Sonic Screens 2012 - full lineup

 

Electroacoustic music concert 
an event by U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi) in collaboration with O’ and Die Schachtel 

Premieres: 
Agostino Di Scipio
"Two Sound Pieces with Repertoire String Music"
for any number of bowed string instruments and live electronics

Andrea Valle
"Dispacci dal fronte interno"
for Violin, Cello, spatialized electronics and printers

Federico Placidi
"TimeCapsule"
for Violin, Cello and live electronics

Performed by: 
Èdua Amarilla Zádory - Violin
Ana Topalovic - Violoncello

Sound Direction: 
Matteo Milani

Live Sets: 
Thoranna Bjornsdottir aka Trouble
Massimiliano Viel

O’ | via pastrengo 12 Milan | Italy
Saturday, December 1st - from 8:00 to 22:30 p.m. 

Door 5 euro

Augmented Listening

By Tue Haste Andersen - October 9, 2012

reBlogged from: design mind
 

Stop for a second and listen. Close your eyes, use your ears, and just listen.

Whether you are in a quiet office environment or out on a busy street, you'll be amazed by how many sounds there are around you. Most of us do not pay attention to the ambient sounds that surround us. Our brains filter them out and we don't listen. Yet the sounds we miss can be very enjoyable.

Designed Sounds

Today, what we hear in our daily lives is often designed sound- music and sound effects carefully crafted for games, devices, and products. For example, mission-critical products, such as heart rate monitors used during medical surgery or a plane’s flight deck controls, use distinctive alarming sounds that are designed to be easy to perceive and raise a sense of urgency or danger.

In interfaces for everyday tasks, sound is used to create engaging and beautiful experiences. Sounds can generate a special feeling or underline brand identity while simultaneously providing cues that a command has been received by the system. Most smart phones today come with subtle sounds that indicate the pressing of a touch screen’s virtual buttons. Since there is no way to feel if a virtual button has been pressed, the sounds reinforce the action for the user. Another example can be found in industrial design, where the latest electric cars are being designed with artificial motor sounds. The sounds alert pedestrians to the car as well as reinforce the sense of driving a powerful vehicle. These examples underline the overall trend of sound being used to create an aesthetic experience rather than serving as purely a functional aid to improve interaction.

Blurring the Border Between Listening and Composition

While systems and products are becoming more enjoyable and pleasant to listen to, they are usually not intentionally designed for sound interaction. The emergence of accessible music software on computers and mobile devices is changing this. These programs allow for easy modification of sound by the average user and blur the border between listening and sound creation. The small form and limited complexity of mobile interfaces has forced music software designers to reduce the complexity of their products, resulting in music software that is widely used by average mobile phone users.

Music apps are often top sellers. Popular applications allow people to become mobile DJs, to transform sounds, and to design ringtones.

I was interested in exploring the blur between sound creation and listening when my friend and colleague Matteo Penzo put me in contact with Matteo Milani from the U.S.O. Project sound art group. The ideas and compositions of the U.S.O. Project revolve around the use of noise and ambient sound as a foundation for sound installations and music composition. Together we wanted to create a mobile experience that would support active listening to the everyday sounds that surround us, making the listener a part of a personal sound installation. Instead of creating a tool for recording and transforming sound, we wanted to start from the sounds themselves. Our goal was to reinforce the sounds of the listener’s environment while blending them with more musical sounds. Together the sounds would form a unique experience that could be enjoyed by anybody that has an interest in sound and art.  

Early Experiments

We started with a small prototype app for iOS using simple sound algorithms to blend U.S.O. music with live recording from the iPhone microphone. The prototype was tested with real use cases that included listening to the app while taking a long walk as well as while sitting at the computer in the office. We added many parameters for the user to be able to tweak and play with the sound transformation.The parameters were mapped to on-screen sliders and buttons and to sensors like the accelerometer.

While doing the informal tests we found that the users were struggling to understand the relationship between the parameters and the sound output. Also, in most cases they would end up spending time experimenting with the parameters to discover how they work. The visual interface and controls were clearly distracting, taking attention away from the app’s original goal of reinforcing ambient sounds for the listener.  

Following these early experiments, we decided to take a drastically different approach. We limited the visual interface as much as possible and provided a set of sound themes in the app for the listener to select. This worked much better. All of a sudden the users would pick up the app and, once started, would tuck it away in a pocket while listening to the sounds. Each theme takes sounds from the microphone and blends them with sounds composed by U.S.O. Project. The sounds are blended using sound algorithms, unique to each theme. Each algorithm is carefully calibrated to replicate the work and skill that goes into producing a great listening experience.

Lis10er

The result is Lis10er (pronounced Listener), an augmented sound installation app. Sounds are blended from the listener’s surroundings, creating dynamic music that changes while maintaining its identity. Lis10er provides users with a creative way of listening to their environment and a unique experience with every listen. 

[www.lis10er.com]

Tue Haste Andersen is Senior Software Architect based in frog’s Milan studio. Tue is a Human Computer Interaction and Computer Music expert, with research ranging from DJ work practices to the use of sound and music in common interaction tasks. He is also the founder and original author of the popular open source DJ software, Mixxx.

Mirror_Mirror | Sound Installation

Concept and software design by Federico Placidi
Hardware design by Matteo Milani
Woodworker: Fabio Testa
Produced by U.S.O.Project, 2012

Where: [.BOX] Videoart project space, Via Federico Confalonieri 11, Milan
When: Thursday, September 27, 2012 | 6:30 until 21:30 PM
Free admission

The concept of multiverse was first introduced in the so-called “many-worlds interpretation” (MWI) of quantum mechanics by Hugh Everett III in his PHD thesis, "The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction". His model was thought as an alternative to the renowned theory called “Copenaghen interpretation”, developed by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

The MWI interpretation postulates that every quantum measurement process (at Planck’s scale) creates, as a consequence, a division of the observed Universe into multiple parallel universes - as many as the possible outcomes of the measurements are.

In different formulations of this concept, all the universes - which form the Multiverse - are structurally identical, and they can coexist at different states even if they possess the same physical laws and fundamental constants.

We need to take into account that those universes are non-communicating (there cannot be any information exchange between them).

In an episode of the famous TV series “Doctor Who” - the episode was Doomsday, written by Russell T. Davies - the Doctor finds himself in the situation to make a difficult and dramatic choice: separating from the person who probably loved him the most, by “exiling” her in a parallel universe to guarantee her safety and survival.

It is worth mentioning some parts of the dialogue from the original script of the episode:

Rose comes to a halt in the middle of the beach and stands there, waiting. A short way to her left, the Doctor fades out of thin air. Rose turns to him. He's slightly translucent.

ROSE

Where are you?

THE DOCTOR

(his voice sounds distant)

Inside the TARDIS.

INT. TARDIS

The Doctor is, in reality, standing by the TARDIS console facing straight ahead.

THE DOCTOR (CONT'D)

There's one tiny little gap in the universe left, just about to close. And it takes a lot of power to send this projection, I'm in orbit around a super nova.

(laughs softly)

I'm burning up a sun just to say goodbye.

Sure enough, the TARDIS is spinning around a beautiful super nova.

EXT. BAD WOLF BAY

ROSE

(shaking her head)

You look like a ghost.

THE DOCTOR

Hold on...

He takes his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket.

INT. TARDIS

He points the sonic screwdriver at the console and somehow this strengthens his projection.

EXT. BAD WOLF BAY

The Doctor now looks as solid as if he were really there. Rose walks over to him and raises a hand to touch his face.

ROSE

Can I t--?

THE DOCTOR

(regretfully)

I'm still just an image. No touch.

ROSE

(voice trembling)

Can't you come through properly?

THE DOCTOR

The whole thing would fracture. Two universes would collapse.

The scene partially violates the no-information-transit prohibition between the two universes, but the subterfuge used in the story (the two characters cannot touch, only see each other), somehow preserves the assumption presented by the MWI, only conceding a small but necessary poetic licence.

In the same episode, there is a very touching scene, where the two characters (Rose and the Doctor), right after their isolation in two different universes, are in front of one another separated only by a simple white wall.

This border, imaginary and symbolic, which divides not only two places in the same space-time continuum, rather two whole universes, gave us an idea.

We wanted to offer that experience as an installation. We wanted to allow the audience to listen to whatever is “on the other side”, beyond that wall, and we wanted all this to happen in real time.

That’s how Mirror_Mirror was born.

The installation is organized inside a space.

What does this mean?

The space in itself, when it isn’t filled with matter (empty), is in reality permeated by low energy levels continually fluctuating.

These fluctuations in the void, have a particular significance on a quantistic level (we refer to the Planck scale, so at infinitesimally small dimensions).

In quantum mechanics, these fluctuations represent temporary shifts in the energy state of the void space, according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This means that the Conservation of energy principle can be violated for very brief periods of time (the lower the energy, the longer the fluctuation can persist.)

This energy can decade and take the shape of pairs of particles and antiparticles (which then annihilate each other).

In substance, the amount of average energy on a larger scale remains constant. Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed.

“There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.” - R.Feynman

It was in our interest to draw an analogy in the sound domain, allowing the audience to directly experience this phenomenon.

As a consequence, we created an application able to “sonify” ideal energetic fluctuations (generating pressure waves, structures and emerging behaviours), starting from the lower energy level available, which is the background noise.

Thanks to the Kyma software implementation, and the use of microphones, it was possible to “measure” background noise and , through a series of negative feedback operations, enable the instrument to create “something”, using all the information available in our space/universe to create temporary energetic fluctuations (statistic variations of the density of sonic quantums’ “packets”), without violating the Conservation of energy principle - in fact, the average energy quantity, altogether, remains the same.

We’ve thus arrived to the gravitational center (here we have no more fluctuations, only numerous certainties, due to the dimensions and mass of the object) of the opera, which is represented by a wooden artifact, symbolically revisiting the white wall we came across in Doctor Who, which divides our universe from another possible universe.

Which one it is, the visitor will have to find out for himself.

By placing a stethoscope on the wooden surface. the observer will be able to “measure”, with various levels of definition, the sounds coming from another probable universe out of phase with ours.

In fact, as identical as it will seem, it strangely does not share the same temporal parameter.

From quantum mechanic and its Multi-Worlds interpretation, we know that every measurement operation will produce a further division of the universe.

So, it is possible that in the end, there will be as many universes as the present observers.

And, paying a little attention, it will be possible once again to listen to the voices of Rose and the Doctor, as if they are suspended in a temporal loop, to remind us that maybe, the current physics laws, could not be the same in every place and every time.

Federico Placidi, Matteo Milani
>>U.S.O.Project

New Album 'Unsorted Tales' Just Released!

Composed by U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object
SYN-007 © 2012 Synesthesia Recordings
Mastered @ Green Movie, Milan (Italy) by Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Performers:
Edoardo Carlo Natoli - Violin
Federico Placidi - Violoncello & Flute

TRACKLIST:

1) F'Shima (13.49)
2) Gretel's New Clothes (19.46)
3) Psalm 21 (22.15)

RELEASE INFO:

Artist: U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object
Title: Unsorted Tales Cat.No: SYN-007
File under: Experimental/Electronic
Format: Digital
Release date: 9.2012


F'Shima 



It's night.
There are no precise coordinates, nor recognizable signs that can lead us back to a familiar place.
And yet those sounds remind us, almost pathetically, of a summer night scene, to which we listened countless times.
But that’s not what this is.
The slow and articulated flow of pulsating energy gradually takes a structure, enabling us to be part of something very different.
The flow surrounds us, passes through us.
We can’t see it, nor touch it, but every particle interferes with our body, with our biological substrate. Far away, a storm is coming, perhaps.
It’s neither natural, nor inoffensive. It deceives us with the variety of its harmony of timbres.
The structure suddenly changes, reorganizing itself while turning us into something new.
A breach made of light. It’s oscillating.
Then, silence.
The air stagnates, suspended and motionless.
An electrical impulse.
One more. Others follow, one after another, fainter and more distant.
(Sounds), like petals made of ash.

F'Shima was designed and built around a series of recordings of electromagnetic fields generated by various electronic devices (Hard Drives, iPad, iPhone, Portable Game Consoles ...), recordings made ​​by using old analog phone-captors. The source material, sometimes fully recognizable, sometimes radically altered, has been digitally processed using the Kyma Sound Design environment.

Gretel's New Clothes 



"Nibble, nibble, gnaw,
Who is nibbling at my little house?"
The children answered: "The wind, the wind,
The heaven-born wind."

Gretel's New Clothes is, in a way, an acousmatic reinvention of the famous fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. It is in the form of a Rondò. 

There is no attempt to literally retrace the story, rather to suggest it in a subtle way, through the use of strongly characterized sound materials (footsteps in the woods, the wind, the "sounds" of the night...) which are then dialogically processed during the final Violin and Cello improvisation. 

“They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat... And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep.” 

Psalm 21



“...Your hand will find out all your enemies;
your right hand will find out those who hate you.
You will make them as a blazing oven
when you appear.
The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath,
and fire will consume them.”

Psalm21 is not a religious work. There is no implication of a celebratory or ritual nature. The dominant and recurring element during the composition of the piece, is the relationship between creation (as a constantly evolving act), creator (of which we ignore existence and features) and creature (as a self-conscious subject that reflects on his nature). These three elements are the driving force around which the work unfolds.

[Available on CD Baby Music Store]

[Digital booklet: Unsorted_Tales.pdf]

Lis10er is now available in the App Store

We would like to introduce you our brand new iPhone app called Lis10er (pronounced Listener). It's a binaural audio augmented reality iPhone application that creates an “augmented soundspace”, warping and mixing in realtime the device live microphone with prerecorded imagined sounds and the elaborated version of the real-time input, designed by U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi) and Tue Haste Andersen.

The app is a mobile installation that places the emphasis on the surfaces of the world in which we live. It contains 10 themes: each one is a carefully composed “virtual place”, where the sonic environment is encapsulated and transformed to invent a new reality, mixing "Live" sounds and their relative aural context with designed ones. 

How It Works

Step 1: To get started you only need the earphones or any other external headset with microphone.

Step 2: With the wet/dry slider you can blend the amount of the input source with the processed output.

Step 3: Swipe left and right to switch among 10 themes.

Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S. Requires iOS 5.0 or later.


What’s in the next versions:

• New Themes
• Non linear selection and crossfading between Themes
• Background recording
• iTunes file transfer
• Soundcloud integration
• Support for iPhone’s built-in microphone

News: Sonic Screens 2012

U.S.O. Project is happy to announce the selected artists for the 2012 edition of Sonic Screens, which will take place in Milan on November 2012 @ O’.
Here they are:

Andrea Valle
Dispacci dal fronte interno
for Violin and Cello, spatialized electronics and printers 

Agostino Di Scipio
Two Sound Pieces with Repertoire String Music
for any number of bowed string instruments and live electronics

 [photo courtesy of Franz Rosati]

The two works will be performed live by Ana Topalovic & Èdua Amarilla Zádory and will later be released (in the first months of 2013) as a digital download by Synesthesia Recordings.

Call for Works: Sonic Screens 2012

 

U.S.O. Project is pleased to announce that the 2012 edition of Sonic Screens will be focused entirely to the electro-acoustic music praxis.

Specifically, candidates should produce a composition for instruments and real-time signal processing (live electronics).

Two works will be selected to be played during the concert.

The requirements are as follows:

1. The piece must be composed for Violin and Cello as a duo. Scores for solo violin or cello will not be taken into account. 
2.  The Score (in .pdf format) must be graphical and not in traditional notation. 
3. The interpretational and playing instructions should be made ​​clear, in order for the players to follow them even without the presence of the composer. 
4. The electronic processing must be developed and implemented using Max/MSP or Kyma (*). The multichannel format for the spatial diffusion must be up to 6.0 (2.0 and 4.0 works are still eligible). 
5. The type of interaction should follow the "ecosystemic" paradigm and should be as autonomous as possible (no pedals or sensors are allowed). 
6. The work should not exceed a total duration of 12 minutes. 

The evaluation criteria will focus on originality and effectiveness of the interplay between the electronic and instrumental parts.

The deadline for all submissions is set for 30th June, 2012.

Interested composers and sound artists should send the material (Score + Patch) within this date.

The two selected works will be presented during the evening of Sonic Screens in Milan.

The event will be recorded for digital distribution (on Synesthesia Recordings netlabel).

The names of the musicians who will perform the selected scores will be announced in March.

U.S.O. Project, composer Daniele Corsi and the musicians chosen to perform during the concert will form the reading panel which will evaluate the submitted works.

The selected works will be announced in September 2012.

For more information or clarifications, please contact us at our e-mail:

submissions at synesthesiarecordings dot com

(*) Clarification:

We can only accepts patches made with Kyma or Max/MSP due to the fact that we are not able to provide financial support for the two selected composers. To avoid any technical issues, we had chosen the platforms we already use in our daily work, with which we are very familiar. If the selected composers can confirm their presence for the evening concert at their own expenses, then any piece of software/hardware can be used to perform live electronics. Thank you for your comprehension. 

Sonic Screens 2011

Electroacoustic music concert

an event by U.S.O. Project | Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi
in collaboration with O’ and DieSchachtel

Sound direction: Matteo Milani
Max/MSP programming: Federico Placidi
Visuals: Franz Rosati

O’ | via pastrengo 12 Milan | Italy

Saturday, November 26th - from 7 to 9 p-m.


Free admission

Sonic Screens aims to render the endless possibilities of life and its surroundings experienceable in our conscious activity, trying to deal with the possible infinites of the listening experience, both in their objective and manufactured dimensions. This journey related to the pure immersive listening will take advantage of Ambisonics sound diffusion practice, creating an immersive sound flow between different electroacoustic works by these selected international artists:

1. Benjamin Taylor - Keen Awareness
2. Daniel Blinkhorn - anthozoa
3. Daniel Courville - Variations on Vater unser im Himmelreich
4. Diana Salazar - Spindlesong
5. Jon Christopher Nelson - Just After The Rain
6. Josh Goldman - Hexagonal (Facets 1-6)
7. Kotoka Suzuki - Automata
8. Panayiotis Kokoras - Anechoic Pulse
9. Tae Hong Park - 48 13 N, 16 20 O

At the end of the evening, a/v live-set:

Franz Rosati - Theory of Vortex Sound [OUTFLUX]
PATHLINE #1

Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Milan/Rome based Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project - Unidentified Sound Object) are sound artists whose work spans from digital music to electroacoustic improvisation. Unidentified Sound Object was born from the desire to discover new paths and non-linear narrative strategies in both aural and visual domains. The project includes several collaborations with visual artists and performers. Milani and Placidi are the co-founders of the label "Synesthesia Recordings", a repository of electroacoustic works. U.S.O. Project is a continuing evolving organism.

www.synesthesiarecordings.com


Franz Rosati

Franz Rosati is a sound and media artist, focusing his research on real-time A/V, Visual Music projects and installations following an aesthetic idea based on discontinuity of aural and visual patterns avoiding any kind of repetition through the use of chaos mathematics, generative and stochastic processes. He uses his own custom made software for real-time micro-montage and sound elaboration in the microscopic time scale to realize compositions and performances based on aural and visual matter’s costant metamorphosis. During the years, Franz Rosati has played in a large number of electroacoustic projects such as Franco Ferguson improvisors collective, Meccanica Ferma, Solderwire, GRIDSHAPE, developing his own approach to electroacoustic improvisation. In 2007 founded Nephogram [contemporary documents] collectives with Stefano Pala a.k.a. UKQWJB. He also teaches MaxMSP/Jitter for sound design, interactivity and multimedia, focusing in computer vision techniques in several Workshops and Art/Design Institutes, and developed Interactive Examples for Electronic Music and Sound Design, a book about sound theory and practice in MaxMSP.

www.franzrosati.com

Sonic Screens - call for multichannel works

Sonic Screens – environmental music listening sessions

Live mixing and spatialization by U.S.O. Project (Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi)


Call for multichannel works

U.S.O. Project is pleased to invite submissions of fixed media sound works for the second edition of “Sonic Screens”, a journey among different electroacoustic Soundscape compositions.

Sonic Screens is an annual event that will take place during two acousmatic evenings in Milan during Fall 2011.

Sonic Screens aims to render the endless possibilities of life and its surroundings experienceable in our conscious activity, trying to deal with the possible infinites of the listening experience, both in their objective and manufactured dimensions.

“Listening to the environment, contextualizing it objectively and creatively has always been a priority of the work of U.S.O. Project.

Free from any pseudo-environmental or socio-political implication, the continuous work on sampling, processing and transfiguration of found sound and carefully preserved in memory of a digital recorder, has always played a central role in our compositional practices.

U.S.O. defines Soundscape as the expressive and narrative richness that comes from the reciprocal and continuous interaction of multiple sound sources from the real world, and other phenomena which are perceptible and measurable only through proper and adequate transduction (electromagnetic signals, for example).

A Soundscape is also an opportunity for reflection and imagination that has little to share with the real world.

A Soundscape can be a place of the mind, a reminiscence of a future experienced in dreams, lands far away in space and time.” – Matteo Milani & Federico Placidi

Composers and sound artists are invited to submit multichannel works, up to 8 channels. The assignment of channels to speakers must be clearly indicated in the submission. Works of any duration will be considered although pieces of under 16 minutes will be given preference.

The performance will take advantage of Ambisonics sound diffusion practice, creating an immersive and uninterrupted sound flow between different works from selected international artists.

The material will be transcoded in real time to 2nd Order B-Format (via ICST Ambisonics Externals for MaxMSP).

The recordings of the concerts will be available for streaming and released in binaural format for headphone use. The ownership of the tracks remains to the authors.

Submissions need to include:

• a stereo version of the piece
• individual mono files for each channel
• channel configuration
• sample rate
• program notes
• brief biography

While the composers of the selected works are encouraged to attend the event, attendance is not required for a work to be presented.

There is no registration fee.

The deadline for submission of works is October 31st, 2011.

Material Submissions

Please send download links to your work using one of the many file delivery services (yousendit.com, sendspace.com, gigasize.com, wetransfer.com, etc) in .zip or .rar format. Please do not email file attachments.

Electronic submissions should be sent to:

[submissions at synesthesiarecordings dot com]

For more information, email contact:

[info at usoproject dot com]

Terms and Conditions

Each participant may submit up to two works.

[Date and Venue To Be Announced]

[SchermiSonori2011-CallForWorks.pdf]

“The essential difference between an electroacoustic composition that uses pre-recorded environmental sound as its source material, and a work that can be called a soundscape composition, is that in the former, the sound loses all or most of its environmental context. In fact, even its original identity is frequently lost through the extensive manipulation it has undergone, and the listener may not recognise the source unless so informed by the composer. In the soundscape composition, on the other hand, it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced and exploited by the composer.” – Barry Truax

Now online on SoundCloud:

Sonic Screens - pt.1 (binaural) by usoproject

Sonic Screens - pt.2 (binaural) by usoproject

Recorded 29th October, 2010 @ O' - no profit organization, during Live!iXem 2010 - Edition VII
International festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art - Milan

An Audio Journey into the Rainforests of Mamori

Mamori Sound Project
6th Annual Workshop/Residency for sound artists & composers
@ Mamori Lake (Amazon, Brazil) / October 2011 / 2 weeks

This Kickstarter Project is to assist in funding eight US sound artists to participate in this year's Mamori Sound Project and, by doing so, help this whole exceptional project in the Amazon survive. This project will only be funded if at least $25,500 is pledged by Tuesday May 31, 1:00am EDT.

Mamori Sound Project is an independent residency/workshop that has been carried out in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005 by a small non-profit organization, integrated by sound artist Francisco López and the cultural association Mamori ArtLab, based in Spain and Brazil. Mamori Sound Project supports the local community at Mamori Lake (Amazonas state, Brazil) by providing jobs every year for a significant number of people in this community.

The Mamori Sound Project is a 2-week workshop/residency for professional and semi-professional sound artists and composers with previous experience in the area of sound experimentation and field recordings. It takes place at Mamori Lake, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, and involves theoretical/discussion presentations, field work and studio work. The workshop/residency has a special focus on creative approaches to the work with field recordings, through an extensive exploration of natural sound environments. It does not have a technical character but is instead conceived and directed towards the development and realization of a collective project of sonic creation with the interaction of all participant artists/composers. The activities of the workshop/residency include: Introductory theoretical/discussion presentation sessions on field recordings and sound creation, with a historical/philosophical perspective.

• Field trips (both diurnal and nocturnal) for extensive listening and recording of sound environments.
• Collective listening and discussion sessions of the sound materials gathered. Sessions of studio work (with laptop) using these materials.
• Development and realization of a sound piece by each participant (or in small groups), as part of the collective project.
• Public presentation of the finished pieces for both the participant artists and members of the local community at Mamori Lake.

All these activities are organized in a daily schedule according to the changing sonic environments of the rainforest. This typically involves many hours of field and studio work but there is also flexibility to allow participants to choose from several schedule options and to have the opportunity to carry out other activities related to the daily life in this environment, such as fishing for food or interacting with the local community.

[project home: kickstarter.com]
[franciscolopez.net/amazon.html]

Listen - R. Murray Schafer

"A soundscape is any collection of sounds, almost like a painting is a collection of visual attractions," says composer R. Murray Schafer. "When you listen carefully to the soundscape it becomes quite miraculous." David New's portrait of the renowned composer becomes a lesson unto itself, gracing viewers (and listeners) with a singular moment of interactive subjectivity. This film was produced for the 2009 Governor General's Performing Arts Award.

[nfb.ca/film/listen]

"Empty Rooms", audio-visual self-organized performance space

(Mixed Media Installation)

Premiered on 29th - 30th October 2010 @ [BOX] Videoart Project Space in Milan, during the Live!iXem Festival 2010 (thanks to VisualContainer)


A Movie made of algorithmically generated "inactive spaces” is projected on a screen.

An overlapped stream of pre-recorded “sound activities” is then diffused from a record player and from 4 different iPods running in shuffle mode, creating recombinant “invisible actions” to fit into the Movie.

A self organizing link between sound and visuals is established via cybernetic procedures defined as interconnected spin networks, produced by a video camera “observing” the movie and by one microphone “listening” to the space placed inside the performance Locus.

The Kyma sound design environment (accelerated by the Pacarana sound computation engine) is then engaged in order to compute the data and perform real-time evaluations between the different types of numerical information (audio-video), producing a “sonorous response” to the asynchronous stream of audio-visual contents.

The synthesized information is then diffused in the performance space again through 4 loudspeakers.

Various types of feedback will take place during this highly dynamic process implying a self regulating behavior that will establish new connections between the pacing of the movie locations and the “sonorous” content produced by the processing of the iPod sound streams.

The Observer will then experience the following layers of information:

- a Real-Time recombinant Movie made of “inactive” locations.

- an Overlapped Stream of “possible actions” diffused by the iPods that fits into the Movie.

- a Sonorous link between the above domains of activities via 4 full range loudspeakers.

The Observer can take into account one or more layers of information (even all of them) in order to create himself a cinematic experience via a correlation process.

More info here:
[Empty_Rooms_eng_booklet.pdf]
[Empty_Rooms_Technical_Rider.pdf]

artists contact: unidentified.sound.object (at) gmail (dot) com
booking: booking (at) usoproject (dot) com
promotion: press (at) usoproject (dot) com

Live!iXem 2010 - Edition VII

International festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art

[a project by AntiTesi (Domenico Sciajno) and U.S.O. Project in collaboration with O' and Die Schachtel]

Live!iXem is a well established event that explores the relationship among sound, music, electronic arts and new technologies. iXem is a project conceived and produced since 2003 by AntiTesi, an organization founded and directed by Domenico Sciajno based in Palermo. Center for self-documentation, research and interdisciplinary development for new forms of Arts, Antitesi focuses on contemporary arts in its diverse expressions, coordinates and organizes cultural events, festivals and exhibitions in music and art.

Festival Live!iXem in October 2010 is divided into two events, a 'preview' in Turin on October 8th, organized with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the main festival in Milan including live performances, installations and  a workshop, organized in conjunction with O' and Die Schachtel.

The field is transverse. The common denominator is not the genre but the experimentation and research to innovation, helping to explore the variety of approaches to aesthetic guidelines, tools and technological solutions adopted by selected international artists and involved in the contemporary music scene.

After the introductory event in Turin, October 8th - with Live! IXem Preview - the festival appointment in Milan will take place in the Isola area, between the spaces of O', Medionauta and VisualContainer on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th October, from morning until late at night, offering a busy schedule of events.

Among these, the workshop 'Movement of acoustic images' - whose theme is the field recording, its transformations and its reproduction in acousmatic space - will consist of three different phases: the first by a technical approach, the second one by listening to environmental sound sources chosen as points of a hypothetical ideal sound map and the third one with 'on-site' recording of sound events.

This year Live!iXem, is also characterized by a partnership with 'Ear to the Earth 2010 - Water and the World', Festival produced by Electronic Music Foundation/Joel Chadabe, which will take place simultaneously in NYC.

PARTNERS: Roland Italy, SMAP (San Marino Audio Project), MIC (Music Information Centre Norway), Sound Corporation

WHERE: O 'via Pastrengo 12; Medionauta via Confalonieri 2; VisualContainer via Confalonieri 11, Milano | Isola Passante Ferroviario/M2 Garibaldi, M3 Zara, tram 2, 4, 7, 31, bus 82, 70, 43

HOW: All events are free except for the workshop (for which there is a fee of 60 euros) - and for the evenings at Medionauta (5 euro membership card).

INFO:

Antitesi www.antitesi.org 

iXem www.ixem.it

Full program here: iXem Press ENG (pdf)

Field Recording Workshop: "Movement of acoustic images"

October 29th, 30th | Milan @ Live!iXem 2010 - Edition VII
International festival of music, mixed media and experimental electronic art

 

Aims of laboratory

• Explore through the knowledge of digital recording techniques the universe sound belonging to the "places";
• Discuss some aspects of the use of specific material in electronic and instrumental composition.

Localization of sound in the environment focuses on the theme "sound mapping" as a social and cultural identity and, at the same time, an expression of conscience and personal feelings, whereas its use in music opens important interdisciplinary horizons.

The workshop's aim is to provide an introduction to theory and practice of the main mobile sound recording techniques and the use of sound sources in different fields, from sound design to cinema, from digital editing to the use of digital sources in instrumental composition, electronic music and live electronics. Music compositions and musical excerpts from field recordings will also be introduced, listened and discussed. All members are invited to participate in the soundwalk along the neighborhood "Isola" in Milan and thus contribute during the workshop to the creation of a small sound map of the place. The pieces obtained at the end of the workshop will be diffused through a multi-channel audio speakers setup and then available to the public in the form of soundscape composition.

Speakers: Alessandro Massobrio (ITA), Fabio Orsi (ITA), Natasha Barrett (ENG)
Curated by Matteo Milani, Federico Placidi (U.S.O. Project) and Domenico Sciajno


Documents available online

[Live_iXem_2010_Workshop_ITA.pdf]
[Live_iXem_2010_Workshop_ENG.pdf]


Costs and subscription

To participate in the workshop you must register (spaces are limited) no later than 23/10/2010 and pay the fee (€ 60.00).

For more information about the workshop and registration, please write to workshop [at] antitesi [dot] org or visit the Facebook and Twitter page.

Payment methods

• PayPal
• Money transfer

Level

All subjects and activities of the workshop/laboratory are addressed at the introductory and preliminary level, combining theory and practice with some helpful audiovisual material. Members are encouraged to get involved actively, having discussion and bringing in their experience. Participants will be guided, if weather conditions permit, in a short sound-geo path through the "Isola" neighborhood in Milan and invited to contribute to the creation of a work of the soundwalk. It does not require any special technical knowledge and/or music. However, the knowledge of digital audio recording/editing basics can be an advantage.

Recipients

The workshop is devoted for those sound designers, musicians, composers, sound engineers and experts who would consolidate and compare their experience in an environment of exchange and sharing, to all the "listening lovers" and those who have interest and curiosity about soundscape and electronic compositions.

Entry requirements

There are no special requirements. The workshop is open to all without any age limit. Entries remain open until all available seats have been booked.

Devices

• Mac/PC laptop (useful but not essential during the editing and sound processing sessions)
• owners of a portable recorder are asked to take it for the soundwalk in the neighborhood "Isola"
• Roland Italy will provide participants two digital recorders - R-09HR and R-05

www.roland.it

Location

The workshop will be held at:

O' | residences | photography | sound | performance
non-profit association | via Pastrengo 12, 20159 Milan (Italy)
tel +39 02 6682 3357
website: www.o-artoteca.org

O 'is a non profit organization for the promotion of artistic research, founded in May 2001 by Sara Serighelli and Angelo Colombo as O'artoteca (O' since 2008). Its activity is divided into a large exhibition space, an area of consultation and archive, and an outside lab, L.A.B.-LaboratorioArtibovisa for the production related to photography and printing. It developes exhibition projects and discussions, performances, concerts, lectures, publications; it's a place where artists can experiment, test and compete with their work.

Does Sound Have Meaning?

Sound Researchers and Practitioners Convene to Discuss 'symbolic sounds' at #KISS10

Can music and sound-effects be symbolic?

Sound designers, composers, sound artists, film makers, researchers and others sharing an intense interest in sound will be convening in Vienna (Austria) from the 24th through 26th of September to discuss this and other, similarly controversial, issues at the annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (#KISS10).

Lively discussions, electronic/computer music performances, interactive installations, demos, workshops, and paper sessions will be held in the newly renovated Casino Baumgarten, a spectacular ballroom built in 1890, and the Rhiz Bar Modern, a showcase for experimental media in Vienna.

[view from the Stage at Casino Baumgarten]

Join in the free on-line discussion

Anyone having an intense interest in sound is invited to join in the free on-line discussion at pphilosophyofsound.ning.com. Sign in and introduce yourself by sharing your earliest sonic memory. Discussions on sound, symbol, and meaning have already begun and will continue during and after the symposium. You can participate on line whether or not you are able to attend the symposium in Vienna.

To register for #KISS10:

The registration deadline for participating in #KISS10 is 13 September 2010. The participation fee of € 90 (€ 40 for students) includes the 3-day symposium, morning/afternoon refreshments, and 2 evening concerts.

Background

The Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS) is an annual conclave of current and potential Kyma practitioners who come together to learn, to share, to meet, to discuss, and to enjoy a lively exchange of ideas, sounds, and music! Kyma is a sound design environment created by Symbolic Sound Corporation. This year, the KISS symposium is being organized by Wiener Klangwerkstatt in cooperation with Symbolic Sound and with the support of Analog Audio Association Austria, Preiser Records, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research.

[Focus on Kyma International Sound Symposium - KISS09]

Conference Contact Information:
Barbara Kopf
KISS 2010 Conference office
Email: office.KISS2010@tonsalon.at
Telephone: +43 (0)650 212 1646
[tonsalon.at/KISS2010]

Live Electronics: a conversation with Michele Tadini

18th Festival Milano Musica
Percorsi di Musica d'oggi
@ Teatro Franco Parenti
Milan, 22nd October 2009

Michele Tadini live and work in Paris. He composes music for soloist, ensemble, orchestra, with or without electronics, for theater, dance and interactive installation, collaborates with video-makers, painters, directors and writers. He was the chief of production at AGON acustica informatica musica (Milan), co-directed Centro Tempo Reale (Florence) and, now, coordinates the activity of IRMus, Istituto di Ricerca Musicale (Milan). His music is performed all over Europe, USA, South America, Canada and Japan. He recently earned the Prix Italia with the radio-opera "La Musica Nascosta". He teaches composition and technologies in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse of Lyon. He has an intense activity of conferences and master classes. Suvini Zerboni, Rai Trade and Edipan publish his music.

[English subtitles are shown by default, you can turn them on/off by clicking the menu button located at the bottom right of the video player]

The 'live electronics' is the real-time electronic processing of acoustic instruments and voices. This practice has infinitely expanded the horizon of compositions. Michele Tadini reflects with U.S.O. Project about the historical aspects of electroacoustic music of the last 50 years.
The concert presents works of composers Tadini, Francesconi, Manzoni, Stroppa and Boulez. It will available for deferred broadcast Sunday, January 24, 8:30 p.m. (GMT+1) on RAI-Radio 3.

Michele Tadini (1964)
...da viva Voce (2009)
for Voice and electronics
Premiére

Luca Francesconi (1956)
Animus II (2007)
for Viola and electronics
IRCAM Commission (Paris)

Giacomo Manzoni (1932)
Sei canti dal Kokin Shū (2007)
for Soprano and live electronics
MiTo SettembreMusica Commission

Marco Stroppa (1959)
I will not kiss your f.ing flag (2005)
for augmented Trombone and chamber electronics
Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik Commission

Pierre Boulez (1925)
Anthèmes 2 (1992/1997)
for Violin and electronics

Laura Catrani, Soprano
Garth Knox, Viola
Benny Sluchin, Trombone
Jeanne-Marie Conquer, Violin

Michele Tadini, sound director
Luca Francesconi, sound director
Alfonso Alberti, Keyboard
Marco Stroppa, sound projection

Special thanks:
Cecilia Balestra - Associazione Milano Musica
Michele Tadini
[www.milanomusica.org]

Focus on Kyma International Sound Symposium - KISS09

These have been busy days here at NIU, especially for the speakers who showed to all the symposiast each method of working with Kyma.
A lot of participants came from different sides of the world, it was great to be immersed in this colourful community! Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel (the creators of Kyma) introduced their new hardware Paca(rana) - you can find a lot of information here @ SSC - and the latest features implemented in Kyma X.70 (where 'X' stands for the last letter in 'six' - 6.70).

Carla and Kurt did a wonderful job to develop a state-of-the-art "recombinant" workstation, which gives any user the freedom to explore unknown sonic territories without hitting the DSPs (there's plenty of headroom in processing power).
During the morning of the first day, Carla showed us how to control Kyma with external devices like the Wacom Tablet and the Continuum Fingerboard, then with Nintendo Wiimote+Nunchuck and SpaceNavigator (via OSCulator by Camille Troillard).
The AC Toolbox presentation by Hector Bravo-Benard, revealed to us an algorithmic approach to sound composition with Kyma. By using the LISP language, it is possible to structure an entire composition and have Kyma play it. It is possible to make use of strict algorithmic procedures like probability distributions, Markov chains, tendency masks, and many other techniques used by composers of the likes of Paul Berg, Gottfried Michael Koenig.
A special mention should be made for Bruno Liberda's lecture, where he explores subtle connections between his wonderful graphical scores and different kinds of ancient neumatic notation, making symbolic notation and symbolic sound computation converge.
Cristian Vogel explained his latest creation called Black Swan for swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin. The 50 minutes original Kyma score was composed in Geneva and at the electroacoustic studio of the Musique Inventives d'Annecy. Here's a Swiss TV documentary about the creation of Black Swan.

What is Kyma?

Kyma is a sound design language that permits to manipulate, transform and warp any kind of sound source in realtime, but we already know all of this.
During these days in Barcelona - at the first Kyma International Sound Symposium - we have learnt something more specific and, maybe, unexpected.
As Carla Scaletti said during the opening lecture of KISS09, "Recombinance Makes Us Human". So, what does this mean? Actually each of the participants brought their own experience, point of view, modus operandi and creative talent to the symposium. This multiform epiphany allowed everyone involved to share the same time and space for 2 days, exchanging their ideas like sharing bits of code in a recombinant manner.
The symposiasts all came from different fields where Kyma plays a fundamental role in each of their activities (sound designers, composers, DJs, etc.). Each of them knows and likes different specific aspects of Kyma.

The lectures performed during these 2 days taught us something: regardless of their own personal skills, and of their own degree of Kyma knowledge, observing things from other users' point of view reveals unexpected surprises and creates new connections, on a mental and operational level, which were never considered before.
Even sounds commonly used in our everyday activity, if put in a different context (artistically or technologically), appear to us as new and unexpected, bringing back to our memory John Cage's famous concept: "(You have) to look at a Coca-Cola bottle without the feeling that you've ever seen one before, as though you were looking at it for the very first time. That's what I'd like to find with sounds -- to play them and hear them as if you've never heard them before."

The musical performances have contributed themselves to recombine new pieces of code, bearing different morphologies, sintax and structures.
With her liveset "SlipStick for Continuum and Kyma", Carla Scaletti explores the sound phase-space, in order to find new timber paths moving from materic aggregation to resonant chimes and back, without forgoing a "virtuoso gestuality" given by the nature of the instrument itself.
We have experienced the possibility of creating vibrating soundtracks for silent movies in real time, thanks to the contribution of Franz Danksagmüller's work, with the help of Berit Barfred Jensen's voice.
Concrete sounds produced by the friction of a Cello bow on different-shaped polystyrene objects, saturate the listening space thanks to the work of Hector Bravo-Benard, reminding us of some textures of Xenakis' work "La legende d'Eer".
Marin Vrbica's "Tiger in the Jungle" immerses us into an exotic and rich spatial dimension made of revolving sound-surfaces and sliding glissando-like multiple trajectories.

In the end, we are surprised that the paradigma presented in the beginning by Carla Scaletti (Recombinance Makes Us Human), has actually acted as an invisible force guiding, transforming, rearranging our thoughts, knowledge and purposes.
So, after the symposium we observe ourselves in a different way. We have changed into new intellectual human beings, and this gave everyone of us a fresh new start, in order to discover new possible configurations and interactions between ourselves and the others, between what we are and what we will be until #KISS10.

We really enjoyed our first attempt to follow a live event via Twitter, we hope you appreciated our efforts to make you feel like you were in Barcellona with us, as part of the symposium.
You can track all of our tweets via search.twitter.com.

Here's a selection of related tweets of interests:

• Now live #KISS09: Carla Scaletti - "Recombinance Makes Us Human" - Philosophy of Kyma #
• a Question: Infinity makes us HUMANS? #
• Infinity+ self-awareness of finitude #
• Open-ended possibilities= open-ended amount of time, but the learning is fun! #
• Kyma sounds are recombinant...like us..! #
• Pen Morph Gandalf to Saruman "You are tracking the footsteps of two young Hobbits" #
• Writing in time and space..... #
• I became operational ath the C.E.R.L. lab in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of November, 1986. -- Kyma #
• Kyma was inspired by three ideas: cutting & splicing audio tape, voltage control, symbolic logic & computer programming #
• An interview with Carla Scaletti @symbolicsound usoproject.com/C... #
• and now...linear interpolation of presets - smooth transition in the phase space... #
• music is something like a side effect of explorating timbre and sound configurations... #
• Presets as aural Keyframes #
• ...the problem of finding graphic symbols for the transposition of the composer's thought into sound." Edgard Varèse #
• ...without friction [...] there would be no music!"- Carla Scaletti #
  

For anyone interested in the Kyma sound design language, the book "Kyma X Revealed" is available here @ SSC. This document gives you an overview of the environment, gives you a strategy for approaching this deep system one layer at a time and then walks you step-by-step through each level of Kyma like your own personal tour guide. At the back of this guide, you’ll find several summaries and quick references that you can keep handy for refreshing your memory while working. This book covers the mechanics of how to use Kyma — not the art and science of sound design. However, if you love sound and are hungry for more knowledge on the subject, achieving fluency with Kyma is an excellent first step!

A great thanks to Cristian Vogel (Station 55 Productions) and Symbolic Sound Corporation for their greeting and organization.

UPDATE: Slides from Recombinance Makes Us Human (.pdf), the welcoming address for the First International Kyma Symposium in Barcelona, October 2009.