David Morneau will bring his composition-a-day project, 60×365, to an end on June 30th. You can hear the conclusion by visiting http://60×365.com

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. Continue reading

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Micah Silver: You and Me, Going, and Patrick K.-H. ScAS (ScotchAcoustic Session):: Two sound installations :: Programmed as part of Diapason’s exchange program with Moscow’s Theremin Center :: JUNE 14, 21 and 28 // SATURDAYS 2-8 PM :: FREE :: OPENING RECEPTION: JUNE 14 6PM :: 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street) // Brooklyn, NY :: Subways: D, N, R to 36th Street :: 718.499.5070 // info@diapasongallery.org :: Sponsored by The Trust for Mutual Understanding.

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 Continue reading

Sculpt: An interactive sound/image work for sensor gloves - MEME Thesis Performance by Robert Griffin Byron :: April 1, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Grant Recital Hall (behind Orwig Music Bldg., corner of Hope Street and Young Orchard Avenue), Brown University.

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. Continue reading

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe :: Giga-Hertz-Award 2008 -The 2nd Giga-Hertz-Award for electronic music is open for entries until April 19, 2008. The Giga-Hertz-Award addresses composers working in the areas of electronic and acousmatic music. Four Special Prizes are awarded once a year. Candidates are judged on the basis of a composition not more than five years old and a proposal for a projected work.

The Special Prize consists of a project realization grant to the amount of 8.000 Euro with which the prize winners realize their submitted proposal either at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe or at the SWR-EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO in Freiburg. Continue reading

Presented by Sonic Arts Network and RadioReverb 97.2FM, in association with Earshot and Arika - Expo Brighton :: July 4-6, 2008 :: Call for Submissions and Commission Proposals.

Expo is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound art scene in the UK and beyond. Free and open, the event mobilises a national network of artists and engages with communities from all backgrounds – placing sonic art and the people who make it in direct contact with the public. Expo steps out from traditional venues and into spaces that lie at the heart of the community - inspiring practitioners and the public to reconsider their environments. Continue reading

Microclimates III-VI is a sound installation and concert. The installation plays in almost complete blackout so that the ears focus on the tiny details in the sound. A 3-D sound-space is created using 3rd-order ambisonics spatialisation projected over 16 loudspeakers. The playing duration and arrangement is designed for each exhibition context. The concert version combines spatialisation performance with pre-programmed spatial information.

Natasha Barrett uses a recording technique following the acousmatic composition heritage. Here composing begins at the sound recording stage, improvising with less conventional recording techniques and capturing a spatial and spectral microphone ‘performance’. Continue reading

The VIDA 10.0 AWARDS were announced recently. Francisco López (Spain) won an award for Sonic Alter Ego in the Incentives for Ibero-American Production category that helps finance art projects exploring Artificial Life (and related disciplines) that still have not been produced. Applicants must be from South America, Spain or Portugal.

The hybrid forms of the artistic proposals submitted to VIDA and the transformation of the discipline of A-Life itself have prompted the jury to consider new issues, such as the rising importance of simulation in both social life (for example, in the concept of virtual personality) and organic life (evident in the concept of “neo-organisms”). Continue reading

“In the late 1940s, radio engineer-turned-composer Pierre Schaeffer celebrated a defining property of audio recording and radio transmission: the ability to separate sounds from their visible sources. This affirmation cut against the grain of modern thought, for no lesser cultural critics than Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer had assailed these technologies for dulling our auditory sensibility. Schaeffer, however, argued that records and radio triumphantly subvert the hegemony of vision to make possible the experience of “sound as such.” In doing so, Schaeffer continued, they revive a neglected form of listening he termed “acousmatic,” in deference to the ancient akousmatikoi, disciples of Pythagoras who were made to listen to their master’s voice while he was hidden behind a curtain…” Continue reading Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse of Synaesthesia by Christoph Cox, Artforum, October 2005.

60×365 (sixty by three-sixty-five) is an experimental new music podcast by composer David Morneau. Every day for a year, Morneau will compose a new sixty-second composition and post it online at 60×365.com. This project commenced on July 1, 2007, and will conclude June 30, 2008, resulting in just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments.

For this project, Morneau is exploring 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. Each daily post brings something new and different, a constant variety. The daily deadline means the works sometimes lose their preciousness as they become explorations in process and method for Morneau—with his form or his audience—as much as they are works of art. Continue reading

Living Electronic Music by Simon Emmerson - Drawing on recent ideas that explore new environments and the changing situations of composition and performance, Simon Emmerson provides a significant contribution to the study of contemporary music, bridging history, aesthetics and the ideas behind evolving performance practices. Whether created in a studio or performed on stage, how does electronic music reflect what is live and living? What is it to perform ‘live’ in the age of the laptop?

Many performer-composers draw upon a ‘library’ of materials, some created beforehand in a studio, some coded ‘on the fly’, others ‘plundered’ from the widest possible range of sources. But others refuse to abandon traditionally ‘created and structured’ electroacoustic work. Continue reading