Session 2: Immersive Experiences
Presentations: Tim Bond . Francisco López (online) . Aki Pasoulas . Louise Rossiter
Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre (MAAST) concert: Tim Bond . Aki Pasoulas . Louise Rossiter . Brona Martin . Pete Stollery . John Young
Friday 13 May 2022 . 10am – 6pm | Free entry
Location: Universities at Medway (University of Kent), Royal Dockyard Church, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, Kent, ME4 4TE.
Royal Dockyard Church has step free access and accessible toilets.
Please wear face masks when attending in-person activities, unless you are exempt.
We advise taking a lateral flow test before attending.
Booking is essential for IN-PERSON TICKETS.
Online events may be watched live on YouTube from 10:30AM (no booking needed).
Reservations are prioritised for PhD researchers at CHASE affiliated universities. The public are welcome to make reservations after 13th April 2022.
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Overview:
10.00 Welcome and introductions
10.30 Francisco López (Independent artist/scholar)
‘Sonic Creation: Social Experimental Audio, Environmental Sound Matter, and Immersive Listening’ (online presentation)
11.30 10-minute break
11.40 Tim Bond (University of Kent - PhD student researcher)
‘Spaces as the Basis for Composition’ (In-person activity)
12.10 Louise Rossiter (Independent artist/scholar)
‘Music – Bodies – Machines’ (In-person presentation)
13.10 Lunch break and networking
14.10 Aki Pasoulas (University of Kent)
‘Introduction to MAAST- Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre’ (In-person lecture)
14.30 Louise Rossiter (Independent artist/scholar)
‘Sound Diffusion workshop’ (In-person activity)
15.45 45-min break
16.30 - 18.00 MAAST Concert (In-person sonic presentations) Programme notes.
NB. All in-person and online events will be live streamed.
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Further sessions will be announced on CHASE's Eventbrite and via SoundFjord.
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Activities
10:30 - 11:30
Francisco López
Sonic Creation: Social Experimental Audio, Environmental Sound Matter, and Immersive Listening
In this presentation I will discuss how my sound creative practice has been shaped over the past 40+ years by two main environments of influence that divert from common music training: the independent home-music worldwide network (starting in the late 70s) and the influence of ‘real world’ sonic environments, particularly from nature. I will present these realms in a much wider social and historical context, recognizing and discussing the immense influence they have had on a gigantic community of sonic creators worldwide for several decades now.
Unlike the now classic canons of ‘field recordings’ or ‘soundscapes’, my work with environmental recordings is not informed by representational goals but rather by the intention of creating new worlds of sonic experience based on a transformation of that source / inspirational ‘reality’. This approach is akin to the recent philosophical field of “object-oriented-ontology”; it considers sounds themselves as self-sufficient, first-order ontological entities, and proposes a deeper and more intimate connection with sonic ‘reality’ than that of traditional representation.
One of the main elements of this development of new sonic realities as public shared experiences has to do with a reconfiguration of sound systems and spaces towards an immersive experience that challenges the general canon of the stage. The stage is an ancient convention for the establishment of a contemplative experience that has been uncritically adopted by most Western musical practices. In the case of electronic / experimental music, the absence of a stage –and thus its perceptive and symbolic consequences– permits to reunite in a single person the generator / controller of sound, transfers the attention from the performer to the sound itself, and transforms the sonic experience from contemplative to immersive.
11:40 - 12:10
Tim Bond
Spaces as the Basis for Composition
As multimedia installations are often set in interesting and often re-purposed spaces, sound projection is heavily affected by the acoustic environment and can radically change the artist’s intention. A way to mitigate this is to compose with the space as principal consideration.
My research by practice endeavours to look at a range of acoustically challenging spaces and to create pieces for them that incorporate their acoustic eccentricities.
In this discussion I will focus on my first portfolio piece and how the choice and categorisation of sounds, combined with the difference between technical data and aural perception, has formed my approach to composition for specific spaces.
12:10 - 13:10
Louise Rossiter
Music – Bodies – Machines
This research presentation will give an overview of the Music – Bodies – Machines: Fritz Kahn and Acousmatic Music project and accompanying suite of music – Der Industriepalast. The project is inspired by the work of infographics pioneer Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) who developed works such as Der Mensch als Industriepalast. There is a body of work examining Kahn’s work (Sappol, 2017; Von Debschitz, 2017; Doudova, Jacobs, et al.) that has revealed Kahn’s intent of making the human anatomy accessible to the non-specialised reader through visual metaphors; unlike the descriptive anatomical illustrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which show how the human body looks, Kahn’s works visually explain how internal structures work using concepts, metaphors, and allusions.
This presentation explores some of the ways in which Kahn’s striking visual images have inspired the composition of a suite of novel acousmatic works of music. The presentation starts with a survey of existing works making use of similar, extra-musical influences to examine how extra-musical influences such as infographics and painting may influence the formal design of acousmatic music. It goes on to consider how, exactly, the infographics of Fritz Kahn have been used within the project. In some cases, this guides the choice of particular materials (such as the sound of a beating heart to represent an image of a heart monitor), but in other cases there is influence on phrasing, placement, and even the formal design of entire pieces.
14:10 - 14:30
Aki Pasoulas
Introduction to MAAST
This is a short introduction to Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre (MAAST). MAAST is a portable and flexible sound diffusion system designed for the performance of electroacoustic music and research in spatial sound. This will be an introductory session to the workshop that follows, led by Louise Rossiter.
14:30 - 15:45
Louise Rossiter
Sound Diffusion Workshop
This workshop will give participants an overview and practical insight into the diffusion of acousmatic music. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about performance practices in acousmatic music before performing pieces on the MAAST loudspeaker system, including works by Gilles Gobeil, Andrew Lewis, Pete Stollery, Alistair MacDonald, Jonty Harrison and, Denis Smalley.
16:30 - 18:00
MAAST Concert
Sound Diffusion
Please view this link for programme notes.
Biographies
Tim Bond studied music at the University of Birmingham under Dr Vic Hoyland for composition, and Dr Jonty Harrison for sonic art. After being a jobbing musician for several years he retrained to become a secondary music teacher and then continued his studies gaining a Master’s degree in composing for film and television, with distinction, from Kingston University where he also won the choral composition prize. He now splits his time between teaching and freelancing as an audio engineer, as well as his PhD studies under Dr Aki Pasoulas at the University of Kent.
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the main figures in the realms of experimental music and audio art. He is also a PhD Ecosystems Biologist. Over the past forty years he has realised hundreds of concerts / live performances, projects with environmental recordings, field research and sound installations in over seventy countries of the six continents. His work has been released by more than 450 record labels / publishers worldwide. Among other prizes, López has been awarded five times with honorary mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica and is the recipient of a Qwartz Award for best sound anthology.
Aki Pasoulas is an electroacoustic composer and the Director of MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre) at the University of Kent. He is the Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’, which explores our experience of heritage sites through sound; and a Co-Investigator of the project ‘Liminal Spaces’ seeking to interrogate the concept of remote or desolate places by revealing the hidden voices and activities that occur within them. Aki’s research interests include acousmatic music, time perception in relation to music, psychoacoustics and sound perception, spatial sound and soundscape ecology especially in relation to listening psychology. He has written for instruments, found objects, voice, recorded and electronic sound, composed music for the theatre and for short animation films, and organised and performed with many ensembles. His scholarly and music works are published through KPM/EMI, ICMA, Sonos Localia, Stolen Mirror, Gruenrekorder, HELMCA, Pinpoint Scotland, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Aki received honourable mentions at international competitions, and his music is continuously selected and performed at key events worldwide.
Louise Rossiter (1986) is an Electroacoustic composer based in Leicester, UK.
Louise's research interests include expectation in acousmatic music, silence and music, acoustic ecology, multi-channel composition and spatialisation. She completed a PhD at De Montfort University, Leicester under the supervision of John Young and Simon Emmerson, having studied previously under Pete Stollery, Robert Dow and Robert Normandeau.
Her works have been performed internationally at EMS, Electronic Music Week (Shanghai), Influx (Musiques et Reserches), L'espace du sons, NYCEMF, BEAST, SSSP, Sound Festival, Soundings..., Sound Junction, Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium, Bologna Conservatory of Music and Electroacoustic Wales. Louise has also been invited to present her work and research as featured artist at BEAST (2018), USSS (Sheffield) (2019), Electric Spring Festival (Huddersfield) (2020) and MANTIS (Manchester) (2021). In 2019, Louise’s work Homo Machina was selected to represent the UK at CIME in Krakow.
Louise has also had works awarded in several international competitions, including in the Destellos International Composition Competition, Musica Nova (Prague), Franz Liszt Stipendium (Weimar), Electronic Music Week (Shanghai) and in 2012 was awarded first prize in the prestigious L'espace du son international spatialisation competition. In 2021, she was awarded the Prix Russolo for Synapse.
Louise's work is published on the Xylem record label.
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