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.

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.

An international jury will decide about the awarding of the 2nd Giga-Hertz-Award for electronic music. The members of the jury 2008 besides the heads of the two involved studios – Ludger Brümmer (Head of ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics Karlsruhe) and Detlef Heusinger (Head of Experimentalstudio for acoustic art, Freiburg) – are: François Bayle, pioneer of electroacoustic and acousmatic music who developed the famous Acousmonium; and Jonathan Harvey, one of the most skilled, and imaginative composers of our time who in 2007 was awarded the first Giga-Hertz-Grand Prize in recognition of his lifework; Armin Köhler, editor-in-chief for New Music at the SWR broadcasting corporation and responsible for the Donaueschingen Music Festival;
and Peter Weibel, CEO of the ZKM Karlsruhe, former artistic director of the Ars Electronica in Linz, and professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

The Giga-Hertz-Award is in memory of the world-famous physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), who taught at the Karlsruhe technical university at the end of the nineteenth century; it was there that he discovered electromagnetic waves.

To apply and for further information go here.

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.

Annually relocating, the Expo traverses the country creating its own community each year. It disperses into the locality it arrives in, scattering events, happenings and sounds across the towns and cities it visits, joining together place, people and art. Work is drawn from a national call and the event collaborates with local partners and highlights the work of local artists. In the spirit of open culture and accessibility the project has developed a social community ethic amongst contributing artists and has encouraged creative approaches to the staging of new work.

Expo aims to present serious, experimental and challenging work in a playful, open and inclusive context, encouraging the public, both local and national, to have direct experience of and access to the most radical and exciting sound work.

After the success of last year’s highly eclectic event in Plymouth the focus now shifts to Brighton in July 2008. This weekend of performance, exhibition, presentation and broadcast will take place across a variety of physical and virtual spaces. The weekend aims to highlight the broadest possible range of approaches and thinking that surround the sonic arts. We welcome submissions of all kinds.

Submissions are sought in all forms of sonic art including real-time interactive works, improvisation with technology, experimental electronica, instrumental/electroacoustic mixes, acousmatic music, sound installations, noise, environmental sound work, conceptual sound art, performances, internet-based creative work, radiophonic work, sound and image works and cross-arts work. In summary, we welcome submissions of all kinds of work incorporating experimental use of sound as a major element.

Submitted works must have been created after January 2007. Some resources are limited and, for example, performers must be supplied by submitting artists. Available equipment for this year’s festival will include an 8 channel sound system catering for the projection of multi-channel works and smaller, adaptable stereo systems suitable for installation work. Video projection facilities are also available. There are 4 streams that artists should consider submitting work for:

1. Market Day - We are seeking installations and performances for a variety of spaces within the disused Circus Street Fruit and Vegetable Market, the proposed main site of Expo Brighton 2008. This unique all day event will aesthetically reconfigure this stunning local landmark. Beyond concepts of concert hall and gallery space we are seeking work to sonically transform this building.

The former wholesale fruit and vegetable market on Circus Street is a huge building containing a vast central market area and a variety of unit sized spaces. This magnificent building was completed in 1937 after the clearance of slums in the town centre. Artists submitting work should consider the reverberant acoustic of the building when developing their ideas for submissions. We will be running both performances and installations in the market on Saturday 5 July and we will be offering an 8-channel sound system for the projection of multichannel work.

2. Radio Day - Sunday 6 July will be the Expo Radio Day. In collaboration with the Arika’s Radio Space festival Expo will deliver a day of broadcasts across Brighton. The main focal point for activity will be a Radio Garden Party event in the gardens of the Brighton Pavilion with Radio Reverb acting as a hub for broadcast activity from it’s nearby studio. Were are looking for innovative work for broadcast. We encourage submissions that pose the most radical rethinking of the radiophonic medium particularly those incorporating radio activism, participation and performance.

3. Expo Late - We are seeking performance-based work for our late night Expo events. True to the spirit of Expo these evening sessions will be as eclectic as possible, showcasing the widest range of current sonic art performance from breakcore and noise to performance and sound art.

4. Unconference - In Expo’s answer to a conference day visitors will decide themselves on the themes discussed through an on-line forum that will be active in the months leading up to the festival. The event, which will take place in the afternoon of Friday 4 July, will be designed to promote debate and to be an open forum for artists, researchers and the public. Debate will be lead by a discussion leader and the division between audience and speaker balanced and equal. Keep an eye on the Sonic Arts Network website for updates.

Sonic Arts Network
The Jerwood Space
171 Union St
London
SE1 OLN
United Kingdom

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’. Often the result is one of placing the source under a sound-microscope. In Microclimates III-VI it is the complete environment of each location that is placed under a sound-microscope.

Most of the sound-sources are purely the environment acting naturally on itself and on the recording equipment. In a few instances some sounds were coaxed for the microphones - sounds that would happen naturally, but seldom, and never when you are ready. Small rock falls. Tearing moss and rotten wood. Popping leaf buds. The movements:

Microclimate III: Glacial Loop

On my first attempt to record sound at the foot of Briksdalsbreen glacier I arrived when the wind was so strong that it forced rain horizontally into my face and body. For brief milliseconds I could open my eyes to glimpse a blue ice monolith through the turmoil. Some days later, on my second attempt, the scene was completely different. Although grey and drizzling, there was not a breath of wind and the forms in the ice were revealed: an enormous wall of blue twists and gashes suspended vertically an unknown distance away across a lake. Instinctively I jumped into the small rowing boat and with ceremony descended two hydrophones (underwater microphones) into the water. Our guide rowed so close to the face of the glacier that as my microphones recorded its electrical sparking, sucking, squeaking, whistling, burning and clicking sounds, I could at the same time run my hands over the smooth curves of its close-up form. To this constant singing and talking was added a single underwater ice fall. Slowly and gracefully the boat glided away from the face. Glacial Loop is an evocation of this boat journey.

Microclimate IV: Wet Face

Wet Face takes sound from marsh birds, dripping water, squelching mud, tearing moss and rotten tree-wood in the Sandane area. Initially the forces appear gentle. Later, when I subject the microphones to what for our normal ears is a gentle pitter-patter, we hear the bombardment and force in a different light. The rhythmic performance of incessant dripping had begun when I arrived. Its millisecond timing was ‘computer’ perfect. I expect it will be the same year after year. Maybe the rhythm will change as the rock is eroded.

Microclimate V: Water Fall

For Water Fall I threw two hydrophones off a bridge into the white rapids of ‘Holvik fossen’ (Gloppen), while keeping four more microphones stationary to capture the air-born soundscape. Turbulence and eddies dragged the hydrophones through local current systems, tossed them suddenly into the air or further down stream, smacked them into opposite eddies or plunged them into imploding air cavities. After a while I learnt a little about the waterfall’s system and attempted to anticipate where the microphones would end up and what type of sound they would capture. This proved interesting play - in one moment I had steered the microphones, at another moment the waterfall had tricked my anticipation.

Microclimate VI: Remote gale

The timing of my trip meant that an excursion to Utvaer would not enable entrance into the main attraction of the lighthouse, nor to overnight on the island. Instead the idea was to overnight at Hardbakke - a westerly point of the mainland - and daytrip by boat to the island. When I arrived at the accommodation a full storm brewed in the distance. Later that evening I received an SMS from an old sailor friend reading “full storm, 40 knots south westerly. This is no weather for sailing in the open ocean. Stay on land”. The next morning a call came from the captain saying he needed more time to get hold of a “bigger boat”… The driving rain and wind had clearly not deterred him, so I used this extra time to waterproof my equipment. Out at sea my stomach continually leapt into my mouth. At Utaer the wind and rain drove horizontally (an experience I would once again have at the glacier). Even with a thick weather shield over my microphones I needed to find windbreaks. The wind sung around every rock, every corner, through every gap. It was so strong you could even hear the airborne wind sound on hydrophones in the sea. The island was scattered with small houses. At one end rose the lighthouse. Open porches offered some rest from the raw weather. The lighthouse’s locked door hid a tower of still air. The wind knocked me over and one stereo microphone became entangled in a thorny bush. I let the wind buffet both bush and microphone as one, recording continuously.

Natasha Barrett’s work spans the extremes of concert electroacoustic and acousmatic composition through to sound-art, large-scale installations and live performances. The focus of this work stems from an acousmatic approach to sound, the aural images it can evoke, and an interest in high quality or unusual recording techniques that reveal detail the ear will normally miss. Although she is freelance, she tries to sustain the research side of her work as she finds this adds important life to her artistic creations. The spatio-musical potential of acousmatic sound has been one of her research and creative interests over the past ten years.

Most of the time she calls herself a composer rather than a sound-artist. As a composer she creates large scale forms of intense musical structure that requires the listener to listen attentively throughout the duration of the work. These works are most suited to concert hall, home listening or radio. As a sound-artist she presents the audience with an open experience that allows their own choice of listening approach. These works are mainly in the form of installations (sometimes interactive), and they may also exist for home listening. Both types of work may contain similar sound and a similar approach to sound. The critical difference is the approach to structure, time and intended affect of the listener. You can find more of her work here.

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”).

The scope of sound creation traditionally covers two large conceptual categories: tools (instruments, software, sound materials, methods) and sound pieces (composed, improvised, random, etc.). Sonic Alter Ego is a system-concept between the said categories or, more specifically, a virtual creative entity that includes both. It will produce original, variable sound creations as a result of the interaction between the author’s criteria and the software’s working architecture. The fundamental concept of Sonic Alter Ego is not the development of a software tool for a potential user, but rather the transfer of crucial aspects of Francisco Lopez’s creative spirit to a virtual machine. Using evolutionary computation techniques, the system will gradually learn the artist’s creative criteria, such as the selection of sound material, editing choices, compositional decisions, etc. This virtual alter ego will reveal hidden or unconscious aspects of the author’s own creative spirit.

About Francisco López

Over the last twenty years Francisco López has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. One of the leading figures of the international experimental underground, he has realized concerts and sound installations all over Europe and the Americas, and his work has been released by more than fifty record companies throughout the world.

Absolute Concrete Music

Over the last twenty years Francisco López has been developing a powerful and consistent world of minimal electroacoustic soundscapes, ‘trying to reach an ideal of absolute concrete music’. To date, his prolific catalog comprises more than 90 sound works, which have been released by 50 record labels from Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, France, UK, Italy, Poland, Austria, Canada and USA. He has toured extensively through Europe and America doing acousmatic performances, and he has received commissions from a number of renowned institutions and organizations, such as the Dutch and Spanish National Radios, the Goethe Institut, V2 Organization, Yale University Theater and the Ralph Lemon Company.

Through what he once called the ‘exploration of the universe of broad-band noise from the real world’, his music arises from the processing of environmental recordings. In deep contrast to the classical soundscape movement (and even despite his paradoxical past involvement with related organizations as the Environmental Tape Exchange, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the Nature Sounds Society), his vast activity doing field recordings all over the world (nearly 30 countries in four continents) never pursued a documentary or representational goal, but a dramatically opposite object sonore perspective.

And in this sense, the evolution of his aesthetics and conceptual background is a profound process of refinement towards an extreme musical purism, with a voluntary and forceful refusal of any visual, procedural, relational, semantic, functional or virtuoso elements. What is left is an astonishingly powerful musical essence capable of reaching both the deepest and most dreadful abyss of crude strength and the most subtle and diffuse aural edges; a complex territory of anti fast-listening where perceptual awareness and the power of naked music are strikingly rediscovered; a world where things are uneasy, unclear, unsolved and where one is forced to immerse and search. He calls it “belle confusion”. (Pedro Higueras, Sonom Studios)

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.

Morneau chose to create a composition 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 encourages listener subscription. 60×365 is presented as a series of shorter pieces over time, in a particular order. However, the listener may wait until many pieces are posted and then listen in any order he desires. You can listen online everyday @ http://60×365.com.

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. Lying behind this maelstrom of activity is the perennial relationship to ‘theory’, that is, ideas, principles and practices that somehow lie behind composers’ and performers’ actions. Some composers claim they just ‘respond’ to sound and compose ‘with their ears’, while others use models and analogies of previously ‘nonmusical’ processes.

It is evident that in such new musical practices the human body has a new relationship to the sound. There is a historical dimension to this, for since the earliest electroacoustic experiments in 1948 the body has been celebrated or sublimated in a strange ‘dance’ of forces in which it has never quite gone away but rarely been overtly present. The relationship of the body performing to the spaces around has also undergone a revolution as the source of sound production has shifted to the loudspeaker. Emmerson considers these issues in the framework of our increasingly ‘acousmatic’ world in which we cannot see the source of the sounds we hear.