591. Technosonics XV Found Sound (1:22:04)

Date:
2014-11-06
Main contributors:
Park, Joo Won, 1980-, Bellona, Jon, Tfirn, Max, Kim, Seung-Hye, DeLuca, Erik, Fang, I-Jen, Trapp, Rachek Devorah, Warren, Kristina, Stine, Eli, Maguire, Ryand
Summary:
Toccata by Joo Won Park is a solo live electroacoustic piece for found objects and the SuperCollider program. Joo Won performs this piece by scratching, rubbing, tapping, and pushing the objects in different ways on a board with a contact microphone. What you hear is the sound of those objects being digitally processed. Every time you see him clicking on a laptop, you hear different effect combinations. In the pre-performance ritual, he mentally prepares himself to create a wide range of sounds in a nervous and hectic mood. The performance guide and the SuperCollider patch for Toccata can be found at www.joowonpark.net/Toccata.pdf smooth is piece written for the KYMA signal processing system and Wacom Tablet interface. Limited Aggregation, by Max Tfirn and Seung-Hye Kim, is a collaborative piece for percussion and computer that explores sounds that are found by hitting different percussion instruments and modified by live processing. Each composer in the collaboration composes new material and edits each other’s material on the fly. This blends the composers’ compositional styles. Each sound from the percussion and computer interacts with every other, creating larger sounds and richer textures. There are also moments where the component sounds are zoomed in on that creates a contest between the larger built sounds and the microscopic natural sounds. These microscopic zoomed sounds are products of analyzing the spectrum and taking certain characteristics of the sound and filtering out others. The changing length of the processed sounds also reinforces the small/microscopic and zoomed aspects. Within a Sand Dune, by Erik Deluca, scored for amplified percussion quartet with one player, involved a compositional system inspired by time listening to the breath of the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. The percussion quartet transduces the sounds of the dunes, and the composer’s experience listening to them. 37720, by Rachel Trapp, is a construction of found sound shaped through a process of unfolding telematic communication. Acoustic and inductive recordings of the composers’ simultaneous transit rituals are transformed and positioned in the performance space according to the composers’ shared sensibilities, creating an audible landscape of movement across time, space, and subjectivity. Look the Other Way, by Kristina Warren: “I explore what I call “found text.” First I compiled texts from several sources, including novels, poems, and newsreels. Then I digitally recorded myself singing- speaking them, and next used various means to obscure the words (e.g., recording to and from tape, intensive layering, etc). This serves to emphasize the sonic and de-emphasize the semantic qualities of the source texts. In performance, I modulate the resulting texture by way of live, semi-semantic vocal input. All this aims to re-consider both signification and authorship.” Touching, by Eli Stine, is an exploration of surface: surface sounds of different objects and the surface layer of musical structure. Sonic materials come exclusively from recordings of touching, leading to friction, leading to striking of surfaces and objects and their resultant resonances. The sounds of these objects meet and interact, but no interaction is more than skin deep. Hyperions, by Paul Turowski, is software that presents an interactive context for musical improvisation. While the performer is free to make specific choices about pitch, timing and activity level, their choices are recognized by the computer via microphone input and significantly affect the dynamic physics-based system. Chance- based factors, including the gradual advance of destructive agents, make the piece akin to a tower defense game and allow unique visual and sonic textures to emerge with each performance. Trans, by Ryan Maguire, is a real-time sonification of a computer transcription of a transalpine scene. The original auditory moment, amidst a herd of cows along a Swiss mountain pass awaiting an approaching thunderstorm, is transformed via machine/human listening and digital transmission. Through repeated transmutation the transience of this particular “found sound” is transpired. In general, all signals are transmodified, and transparency is only relative. The transitory can never be truly transfixed because, first, we have only its trace and, second, communication necessitates transduction wherein its substance is transmuted. Nevertheless, might transpersonal knowledge of such ephemerality facilitate transcendent experience and/or esthesic trance?

592. Technosonics XX - Concert I at The Bridge PAI (1:18:27)

Date:
2020-02-21
Main contributors:
McIntire Department of Music
Summary:
Concert I Friday, February 21, 2020 at 8:00 pm The Bridge PAI featuring Ryoko Akama David Tudor’s Rainforest IV Sound Art Students Violinguistics Three Blind MICE Dark Parts Becky Brown Remembering with Objects Heather Frasch & Ted Coffey Deep Map #1 Michele Zaccagnini Interruptions in an Endless Expanse Max Tfirn (shimatsu) Ryoko Akama Rainforest IV — Sound Art Students Installation by David Tudor 1973 Realized by students of Sound Art in Practice Rainforest IV by David Tudor runs found sounds through found objects. By sending sounds through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released, creating a new kind of sound that blends the sounds and objects together. According to Tudor, the concept for the piece grew out of a “dream-vision of an orchestra of loudspeakers, each speaker being as unique as any musical instrument.” The students designed or chose their own objects, decided on which sounds and came to a consensus about placement. Participants are encourage to move around the installation and explore the sounds close up. They can carefully touch the objects to feel the vibrations as well as listen more closely. Violinguistics — Three Blind Mice Violinguistics: Electro-acoustic phonetic reduplication through violin morphologies of formant-shifting nonconcatenative morphemes Dark Parts — Becky Brown A liminal space is a liminal space is a lmnial spa ce i paace A limin s pa li mna space is space is space is a liimin lnaa spi liminal liminal spsp ANimal speci le scepim nillima ellaminis cesna alimin aces laces animal special alleminiam asp case is a kn i. A kn i. A kn i. A liminal spa is ce f. A kni. f. F. F> Remembering with Objects — Ted Coffey & Heather Frasch Duo Coffey and Frasch will realize this text score by Frasch which maps personal connections among memory, places, and self — and the objects that remind us of those things. Deep Map #1 — Michele Zaccagnini The piece is a recent development of a practice I am developing that I named “deep mapping”: deep mapping is an approach that allows the composer to store and render musical data into visuals by “catching” the data at its source, at a compositional stage. The advantages of this approach are: accuracy and discreteness in the representation of musical features; computational efficiency; and, more abstractly, the stimulation of a practice of audiovisual composition that encourages composers to envision their multimedia output from the early stages of their work. In particular, this piece explores ways of rendering synchronicity between same or similar patterns so that when synchronization actually happens, one can experience it not only aurally but visually. Interruptions in an Endless Expanse — Max Tfirn Interruptions in an Endless Expanse is a composition for interactive electronics, including various drone synths, guitar pedals, sequencers, and live coding. The composition takes shape through a series of long, drone sounds that slowly morph into one another. As the piece progresses, new sounds are introduced that break away from what was previously heard culminating in sonic disorder. Interruptions in an Endless Expanse takes its name from the idea of a made-up scenery being endless to the eye. Looking in any direction gives the viewer the same sight. While the environment changes, the endless expanse seems to go unchanged. It is only when the observer takes a deeper look around that the details start to change and the surroundings take a helter-skelter, eldritch turn. (shimatsu) — Ryoko Akama i.e. beginning + ending management dealing settlement cleaning up getting rid of (usually bad) end result This is the fifth of her solo performance series, shimatsu, with contraptions made out of found objects and simple electronic devices, creating a subtle, sometimes violently silent, listening situation.

593. Technosonics XX - Concert II Old Cabell Hall (1:15:04)

Date:
2020-02-22
Summary:
Concert II Saturday February 22, 2020 at 8:00 pm Old Cabell Hall featuring Olivia Block Zipper Music - Judith Shatin Cameron Church and Nelly Zevitz, zippers Max Tfirn, controller A Chinese Triptych - Juan Carlos Vasquez Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier - Matthew Burtner for percussion and computer, I-Jen Fang, percussion palimpsest | erasedGavotte (Himno de los durmientes II or Los Olvidados) -Omar Fraire Reverie - Leah Reid Locked In - Michele Zaccagnini I-Jen Fang, percussion October, 1984 - Olivia Block Concert II — Program Notes Zipper Music — Judith Shatin Zipper Music is scored for 2 amplified zipper players with interactive electronics performed by either 1 or 2 MIDI controllists, each operating a Max patch. Composer/technologist Max Tfirn created the Max patch in consultation with me, a process with a great deal of delightful experimentation. Zipper Music forms part of my Quotidian Music series, embracing the musicality afforded by everyday objects, and creating accessible opportunities for performers who do not have traditional musical training. The zipper score consists of icons on a time-line grid, with specific symbols for one to four pulls, as well as a variety of symbol groupings and movement indications. There are also theatrical directions for the players as they interact with one another. The controllist(s) score consists of a line on a time-grid, whose thickness LMH (low, medium or high) indicates levels of processing, with additional shapes designed to suggest degree of sharpness and suddenness of knob and slider change. A flat line indicates amplification without further processing. The piece is performable using a wide variety of controllers. Ideally, they should include multiple knobs for each of 4 – 7 sliders plus a master gain slider. However, it can easily be performed with fewer. A Chinese Triptych — Juan Carlos Vasquez A Chinese Triptych was composed with recordings from an extensive sound documentary made by the composer in the Chinese cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, Wuxi, Harbin, and Beijing. The piece overlaps sonic events from the rural, the industrial, and the digital China in a single flowing musical discourse, attempting to represent the full range of highly contrasting ways of living in China. The piece lasts exactly 6 minutes, a number that is given in China the connotation of events “flowing smoothly.” The form and proportion of the parts are inspired by the triptych, an art format comprised of three thematically-interrelated parts in which the middle panel is usually the largest. Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier — Matthew Burtner Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier (2014) was commissioned by Brandon Bell with support from the Presser Music Award. The music was created from a recording of Alaska’s Root Glacier. The unique and visceral presence of glaciers is disappearing across the planet because we live in a time of ice melting. Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier tries to stop the glacial melt through signal processing by freezing time, suspending the listener between droplets and a single droplet of melting ice. palimpsest | erased Gavotte (Himno de los durmientes II or Los Olvidados) — Omar Fraire As an exercise in the act of destruction as a creative input, I took Bach’s Gavotte en Rondo from the English Suite II and tried to play it as fast as possible, depressing the keys but trying not to hit the strings. This piece was the first one I learned on the piano; the exercise allowed me to realize how our compositional narratives read the tradition. The notion of removing what is supposed to be music, reveals a kind of unwanted sound activity that belongs more to the encounter of my body with the sound object. And of course, some notes appear but more like accidents. Reverie — Leah Reid Reverie is an acousmatic composition that leads the listener through an immersive fantasy centered around deconstructed music boxes. The work is comprised of eight sections that alternate between explorations of the music boxes’ gears and chimes. In the work, the music boxes’ sounds are pulled apart, exaggerated, expanded, and combined with other sounds whose timbres and textures are reminiscent of the original. As the piece unfolds, the timbres increase in spectral and textural density, and the associations become more and more fantastical. Gears are transformed into zippers, coins, chainsaws, motorcycles, and fireworks, and the chimes morph into rainstorms, all sizes of bells, pianos, and more. Locked In — Michele Zaccagnini This piece is written around the idea of rhythms oscillating around regular and irregular pulses. In particular, the different parts are generated by applying the idea of "non-linear sequencing," i.e., distorting the playback of a regular pattern by applying a non-linear time-line. There is no large structure in this piece, rather it is a collection of Etudes. October, 1984 — Olivia Block October, 1984 is a composition for found microcassette tape, electronically processed breath, organelle, field recordings, piano, and descending tones. Each emerging sound follows the envelope of the preceding sound, conveying a circular progression of aural cause and effect. In the logic of this sound world, breath causes a flood of water, piano causes descending tones. These processes accumulate over time into a roiling, unwieldily storm. Many of the lowest sounds are experienced in the body as vibrations. Through the course of sonic events, October, 1984 emphasizes themes related to time, loss, and memory.

597. The ash and the fire, writing about medicine, the body, and the mind (59:48)

Date:
2014-09-17
Main contributors:
University of Virginia. School of Medicine
Summary:
Acclaimed physician-writer Christine Montross (Body of work, 2007; and Falling into the fire, 2013) discusses how diving deeply into her most challenging patient encounters has led her to the ancient concept of "abiding" as a lost tenet of patient care. A psychiatrist and medical educator, Dr. Montross speaks in defense of repugnance, and encourages physicians and doctors-in-training to acknowlege, rather than suppress the discomforts which naturally arise in the practice of medicine. A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture