient life. Headgames has been widely performed throughout the United States from 2017-2019. This will be the first performance of the piece since the Pandemic began in 2020. Eric Barry Drasin is a research-based artist exploring the relationship between art and systems of value. Eric’s work is rooted in media ecology and performance. Using experimental media techniques and custom software systems, his performances and installations have explored how media can transform relationship. Eric founded a video art collective called the Fast Food Collective in 2012, and has been curating realtime media performances in NYC since 2013. He has worked as a curator through Culturehub/LaMama, Outpost Artists Resources, and other spaces in NYC. In 2016, he co-founded Moving Pictures Gallery, a platform for digital art. In 2017, he founded and produced the Confetti Machine Realtime Media Festival. He is currently developing programming at FEED, a new residency and exhibition space for media artists in Erie Pennsylvania. http://ericbarrydrasin.com “Headgames” is a Diggers performance negotiating a relationship between the body, a head-mounted camera and projected screen. Through the use of networked media, aleatoric score, and performative feedback, Realtime media is contextualized as an interdependent and fluctuating psychic space; an extension bridging interior and exterior awareness. Using a series of specific choreographic arrangements, the performer initiates different states of balance in the signal. The image is processed through a custom software system which is controlled by two handheld wireless sensors. The image is sonified, enabling the body to connect to the mediated image and initiate a dialogue. Based on Paul Ryan’s notion of “threeing” the Headgames score represents divergent relational positions that one can take when mediating conflict. The form of these positions resembles a circuit, or a system of interrelated processes. Each position allows the performer to relate to the content of a message in nested arrangements of observation that allows for a behavioral feedback circuit to occur. Through this feedback circuit, the signal is extended into the environment through light and sound; given form and sculpted through movement. Through this embodied choreography of signal, the internal psychic space of the performer becomes immediately externalized and the process of finding balance can be enhanced and made observable."
Emilie Craig Dissolve: Emilie Craig is an audiovisual artistand electricbassist based in Denver, Colorado.As an instrumentalist, Emilie has played in many groups ranging from shoegaze and hardcore to contemporary classical genres (highlights include working with Polly Urethane and opening for Empath and They are Gutting a Body of Water). As an audiovisual artist, her work employs digital and analog glitch to explore core themes of time and memory, drawing inspiration from composers such as William Basinski, Ryoji Ikeda, and Aphex Twin. Dissolve is an audiovisual composition exploring nostalgia and loss through digital and analog technology."
Sean Winters Last Chance: Sean is a spatial audio composer and sound-designer, multi-instrumentalist, music producer, audiovisual artist, and hacker/technologist. Over the years, he's worked and collaborated on projects involving film/television, virtual reality, projection mapping, acoustic music ensembles, stereoscopic video, audio-reactive sculptures, circuit bending, interactive sound-art installations, and live spatial audio performances. As an instrumentalist, Sean has played with countless groups running the gamut stylistically from free jazz and contemporary classical to afrobeat and live future bass (highlights include headlining at the Montreal Jazz Festival, Chicago’s Millennium Park, and the Italian Palace in Tangier, Morocco). As I prepared for a life-changing move across the world, Last Chance was quickly composed on the piano that I grew up playing, moments before leaving for the airport. As we gather, in-person, mask free, safe from war, and natural disaster -- to experience an outpouring of human creativity together -- it also feels appropriate to give over this work as a moment of rememberance for all of those who have passed away, during the pandemic and otherwise."