Expo Unconference :: Date: Friday 4th July, 10:30-16:30 :: University of Brighton :: Grand Parade Campus, Grand Parade, Brighton, BN2 0JY

Expo Unconfernce is about discussing ideas about and around sonic art. By ‘sonic art’ we mean anything that uses sound with artistic intent. It is part of Expo Brighton, the UK’s largest weekend of free sound art and experimental music.

At Unconference, everybody participates! That means the attendees are the presenters and the audience. If you aren’t going to present, you can organize a discussion or publish notes from a talk. Continue reading

6th International Linux Audio Conference (LAC2008) :: Cologne (Germany) :: February 28 - March 2, 2008 :: Call for Papers, Music and Installations :: Deadline for Installations: October 19, 2007 :: Deadline for Paper and Music: December 1, 2007.

The Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, is proud to host the 2008 issue of this event, where once a year programmers and artists, musicians, composers and practitioners gather to discuss and explore new and important developments in making music and sounds with Linux and Open Source software. The Linux Audio Conference is both a meeting of developers writing audio software for Linux as it is a music festival, where artists from all over the world show how free software can create fresh and exciting new sounds. Continue reading

IMPROVISING WITH SPACES by Pauline Oliveros - This paper explores qualitative changes that occur in voices and instruments in relationships with changing spaces ordinarily held in a stationary paradigm of performance practice, spatial transformations and the effect on sounds in multi-channel speaker systems. Digital technology allows one to compose and improvise with acoustical characteristics and change the apparent space during a musical performance. Sounds can move in space and space can morph and change affecting the sounds. Space is an integral part of sound. One cannot exist without the other. Varieties of sounds and spaces combine in symbiotic relationships that range from very limited to very powerful for the interweaving expressions of the music, architectures and audiences. [Keywords: Spatial Music, Surround Sound] Continue reading

If human beings had radio antennae instead of ears, they would perceive an entirely different sonic universe to that which we presently inhabit. Radio signals, created by the planet itself, surround us at all times, wherever we are. At parts of the frequency range far below that of most man-made radio transmissions, these phenomena can be thought of as a level of sonic reality beyond (although surrounding) our daily sound experience. For although radio waves are generated by vibrations in electro-magnetic materials rather than air particles (as is the case with sound waves) we nonetheless tend to think of radio as a purely sonic medium. Continue reading

OPEN n0.9 Sound: Sound in Art and Culture - Open 9 examines the role of sound in the public domain. After all, public space is manifest not only visually, but also, and to a considerable extent, acoustically: its public nature hinges on visibility as well as on audibility. All the same, the accent in cultural or social analyses of the public space still often rests on the visual. Despite sound’s ubiquity and inescapability, it is usually regarded as being merely illustrative, a minor consideration or nuisance. Marshall McLuhan took a critical stance on the dominance of ‘visual space’ as the ‘linear, quantitative mode of perception that is characteristic of the Western world’. In his view, however, this traditional space was being superseded by the ‘global village’, constituted by the electronic media, which he likened to ‘acoustic space’, a mythical, tactile, organic and integral space that is characterized by solidarity. Continue reading

Perceptual Evaluation of Spatial Audio for “Audio Nomad” Augmented Reality Artworks [PDF] by Nick Mariette: Audio Nomad is a three-year art / science research collaboration on the creative and technological potentials of location-sensitive, mobile spatial audio. The first Audio Nomad productions were two versions of Syren – a ship-based multi-speaker installation using the ship’s position from a GPS receiver to render a two dimensional soundscape. New work including Virtual Wall (Berlin) will create a personal location-sensitive spatial soundscape on headphones using a portable computer, GPS receiver and digital compass. The technological intent is to enable the artist to augment real world objects and spaces with sounds perceived to emanate from them. It is important to know the maximum perceivable accuracy of the intended augmented reality effect, given human and technology limitations, even if soundscape design doesn’t always require maximum precision. Continue reading

Addressing the Network: Performative Strategies for Playing APART (2007), F. Schroeder Publications and Pedro Rebelo Publications. This paper has been accepted by the International Computer Music Conference 2007. An in progress version is available here [PDF]. “Addressing the Network…” describes a recent network music performance study that was carried out at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland in March 2007. A wide variety of network scenarios were tested and a large database of movie and sound files were created.

For the study three professional musicians were placed in separate studios at the Sonic Arts Research Center and asked to perform under a variety of conditions that simulated geographically displaced network performance, such as different latencies. One scenario in which computer generated graphics (Avatars) was introduced to test the performers interactions is described in detail. Network Performance Scenarios can be reviewed at here. Continue reading

Hz #10 presents: INTERVIEW WITH ART CLAY, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF ZURICH’S DAW07 by Rachael Watts - Art Clay, artistic director of the Digital Art Weeks organised by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, in conversation with Rachael Watts explains his view on the intersection between art and new technologies. [Image: “Going Publik” from Art Clay is an example of an art project that not only uses innovative technology (Q-bic Belt Computer), but uses it to explore innovative application in the arts (Real Time Scoring). The computers are located in the belt buckle and communicate wirelessly with a 3d motion tracking system on the trombones.]

PLACE, SPACE AND SOUND by Christian Horgren - With Stockhholm New Music Festival’s ‘06 theme “Place and Space” as a starting point, architect/critic/musician Christian Horgren examines the relationship between the notion of space and music by tracing examples in music history. Continue reading

“Someday someone will appear who has analyzed more minimalist-influenced music from the 1980s and ’90s than I have, and if that person feels that I have divided my era into categories inappropriately, I will be glad to listen to her argument. So far, I’ve gotten plenty of argument, but only from people who don’t come anywhere close to fitting that description.

There are several ways to characterize a style. One is to catalogue all relevant qualities associated with pieces associated with that style. I’ve done this for postminimalism elsewhere, and I have no intention of replicating that feat today. Another, less cautious tactic is to isolate a compositional aim that one perceives as the essence of a style. Continue reading

[Image: Pierre Schaeffer in 1952 playing the phonogène à clavier, a tape recorder with its speed altered by playing any of twelve keys on a keyboard. Photo courtesy of GRM.] Image and text source :: Published: May 24, 2006 :: Inside the Box: The computer comes out to play.

There’s often a vertical plane between musician and audience. The sheet-music stand paved the way for the upturned plastic shell of the turntable, and today, chances are that rectangle obscuring the face of the performer on stage is the screen of a laptop computer, which has emerged as a ubiquitous music-making tool.

The laptop, however, obscures more than just the musician’s face. Its uses vary too widely for it to be easily characterized. For some, the laptop is essentially a more portable equivalent of the DJ’s turntables, mixer, and crate of records. But for many, it is a means to bring the power of computer processing into live performance, creating music of the moment that’s comprised of all manner of sonic detritus: field recordings, sine waves, sound bites of pre-existing music, pure feedback. Continue reading