For a PDF Version of the conference abstracts, click here: Bringing New Music to New Audiences Conference Abstracts
Abstract – Paper
Friday – 9.30
Peter Sheppard Skaerved
Royal Academy of Music
ptrshpprdskrvd@aol.com
Invisible Cities
Violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved is working, with composer Evis Sammoutis on a series of new works for solo violin, resulting from their ‘deep hanging out’ in the old city of Nicosia, Cyprus. How does walking, listening, recording, drawing, talking, touching, and returning feed in to the compositional and collaborative processes? How does work from this process ‘travel’? Peter performs these works internationally, in venues including concert halls, theatres, museums. What is the impact on, and response from audiences to music ‘made’ in this way.
Abstract – Paper
Friday – 10.00
Evis Sammoutis
Representing European University of Cyprus for ‘Interfaces’ + Ithaca College
esammoutis@hotmail.com
Educational, artistic and collaborative strategies in engaging New Music audiences: the genesis of the Living Museumsproject andInterfaces
The 21st century is indeed a very challenging time to be a musician. A few decades ago, in order to be a professional musician, one had to be able to play their instrument, compose, arrange or conduct at a top level. Today, while this is still a prerequisite, in addition, a musician must be able to collaborate professionally (artistically but also organizationally) across a wide array of disciplines and to also excel at several other skills. A musician today, perhaps more than any other time in history, must also have strong pedagogical and research skills, be fluent with technology and be able to communicate across a wide range of audiences both in the realm of academia and wider society. That is why more and more curriculums are now shifting towards placing more attention to training students with “skills” rather than just “content” with hands-on learning experiences.
As a teacher I wanted to create a program that would blend both theoretical and practical concerns to engage students on many levels and through a collaborative ethos to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning. In 2014 I designed and coordinated a unique international program entitled, Living Museums: Collaborative Creation, Performance & Education Based on Museum Artefacts in an attempt to do just that. The Living Museums Project was entirely funded by an Erasmus Intensive Program. It involved the participation of faculty and students from the Department of Arts of European University Cyprus (Music and Graphic Design programs), The Royal Conservatory at Hague (Composition and Percussion departments) and the University of Hull (Composition and Performance fields). The museum space of the Cyprus Museum (made available through a collaboration with Cyprus’s Department of Antiquities) and its collection became the focal points of a wide range of interdisciplinary activities, including the composition and performance of new student works, the creation of visual art pieces, educational workshops and a project website. The students organized and marketed the concerts to the general public by creating an original marketing campaign. The project was student-centered, helping students gain valuable hands-on learning experiences and make connections across the curriculum.
The project had a deeply international dimension by incorporating a diverse set of faculty and students of different disciplines from Cyprus, Netherlands, Russia, Romania, Spain, Poland, Ecuador, Lithuania, Belgium, Israel, Italy and the UK. A combination of daily lectures on composition, museum interventions, 3D Design, contemporary performance and others was combined with master classes, workshops, round table discussions and collaborative opportunities, aimed to inform, inspire and engage students to undertake the great task of building up a unique museum concert experience in less than two weeks.
The concert itself attracted considerable media attention and brought in a very large and diverse audience, many of whom had never visited the museum nor attended a new music event. The educational, artistic and collaborative strategies used therefore, were very successful not only in engaging students, but subsequently new music audiences too.
Abstract – Paper
Friday – 10.30
Lorenda Ramou
Onassis Cultural Centre
l.ramou@sgt.gr
Extra-muros of the Concert Hall: New music events in and with the neighbourhood
The paper will refer to two examples of new music projects which have been programmed by Onassis Cultural Centre (OCC). Both are related to the close neighbourhood of OCC and reflect its policy to bring a part of its productions outside its own space, as well as to initiate new productions, performed intra-muros, based on oral history and micro history material of the city’s past.
The first project is entitled “A Musical Bridge over Syngrou Avenue” (the name of the Avenue in front of OCC). Across this busy Avenue, there is Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences, which hosts a department of Communication, Media and Cultural Studies. The project, initiated by OCC, aimed at promoting mainly young musicians and composers during a series of three contemporary music concerts, taking place each year since 2016 in the University’s main hall, while training the students of the department in concert organisation and promotion. The students meet both OCC’s staff and the musicians; they get to know how several departments of OCC work and they have an inside look on the concerts’ preparation by the musicians. At the end of the 13 week programme, they have to provide the promotion and communication material for the concerts.
The second project is entitled “Music for Neos Kosmos”, a wordplay with OCC’s Athenian neighbourhood, Neos Kosmos, meaning New World in Greek. Today’s residents bring the memory of older – since the beginning of the 20thc. – and recent migrant waves, as well as many dark moments during the Nazi occupation of Athens. The group Ochi Paizoume, interested in local history, had collected their stories in the framework of an intense research and artistic activity project (UrbanDig Project). Neos Kosmos has been subject to an aesthetic, historical and sensory mapping leading to the creation of a rich cultural archive. The groups which were formed to carry out the mapping, had created five dramatized routes, related to Neos Kosmos and its archive.
These routes were the ‘libretti’ given to the composers Dimitris Andrikopoulos, Panayiotis Kokoras, Yannis Kyriakidis, Esthir Lemi and Nicolas Tzortzis, in order to create their compositions for the routes, to be played by ARTéfacts ensemble. Director Louizos Aslanidis had created videos to be viewed simultaneously with the performance of the pieces.
In both “Musical Bridge over Syngrou Avenue” and “Music for Neos Kosmos” projects, the aim was to find a way to bring new music to audiences which are very close to OCC, but do not necessarily step inside to follow its musical programme. The paper will contain references to the students’, musicians’ and audience’s experience and selected extracts from the performances.
For more info on these projects: http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1712/, http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2000/
Abstract – Paper
Time – Friday 11.30
Martin Fautley martin.fautley@bcu.ac.uk,
Nancy Evans nancy@bcmg.org.uk
and
Victoria Kinsella victoria.kinsella@bcu.ac.uk
{1, 3} Birmingham City University, {2} Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Through the Music Maze: Adventures in experimental music with children
This paper will explore the use of contemporary classical/experimental music repertoire and the processes of contemporary classical composers as a stimulus for young people’s own composing and as a tool for supporting listening. It draws on the experience of Music Maze, a 12-year continuing project run in the UK by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) for 8-11 year olds. It brings together the perspectives of practitioners (composers and educators) and researchers. The reasons for using repertoire vary from organisation to organisation but have also evolved across time. Initially repertoire projects were audience development projects – ‘building audiences for the future’ and latterly more as a vehicle for developing understanding of a piece of music. Though these remain the either a central or peripheral goal, for many organisations, children’s own creative music making and its intrinsic value has become more or as important. We posit that the repertoire projects happen on a continuum, with re-creation in a simplified version, via pastiche, to taking an extra-musical stimulus and using this as the brief (eg “La Mer” – piece about the sea). This paper will hopefully develop understandings of how to use repertoire as a stimulus that opens the composing horizons for children and young people.
The question then remains why use repertoire as a starting point and, in the case of BCMG, why use contemporary repertoire? This paper will demonstrate what contemporary repertoire and the processes embedded in them offers children’s composing and how this might be approached whilst still valuing children’s own composing and creative processes. A model is proposed that goes beyond pastiche, mechanistic composing tools and skills to articulate a concept of composerly thinking and doing and how that might be nurtured in children.
In this paper presentation Activity Theory (Engeström 1999) will be used to deconstruct composing processes within Music Maze. Research analysing the composing process has been underway for a while, (inter alia (Burland & Davidson, 2001; Burnard, 2006; 2012; Fautley, 2002; Fautley, 2010) and there have also been explorations of the use of activity theory for the investigation of musical learning (Kinsella and Fautley 2018, Burnard & Younker, 2008; Welch, 2007). These studies form a useful informant to this paper as they include not only an understanding of composing pedagogy but the social, cultural and political structures surrounding musical activities, along with dispositions that frame beliefs, values, and discourses. Like these studies, the analysis of Music Maze sessions also had to account for a range of different identities, intelligences, modes of learning, and pedagogical processes. In order to understand this multifaceted reality, a socio-cultural perspective, like activity theory, is helpful as it embraces individuality but also credits interconnections between people involved.
The paper concludes that using an activity theory system enabled deeper understandings of composing processes employed by the music leaders, BCMG musicians and children within Music Maze. It points ways of developing practice and ways in which composing pedagogy can be taken forwards.
Abstract – Paper
Friday – 12.00
Mario Duarte, Rodrigo Sigal
Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Unidad Morelia, UNAM, Mexico,
Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras, Morelia
mario.duarte02@gmail.com, rodrigo@rodrigosigal.com
Timbral and Spatial Interactive Systems in the Community: The use of electroacoustic music in education and social integration
In Mexico, the lack of educative and employment opportunities has forced certain age groups to find new ways of surviving. A great amount of children, teenagers and young adults make their living in the shadow economy, which results in very bad conditions. A large number of people from these age groups join to organized crime, pursuing better wages at a very high cost for society (Bonilla Ruis 2008).
According to Barbosa (2002), active participation in an artistic program helps to develop critical thinking and creative solutions to different situations. Moreno and Bidelman (2014) found that music training provides behavioural advantages to perceptual abilities and higher-order aspects of cognition like working memory and intelligence. Moreover, Kniffin, Yan, Wansink and Schulze (2016) indicate that music promotes cooperative behaviour and serves as a bond within groups.
To date, several studies have used music technology to develop certain skills or abstract concepts related to electroacoustic music education in children. Antle, Droumeva and Corness (2008) used an interactive sound-making environment to create musical sound sequences. Similarly, Masu, Conci, Core, Angeli and Morreale (2017) implemented an interactive web app and a motion-tracking interface that allowed children to react and manipulate volume, speed and articulation.
Taken together, these studies support the notion that music education contributes to the development of creative skills and the enhancement of social integration. Analysis and decision-making are fundamental parts of the creation of art.
The purpose of this research is the use of electroacoustic music as an approach to develop creative skills, including timbral and spatial operations, and enhance social integration in a marginalized community in Tumbisca, Morelia, Mexico. Through the use of interactive music systems to control space and its interaction with timbre, pitch and duration, this project intends to engage young people in the electroacoustic music field.
In order to achieve what is stated above, an interdisciplinary research group was integrated with students from the following undergraduate programs at ENES Morelia (The Autonomous National University of Mexico, UNAM): Music and Artistic Technology, Technology for Information in Science and, Social Studies & Local Management. Each team within these fields of knowledge plays a specific role in the development of the project.
The use of mobile devices helped to attract people who would not have been able to access musical education, more specifically, electroacoustic music. This high level of accessibility opened up a new possibility to deliver music courses and interaction with new audiences. This paper will discuss the findings and problems that we encountered while carrying out this project and how we tackled these issues.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Friday 12.30
Makoto Nomura
Japan Century Symphony Orchestra
nomu104@googlemail.com
Joy of Creation and Innovation: Participatory composition projects by the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra
What is the symphony orchestra in 21stCentury in Japan? This was the big question when I was appointed as the director of community programme of Japan Century Symphony Orchestra (JCSO), the Osaka-based professional orchestra in 2014. Most professional orchestras in Japan mainly played western music from the 18thand 19thcentury. But they seldom played Asian music from the 21stcentury.
I believe music is like bridges. Many of my past music projects went beyond borders, such as “Music with animals”, “Concert in a swimming pool”, “Music performed by 1010 people” and “Roof Tile Music”. Music can connect different sounds, different notes, different rhythms, different melodies, different instruments, different styles, different people, different cultures, different worlds, etc. Through the combination of differences, it produces the beauty. That is why community projects I launched with the JCSO were designed to connect with people who were neither interested in the symphony orchestra nor in contemporary music.
For example, “The Work Music Project” is a project to connect JCSO with Hello Life, which is the job placement service for unemployed young people. The project enables young people to engage and create music with orchestra members, leading to public performance so that they become integrated into society and gain confidence in themselves with fresh ideas for their career. In 2017, as a post-workshop piece, I composed a cello concerto “Miwamokiho Apupo Gun Kamane”. This concerto was performed by professional musicians, but the piece was based on the ideas of the creative music workshop.
“Shonai World Music Workshop Orchestra” is another example to connect different musics. In the workshops, participants explored either western or Asian instruments which they had never played before. This project was to make connections between East and West, between professional and amateur musicians. The final orchestra included violin, viola, double bass, trombone, clarinet, shakuhachi, koto, shamisen, sitar, gamelan, viola da gamba, percussion, etc. This is the experiment for music of anti-exclusion. The workshops encouraged creative improvisation on those instruments.
JCSO has been involved with several site-specific performances. For example, on 8 January 2018 we organised a concert called “Noise Concert”, which was in a house under demolition. The concert involved a collaboration between demolition noise by builders and instrumental sounds by musicians from JCSO. The music was totally improvised by musicians from JCSO with helmets on their heads.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Friday 14.00
Lilian Beidler
Sound artist
loul@gmx.ch
Performative Sound Arts – Impetus for communication
In recent years, the question of how to connect my background and craft as a musician and composer of electro-acoustic music to a participatory performance and social arts practice has become the main impetus of my work. I am using my practice to create a performative sound arts methodology to investigate particular qualities of public space as well as to investigate my role as an artist, facilitator, activist, woman of my generation, a member of „the West“ and as a European and Swiss citizen in a more and more complex and globalised world.
I am particularly researching peripheral and liminal spaces, spaces of transit, the connection of identity and territory and decolonisation of space. I try to find new ways of transcultural communication. I am investigating the possibilities inherent in phenomenological, sociological and philosophical approaches to performative sound arts from the perspective of a practitioner, trying to define intercultural communication from a performative sound arts perspective (site-specificity, the performer‘s body, audience relations). In composing musical form, I include the performance format as a substantial part letting the performance space affect the compositional process.
Working site-specifically means to be in exchange with something, considering the audience-performer relation, time, space and participants as compositional parameters.
Based on three projects of mine, I would like to give an insight into my practice combining composition and performance of contemporary sound arts with social arts practice, community work, public space, oral histories and transculturalism.
Along with speaking about my work and projects, I would like share my preliminary findings in the process of my practice-based research. These include tentative answers to the questions: What is the potential of performative sound arts in facilitating intercultural communication? How does the phenomenological investigation of liminal spaces and spaces of transit influence the composition and devising of performative sound arts? How can the employment of sound arts as a research method change the way to look at it and add to an aesthetic level and the definition of it?
Abstract – Paper
Time – Friday 14.30
Mike Blow
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
mike.blow@dmu.ac.uk
Durational Sound Art
Durational sound art is purposely designed to become part of the sonic, and sometimes visual, environment in its location. A notable example, though not immediately obvious to the public, is Max Neuhaus’ Times Square, which the Dia Foundation promotional material describes as “a rich harmonic sound texture emerging from the north end of the triangular pedestrian island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City” and which has been in place (though not constantly) since 1977. Installations such as Times Square, Jem Finer’s Score for a Hole in the Ground (2008) in Kent UK, or the Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatia (2005) are ‘always on’ and become part of the sonic landscape in which they are placed. This paper explores durational work in depth using a range of examples from sound art practice and beyond. Cultural factors such as siting, noise pollution, the transformation of locations and generation of new ‘audio space’ are explored. Due to its timeframe, durational work can reflect ongoing environmental changes and can provide a sonic record of medium to long-term processes; the changing length of days, or temperature, or air quality for example. Durational work is also notable for its aspirations; David Toop, writing about Jem Finer’s Longplayerin 2008, points out that “In the face of human barbarity, short-term greed and destructiveness, [Longplayer] is a benign creation built to last”.
Abstract – Paper
Friday – 15.00
Steve Jones
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
steve@amancalledadam.com
iPads, Mobiles and New Music in Schools
For this conference I will be discussing a series of workshopsI devised for the British Council and the French Ministry of National Education’s cross-cultural project, Science in Schools. While the workshops aimed to give students a basic understanding in computer science, they also demonstrated how we interact with smartphones and mobile applications through music-based activities. This discussion will examine howthe use of iPads, mobile devices and sound apps were able to bring the concept of newmusicto schools.
Travelling with 20 iPad minis, I visited numerous schools and colleges in cities, towns and villages across France and its overseas territory, French Guyana. ‘Music, Sound and Mobiles’explored sound – how we register it, how we measure its properties and how it is recorded – and its connection with music and mobile media. With the free mobile application MobMuPlat (Mobile Music Platform) and open source software Pure Data (Pd) asan audio engine,I was able to demonstrate concepts such as frequency and amplitude, and how numbers are used to generate digital sound. Developed by Daniel Iglesia, MobMuPlat is developed as platform for rapid prototyping of standalone apps, but excludes the need for text coding. Students were able to design their own simple sine wave generating app, which could then be ported to the iPads or their own mobile phones.
This established the iPad as a sound-making object, a concept that falls in with my own research using the Carry Principle as an investigation into mobiles as autonomous performance systems. Once students were able to understand how the iPad was able to produce sound, I would ask the question: what is music? The consensus view was that music is based on melodies, rhythms and lyrics. Students would split up into smaller groups, exploring other Pd patches available on MobMuPlat, the SmartFaust platform by GRAME (National Centre for Musical Creation), and IRCAM’s CoSiMa (Collaborative Situated Media) web audio app. The workshops would end with individual and ensemble performances or everyone participating as a collective, mobile ‘orchestra’.
Returning to the debate, what is music, it was then that students began to perceive of their efforts as a new type of music. Suggestions included that music could be also be abstract sound, as organised sound. On the basis of this evidence, I will argue that the students were led to a different understanding of new music by studying sound and its properties. More importantly, it was through the agency of iPads and sound apps that I was able to challenge young people’s understanding of what new music can be.Mobile devices were able to cross differences in culture, language and age.
At one particular school, a teacher commented on how students would share the devices between themselves, sharing advice or helping those that had fallen behind. We agreed that this could be theorised as nomadic learning. I hope to investigate this phenomenon further, looking at nomadic technologies for new music and performance in schools. I express my firm belief that this form of technology and its total access can help to promote inclusivity and creativity through the cultural adhesive of mobile media.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Friday 16.00
Judith Robinson, Alexandra Richardson
Sound and Music, London; Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
judith.robinson@soundandmusic.org, a.richardson@hud.ac.uk
Music for Young Players
Within the British Music Collection, housed at Heritage Quay at the University of Huddersfield is a set of graphic scores called Music for Young Players.
Published by Universal Edition and intended for classroom use, the Music for Young Players scores aimed to encourage experimental approaches and connections to the new music of the time. These were designed to be accessible to both children with, or without, previous music experience – something that continues to be an important feature of much participatory music today.
In the autumn of 2017, Sound and Music worked in collaboration with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to bring the scores to life and explore how the scores could bring experimental approaches to music-making to a new, 21stCentury audience.
Three Yorkshire-based composers worked with six Kirklees primary schools to create performances of the original Music for Young Players scores and compose original companion pieces for performance at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. These professional composers used the opportunity to develop their skills as music educators, receiving mentoring from composer and sound artist Duncan Chapman in the process.
In this session, led by Judith Robinson, Creative Project Leader for Education at Sound and Music, Alexandra Richardson, Learning and Participation Officer at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and composer [to be confirmed] we will:
- Outline the Music for Young Players project including the elements of professional development for the composers;
- Discuss the relevance of the scores to today’s music education environment;
Assess their effectiveness in bringing experimental music to new audiences.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Friday 16.30
Hans van Regenmortel
Affiliation Musica, Impulse Centre for Music, Neerpelt, Belgium
hans.van.regenmortel@musica.be
Eersteklasconcerten: A new perspective on contemporary music participation of young children in concert halls
Eersteklasconcerten is a journey of artistic, interactive experience for children in their first year of primary school (6 year olds). This co-production by Musica, Impulse Centre for Music and Concertgebouw Brugge (BE) puts a different renowned ensemble in the spotlight each year.
Once more, the 2018 edition in partnership with Het Collectief confronted young ears with 20th-century and contemporary composed music and its interpreters, without compromising on the artistic content. Eersteklasconcerten breaks down the borders between listening, active experience and performing. It demonstrates that young children can get really enthusiastic about music from the past and present, irrespective of its complexity. Often the format challenges the interpreters’, concert organisers’ and teachers’ view on children’s aptness to ‘understanding music’. At the same time, it explores new ideas about ‘what is a concert’? What possibilities are there for a (young) public in playing an active role towards repertoire?
Involving big groups of children with their teachers, and addressing both categories as participants on an equal basis, Eersteklasconcerten is meant as a shared experience in the first place. For many it even happens to be a unique experience on the personal level as well. The format shows that, as long as the context is well thought of, young children can be confronted with complex and layered phenomena, like music, because they are apt to ‘absorb’ them as a whole experience and in a meaningful way, even without any verbal explanation, nor practical instruction.
Eersteklasconcerten makes us aware of the opposing strategies of children and adults in dealing with the world. It reveals children’s need for symbolic play in a context of shared experience and companionship as a basis for being educated. It illustrates children’s sensitive openness and aptness for being part of a whole, even without ‘really’ understanding every aspect of what is happening.
Eersteklasconcerten reminds us about the role that our understanding of human musicality could, and probably should play in rethinking (music) education as a way of interactive participation.
Abstract – Paper
Time
Silvia Rosani
Goldsmiths, University of London
silviarosani@yahoo.it
Voice Sound Analysis and Visual Art to Engage with New Audiences in Public Spaces: A composer perspective
Social inequality is one thing which keeps the community of contemporary classical music and so-called new audiences apart. By describing the main features of some of my most recent works involving audience participation, this paper highlights the importance of accessibility and imagined communities with regards to contemporary music and the sonic arts, and suggests a way to assess the success of the approaches taken by these works. The common thread in most compositions I have developed in the past two years is the blurring of hierarchies between performers and audience as a form of staging alternative collective identities. The combination of the sound analysis of voices with the use of technology along with the inclusion of audiovisual elements expand the traditional spatial binary opposition between stage and audience, promote audience participation and provide the audience a unique and individual sonic and social experience. By enacting non-hierarchical relationships between performers and audience members during a performance and suggesting unusual uses for specific spaces, it is possible to encourage social change and new ways of thinking. Part of the methodology employed to achieve the objectives described above also entails the direct contact composers and performers have the chance to develop with public spaces and institutions, so that workshops for youths are associated with performances and the involvement of public and private funding allows the events to forego attendance fees. The paper illustrates how in the selected works a whole ensemble alternates conversing with audience members to playing, a pianist accompanies her own recorded voice while this is also filtered live by the sound of the piano, a singer sits in the middle of the audience and recollects memories from her childhood thus encouraging other people to share theirs, a cellist performs in different positions within a performance space shared with the audience and delineated by a visual installation which is animated by vibrating metal panels. In all these projects voice sound analysis is an effective means of creating transitions between spoken words and instrumental or electronic sounds. This material bridges the gap between everyday life and performance situations, hence highlighting the association between temporary social groups, enacted by performers and audience, and the society within which one interacts in everyday life. The lack of hierarchy between audience and performer questions the hierarchical structures encountered in everyday life. This encourages social transformation and the erosion of the social inequalities that underlie the distance between the contemporary music world and new audiences. The use of technology and visual elements contributes to guaranteeing the unity of the performance and shapes intimate spaces in which audience members feel comfortable enough to experience unusual interactions with the performers. New audiences are approached directly along with underrepresented communities through the direct link the artists establish with institutions which manage public spaces, thus avoiding the segregation that concert halls and attendance fees tend to create and facilitating theaccess to the world of contemporary music.
Abstract – Keynote Paper
Time – Friday 19.15
Susanna Eastburn
Sound and Music, London
I Thought All Composers Were Dead and Had a Beard
One of the challenges of bringing new music to new audiences is that the latter may look at the former and not see themselves reflected in what is programmed. In 2018, new music still sees massive under-representation by women, and by people from black and minority ethnic, lower socio-economic, disabled and other disadvantaged backgrounds. These represent over 50% of the UK population and we cannot afford not to take this seriously. Diversity has been a buzzword for some years now and many organisations claim to espouse it, but how far are organisations prepared to go to change themselves in order to be truly welcoming to a wider range of people?
In this keynote speech, I will introduce some of the ways in which individual, institutional and systemic bias plays out in the music world, and share some practical examples and insights into how these can begin to be overcome.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Saturday 9.00
Rodolphe Bourotte, Sharon Kanach
Centre Iannis Xenakis, University of Rouen
rodolphe.bourotte@centre-iannis-xenakis.org, sharon.kanach@gmail.com
UPISKETCH: An old idea revisited
Our presentation comprises three main sections:
- As early as the 1950s, Iannis Xenakis had the intuition to develop a machine that enabled one to break free from the constraints of traditional music notation while simplifying the exploration of this new way of composing. In his mind, this tool should facilitate, for example, the graphic and sound transcriptions of the glissandi in his breakout work Metastaseisfrom 1954. The prototype of a machine hybridizing drawing, sound synthesis and music was born only in 1977 in the research centre founded by Xenakis (theCEMAMu): the UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique of CEMAMu). The “agogic” suffix evokes all parameters specific to the expressiveness of music notation; by appending this to the prefix “poly”, Iannis Xenakis opened up the field of the compositional process by making drawing the main vector of music composition (graphically incorporating musical structure, sound, dynamics, envelopes, etc.).
Different versions of the UPIC evolved at the CEMAMu, adapting the system to new technological capabilities, up to the creation of the UPIX solution (UPIC software) for Windows dating from 2001, which no longer depended on the specialized equipment manufactured by the CEMAMu.
- When the Centre Iannis Xenakis (formerly Les Ateliers UPIC/CCMIX, the structure created by Xenakis in 1985 for the promotion of the UPIC worldwide) was establishedat the University ofRouen (2010), one of the projects we had was to continue the development of theUPIC/UPIX, in a way close to Xenakis’soriginal idea. Documents from our own archives, previously un-inventoried, provided testimony from Xenakis himself about potential future developments.
Meanwhile, the CIX had the opportunity to collaboratewith the European University of Cyprusona European-funded program, Interfaces. The specific project is “Urban Music Boxes and Troubadours.” We agreed on the goal to create an UPIC-inspired application for mobile devices that could be integrated into multimedia terminals available in the streets of Nicosia. The application provides the opportunity to draw music, albeitin a more intuitiveway than the original UPIC, thereby fulfilling the project’s general goal of bring “new music to new audiences.”
- A description of the process and creation of this new application UPISKETCH will be presented and future developments for UPISKETCH will be addressed.
The first implementation of UPISKETCH took place in April 2018 in Nicosia (Cyprus) in the form of several workshops with children from various backgrounds, ranging in age from 6 to 10. Ipads were provided already loaded with the UPISKETCH application and the children experienced their very first exposure to composing music. We propose to share documentation of this as a coda to our presentation.
Abstract – Paper=
Time – Saturday 9.30
Motje Wolf, Sarah Younie
De Montfort University
mwolf@dmu.ac.uk, syounie@dmu.ac.uk
Enhancing Music Access – Pedagogic content knowledge for teaching sound-based music
Bringing new music to new audiences requires stakeholders and audiences to have knowledge of this music. The place where we learn about music different to the one we grow up with, is – or should be – school. School teachers, however, do only have a limited time in which they can enhance their own knowledge on pedagogies related to new music. While they might have acquired subject content knowledge (so they might have studied contemporary music at university or listen to it) they might lack the pedagogic content knowledge. However, as one example of new music, sound-based music provides a level playing field for all pupils regardless of their prior knowledge. Still, teachers will need to know the pedagogies that enhance pupils’ access and appreciation of this music.
The Enhancing Music Access project (EMA) investigates music teacher practice through the building of a knowledge hub and a community of practice. The project aims to develop teaching practices in different fields, for example, working with sounds (music technology) in order to enhance pupils’ access to music. In Continuous Professional Development (CPD) sessions, teachers analysed their competences and received CPD accordingly, building a community of practice lasting beyond the duration of the first phase of the project.
In order to sustain this learning and share this with the wider teaching community – and therefore enable them to bring new music to new audiences – the EMA project feeds into the Music MESHGuide project. This project aims to translate research results for teachers in order to enhance teacher competences in classrooms world-wide. The first phase of the EMA project has resulted in MESHguides on classroom listening and sound walks (amongst others).
In this paper we will present recent research findings of the first phase of the EMA project and discuss the current of the Music MESHGuide knowledge hub. This will be followed by an invitation to researchers, teachers and practitioners to join both projects.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Saturday 10.00
Caroline Waddington, Andrew King, Pam Burnand
{1,2} University of Hull, {3} Cambridge University
c.waddington@hull.ac.uk, a.king@hull.ac.uk, pab61@cam.ac.uk
Hull 2017: Engaging communities in collaborative composition and performance
Several studies have highlighted the positive effects of musical engagement (e.g. Croom, 2015), and participation in group music activities has been a particular focus (e.g. Creech et al., 2013; Habron, et al., 2013; Hallam & Creech, 2016), as researchers seek to understand more fully this long-acknowledged positive impact of musicking with others (Small, 1999). Such studies have considered that it may be the creative and social aspects of group music-making in particular which have a positive effect on participants’ wellbeing. Collaborative composition offers strong examples of both of these aspects as participants work together to create new material. However, although it seems likely that participants’ influence over and ownership of the creative material would further contribute to these positive effects, studies have yet to examine these elements in detail. The New Music Biennialresearch project as part of Hull 2017therefore sought to: 1) explore the perceived impact of participation in workshops involving collaborative composition and performance, on diverse groups of people; 2) identify skills and approaches employed by the composer-facilitators in order to understand more fully the approach and skills employed to engage participants in the creative processes.
Through analysis of video observations, pre- and post-project interviews, video recall interviews, and questionnaires, this paper evaluates two composer residencies that sought to engage older people and primary school children. In terms of the perceived impact of participating in the collaborative composition workshops and group performances, thematic analysis of the observational, interview, and questionnaire data revealed themes related to the 5 dimensions of PERMA (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment; Seligman, 2010) – a model which incorporates dimensions of both subjective and psychological wellbeing. Analysis of workshop videos and interviews with composers identified various facilitation skills employed by the composers in order to establish safe creative space and to encourage participants to engage in the process of collaborative composition. This paper adds further evidence to existing literature supporting the relationship between group musical engagement and wellbeing and considers the role played by the facilitator in this process.
REFERENCES
Creech, A., Hallam, S., Varvarigou, M., McQueen, H., & Gaunt, H. (2013). Active music-making: A route to enhanced subjective well-being among older people. Perspectives in Public Health, 133(1), 36–43.
Croom, A. (2015). Music practice and participation for psychological wellbeing: A review of how music influences positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Musicae Scientiae, 15(1), 44–64.
Habron, J., Butterly, F., Gordon, I., & Roebuck, A. (2013). Being well, being musical: Music composition as a resource and occupation for older people. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 76(7), 308–316.
Hallam, S., & Creech, A. (2016). Can active music-making promote health and well-being in older citizens?London Journal of Primary Care, 8(2), 21–25.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2010). Flourish: Positive psychology and positive interventions. The Tanner lectures on
human values (pp. 1–243). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Small, C. (1999). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. A lecture. Music Education Research, 1(1), 9–22.
There is also an audio-visual presentation of the project on Saturday
Abstract – Paper
Time – Saturday 11.00
Leigh Landy
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
llandy@dmu.ac.uk
EARS 2 + Compose with Sounds: Bringing sound-based creativity to anyone with no prior experience
This paper will focus on a project called the EARS 2 Pedagogical Project (ears2.dmu.ac.uk) that involved the creation of an eLearning environment that is supported by creative software for sonic creativity, Compose with Sounds (CwS – cws.dmu.ac.uk) which is being further developed as part of the Interfaces project (this conference is part of Interfaces). EARS 2 was originally proposed by UNESCO which had supported its predecessor (www.ears.dmu.ac.uk). They felt that offering a means by which young people could gain access to knowledge related to sonic creativity was something that could be of enormous value in both developed and less developed countries.
Key concepts launched in the author’s book Making Music with Sounds (Routledge, 2012) have been translated into webpages and ‘projects’ (similar to lessons) on the EARS 2 website focusing on three main areas: real-world sounds, manipulated sounds and synthetic sounds and placed within a framework of learning through listening, learning and making (using CwS). It was originally conceived of for the age group of 11-14 year olds but that has expanded after initial workshops. Compose with Sounds has been created to enable people to either record sounds or use sounds offered when the software is downloaded or found elsewhere online as sonic material from which one can create music in an enjoyable and intuitive manner.
The talk will first present the contextual and historical foundations for EARS 2/CwS. This will be followed by the combination of a brief demonstration of both focusing more on their goals and methods of construction, the concept behind their use in the classroom as well as in in other situations (e.g., in community arts contexts, by individuals of all ages, as will be discussed further by others at this conference) and the notion of cultural adaption which goes well beyond translation for use in other nations or language areas – a number of translations are already underway. The new CwS developments supported by the Interfaces project will be introduced as well as links to other Interfaces actions including our creation of new schools/community taster workshop content which is already online (http://www.interfaces.dmu.ac.uk/activities/hacking-and-sound-based-creativity-in-schools/). The talk will conclude with some optimistic thoughts regarding the future of sound-based creativity through the development of new communities of interest despite many countries’ reduction in support of music education in schools. (The development team ironically believes that EARS 2/CwS may help modernise and broaden music education in schools despite this trend.) It will be proposed that the MTI2’s approach to bringing new music to new audiences is, in a sense, an approach towards the creation of new forms of 21stcentury folk music, that is, collaborative and individual music making, in particular those involving the organisation of everyday sounds, open to all.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Saturday 11.30
Duncan Chapman, David Holland
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
dchapmanhoot@gmail.com, dholland@dmu.ac.uk
Sharing Experiences of Sound-based Creativity in Schools and Community Settings
As part of the Interfaces project a series of workshops involving sound-based creativity are taking place in schools and community settings in the UK, Germany and Greece. The goal of these sound-based workshops is to demonstrate the value and user-friendliness of new musical creation in a manner whereby the approach can be taken on within the schools and other community settings without any other support afterwards. The workshops build on our previous work with the aim of creating model sessions that less experienced (but enthusiastic) leaders can use them to develop their own sessions.
The workshops involve the following –
- Participation in listening exercises to help develop aural awareness
- Recording environmental sounds while participating in soundwalks (where participants walk through an area listening closely to the environment)
- Composition of sound pieces on computers using sound materials recorded by the group on the soundwalk
- Listening to examples of sound-based music and exploring the connections between them and the work done in the workshops
- Collecting information based on the Intention/Reception project concerning the participants’ responses to musical examples.
One of the key pedagogical benefits of sound-based music (in educational settings) is that it enables pupils of all abilities to have the opportunity to be creative with sound without the need for previous musical training. It also enhances and develops skills that can support learning across the curriculum, especially in subjects such as ICT, music, maths and geography. In non-formal settings, it offers the opportunity for participants to explore their sonic environments and to create work that responds to the act of listening.
This project aims to develop participants’ aural (listening) skills through participation in different exercises such as soundwalks as well as engaging participants in sound- based composition and introducing them to examples from the repertoire of sound- based music.
This talk will introduce the workshops and explain how their structure is grounded in previous projects (such as Holland, 2016; Chapman / BCMG, 2013). We will seek to describe the workshop process through examples of work and contributions from participants.
We will also discuss some of the issues around delivering this work, looking at both practical/technical aspects as well as some aesthetic concerns in relation to working inside institutions for whom this approach is unfamiliar.
The final workshop involves the completion of Intention/Reception questionnaires (based on the Intention/Reception project), and we will discuss and share some of the findings from these questionnaires and the implications of this for future pedagogical and community projects involving sound-based creativity. The adaptable nature of these workshops will also be discussed and examples will be given of how the workshops have been effectively conducted with a diverse range of participants and in a range of different settings (such as schools, arts centres, community projects).
Abstract – Paper
Time – Saturday 12.00
John Richards
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
jrich@dmu.ac.uk
Cardboard Boxes and Cupboards: Radical electronic music
I was recently asked to give an interview and be filmed in my studio. As a musician known for their work in electronic music, this would appear a legitimate request. On reflection, however, this seemly innocent question pointed to a schism in my work and highlighted a particular characteristic of DIY electronic music. My electronic music exists in the form of cupboards full of makeshift containers, cardboard boxes, with electronic components, wires and miscellaneous odds and ends. These boxes and cupboards and are not just for storage or archiving, but a reminder of an electronic music that is concerned with placing materials and concepts in the hands and minds of participants, to bring and to give the opportunity for, in the words of Christopher Small, ‘musicking’. These cupboards hold the remains of workshops, participatory events and public art making; whilst the boxes are vehicles to transport raw materials and tools to the coalface of art making and education. The cardboard box acts as a metaphor too, as a humble offering to reach out beyond the institution, suggesting a decentralised model for the creation of electronic music. This approach to electronic music is not born in the recording studio or computer lab, or made on a workbench, but represents ‘arty electronics’ and ‘arty music’ brought to a village hall, pub or bar, community centre or arts space.
The use of the word ‘radical’ in the title of this talk may seem audacious, but I wish to look more closely at the use of this term in this given context. Latinradicalis“of, or having roots”implies anorigin, the essential, a blank page or a clean slate. From the root we also get ideas of emergent, tailor-made, personalised, ownership and belonging to. One of the alluring traits of DIY electronic music is the potential to make on your own terms. This ultimately serves a demographic function where those considered on the margins are given licence to participate in a music that may be viewed as exclusive or esoteric.
This talk also presents two projects, DIY Instrument Making and DIY Instruments in Schools, which are part of interfaces: an international, interdisciplinary project funded by the European Union focusing on bringing new music to an extensive range of new audiences. These projects fundamentally connect to the idea of cardboard boxes and cupboards and a radical electronic music as outlined here. Consequently, it is not the case of bringing new music to new audiences. In this radical electronic music, audiences would become participants who have to find the music in objects, materials and in the act of doing and making. The projects are not considered as mutually exclusive as they both set out to address the essence of music for DIY electronics. The making of electronic sound devices and composition are viewed as an holistic practice as a music of objects and things. The object in this case is also the piece and acts as a well of material for the classroom, concert hall, workshop, or makerspace; and with the proviso of “What is good for kids, is good for adults.” Specific examples of workshops given by Duncan Chapman, Jim Frize and John Richards for the projects will be discussed and used to illustrate a radical electronic music that is focused on participation, not tied to the recording studio, and taken out to the broader community.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Saturday 12.30
Ruta Vitkauskaite
ruta.vitauskaite@gmail.com
Walking Opera
Active participation in the creation of music has been a way of experiencing music from long before the classical music tradition was born. Music in a ritual, where the whole community is actively participating and contributing to it, is way of connecting, celebrating and healing.
In classical music, however, a gradual division of roles – composer, performer, listener – has now reached a peak, where these roles define precise levels of participation in the musical event. Here, the composer presents their idea in the form of a piece. The piece is disintegrated and reintegrated in the rehearsal, and the product of the work is demonstrated to the listener, hopefully practising active listening on hearing the piece. The three – composer, performer and listener – are participating in the same musical event, but through different modes of engagement, at different times, and resulting in a different experience of it.
Such refined division of roles in contemporary classical music also requires very specific experience and preparation – not only of the composer and performer, but also of the listener.
However, being musical, and therefore being able to actively participate in musical events, is something that we, so it seems, inherit with our genes (ref. to Stefan Koelsch and Walter Siebel book ‘Towards a Neural Basis of Music Perception’).
By blurring the roles of composer, performer and listener, and by engaging my audience into active participation, I aim to allow everyone without that specific education to be a part of the piece, for a more authentic, more involving and therefore more rewarding musical experience. The musical experience may become an environment for self-discovery and self-expression.
However, here I come to a question – doesn’t making music available for wider audiences (not educated in this very specific field) require presentation of some simplified version of it?
I try to answer ‘No’, and prove it through the experimental research.
As a result of this research, Walking Opera was born: a site-specific work with strong engagement with local communities. The main and core element of this work is thorough participation of the audience in the whole creative process of the work. It has two active stages:
1 – Voice exploration workshops with local communities: Participants learn to understand and explore their voices, share stories of their local areas with us, and together create vocal compositions. We, from our side, get our audience to experience a new opera ‘from within’ – starting with new opera vocal techniques, and finishing with the creation of a contemporary opera scene together.
2 – A new opera as sound-walk: All the audio material from the workshops is worked into the soundtrack for the Sound-walk. The audience are given headphones and invited for a walk around their local area, to see and hear the familiar streets and buildings in a new way. The story of the opera unfolds as the local objects come to life through arias and recitatives, and vocal choirs created by the communities during the workshops.
See also: audio-visual presentation of ‘Walking Opera’ on Saturday.
Abstract – Paper (In PACE 1)
Time – Saturday 17.30
Michiko Saiki
Freelance
michikosaiki.piano@gmail.com
The Vocalizing Pianist: The voices or women
In this lecture recital, I will introduce my project The Vocalizing Pianist: The Voices of Women and perform a composition created from the project. I re-imagine the theoretical framework of l’écriture féminine(feminine writing), a concept developed by the French post-structural feminists, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, as a new aesthetic concept, realized through musical performance. Due to the pianist’s vocalization, the vocalizing pianist genre makes the performer’s body and gender an integral element of the performance. The performance draws the audience’s attention to the corporeality of the performer and reveals the performer as a vulnerable, gendered-being. Because of these characteristics, I suggest that the vocalizing pianist genre enables the audience to experience such aesthetics as sensorial. My project offers an alternative concert space that generates a female-centric space based on the ideology of l’écriture féminine— one that centers the female experience and aesthetics free from the patriarchal criteria that govern art and daily life. I aim to create a new sensory experience for the audience where they can challenge their gender stereotypes and learn new perspectives.
In this presentation, I will perform For them…by Turkish composer Beste Özçelebi. The piece is written from a perspective of a child bride who goes through great range of emotion: she finds out about her arranged marriage, tries to understand and accept her life, but she is also scared, devastated and calling for a help. The piece juxtaposes the toy piano performance in the video and the piano performance on stage. The live performer represents the child bride who is forced to act as an adult while the video portrays the child’s true self.
Abstract – Paper (PACE 1)
Time – Saturday 18.0
Emma-Kate Matthews
EKM Works
hello@ekmworks.com
The Spatial Instrument: Spatiosonic practice in real-time
As we approach the post-information age, we find our lives increasingly saturated with the availability of digital media. Music and technology have enjoyed a productive, symbiotic relationship over the last few decades, and the virtual format of digitally recorded and distributed media now dominates our experience of this content.
Much current recorded music, especially that which is digitally produced, is in denial of its physicality. Ideas of site and space have shifted from the real, to the virtual. As such, ideas of site specificity are changing. Typically, recorded music is currently made in purpose-built, acoustically non-opinionated studios and listened to on loudspeakers. The loudspeaker is the site of the sound. Sometimes recorded music simulates spatiality by applying effects such as digital reverb. Though these effects are mostly acceptable to our ears, the spaces they conjure are not real per se.
On the other hand, when we experience live music, it is most often played in theatres and concert halls which are designed to support all genres of music. The architectural result of such spaces is one which necessarily provides a standardised and generic acoustic and audience/performer layout.
Historically, architecture has played an active role in the experience and composition of live music. The Dutch renaissance composer Adrian Willaert is famed for having developed ideas around ‘polychoral’ music, as initiated by the spatially diverse positioning of choristers in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. In contrast, our current experience of live music is generally frontal and static. We normally sit when we listen and we are usually sitting face to face with the performers, who dutifully occupy their usual place on the stage. When we listen to music frontally, it hits us like a flat sheet. Any physical distance between sound sources is imperceptible as it either doesn’t exist in significant amounts, or is ‘corrected’ in the conducting of the piece.
Conversely, spatial music requires us to listen differently. When we experience spatial music, we more readily hear the individual components and we are able to move (our bodies and/or our heads) in and amongst the sound sources. In experiencing these separations, we become much more exposed to the composed interactions between musical elements. For instance, a harmonic structure is easier to understand as separate elements, but can also be perceived as unified; the sound simultaneously surrounds us and makes its component parts apparent, even visible.
Spatial music demands an unusual way of listening which is distinct from the flat listening that we so regularly practice. This presentation will speculate on opportunities for exposing new audiences, beyond purely academic circles, to creative reciprocities between space and music. Specific discussion points will include:
– What is spatial music? with historic and personal examples)
– How do we listen to spatial music?
– What does it mean to ‘listen’?
– How do we understand ‘spatial realities’ in both real and virtual environments, through sound and music?
– What opportunities exist for encouraging new audiences to engage with ideas of site, space and music through spatial listening?
Abstract – Paper (PACE 1)
Time Saturday – 18.30
Barbara Lüneburg
University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz
barbara.lueneburg@kug.ac.at
Transcoding: From ‘highbrow art’ to participatory culture
K-Pop artist PSY andgender theorist Judith Butler, contemporary art music and pop culture – how can these possibly be considered together? The artistic research project TransCoding – From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture (PEEK AR 259-G21), funded by the Austrian Science Fund, has attempted to find an answer. TransCoding engaged with the topic of participatory culture by using social media in the context of artistic practice. My team and Iencouraged participation and shared discourse in the new arts by actively involving an online audience in the making of multimedia artworks. We hoped thus to make ‘highbrow’ art, that is, contemporary classical music and multimedia art, more accessible to a broader public.
Our main target group was an internet-literate young audience, mostly drawn from popular culture,who might not necessarily be considered the typical audience for classical contemporary multimedia performances. During the official runtime of the project (Feb 2014-January 2017) the TransCoding team built a network of various social media channels around the WordPress site what-ifblog.net. The blog served as the central social media and content base, and also as a contact point for our community. Here we introduced our topics of multimedia art and contemporary (art) music, community participation, and the ongoing creation of our show under the categories “Art we love”, “You, us and the project”, and “Making of”, respectively. In a fourth category we chose “identity” as our main topic for the content of the artworks and the blog. The concept of identity offered a framework for the project that was universally relevant and united our otherwise diverse international community members.
We invited to speak out, share discourse and take influence on the creation of our artworks, thus empowering our followers to express their own identities and participate in the creative process. Via calls for entries we encouraged our visitors to contribute images, sounds, and texts that I incorporated in the multimedia artwork Slices of Lifeand the installation Read me. The overall content of both artworkswas grounded in democratic affordances that we granted the community. Our members influenced the emergent fields of interest by passively rejecting or actively reacting to what we presented, and they shaped the content by way of their submitted narratives, imagery and sounds.
In TransCoding, we employed principles of participatory culture in the communication and creative process, thus redefining the (commonly hierarchic) relationship between artist and community as one of permeability and mutual influence. We applied findings and theories from media sociology and cultural science to an artistic process; we investigated their applicability and meaning in the arts, and their impact on the resulting artworks itself, on the community we had gathered, and on the role of the artist. We asked how granting creative influence to our community altered traditional (power) models of artist-audience relation and if the interaction consequently adds meaning to both. In my talk I will like to discuss the artworks that came into being and their genesis, while reflecting on scholarly and methodological considerations. http://transcoding.info
Abstract – Paper
Time – Sunday 9.30
Ellen Thompson
sound, Aberdeen
participate@sound-scotland.co.uk
The soundfestival: a festival targeted at new audiences
soundlwas set up in 2005 by local people to bring new music to new audiences in North East Scotland, where there was little opportunity to experience new music. Over the last 13 years the festival has grown into not only one of Scotland’s main new music events, but an organisation with a year round programme of activity that works directly with and for the local community. Each year 20-30% of its audience are attending a new music event for the first time. How do you grow this new audience and sustain attendance at new music events?
This talk will demonstrate how soundhas embedded itself in the local community to become the thriving grass-roots organisation it is today, serving Scotland’s third largest city, Aberdeen, and neighbouring Aberdeenshire, a vast rural county covering nearly 2,500 square miles.
Key elements of this talk will explore the many ways in which soundprogrammes its events. Is it possible to find a balance between showing experimental work and engaging the local community? It will also look at the role partnerships and working with those in your local community has on developing an audience over the long-term.
It will also discuss if a new music festival can be a participative community project at the same time. What is the role of learning, participation and outreach in developing audiences and performers alike?
The best thing about the festival was:
“bringing aspects of our community (input from primary school children) into a newly composed piece and having my child, who contributed, be able to see the live performance locally.”
Parent/audience member 2018
Exploring specific programmed events and strands from our year round work, including the festival, we will conclude with the impact the programme has had locally in creating and supporting audiences and performers and the plan to build on this in future years.
“This is a festival that clinches that most elusive of ideals: it’s a genuine meeting point of community engagement and contemporary music.”
Kate Molleson, The Guardian 2014
Abstract – Paper
Time – Sunday 10.00
Bobbie Gardner
for-Wards
bobbie@for-wards.co.uk
Composition in a Hyperlocal Environment – for-Wards: Citywide
‘Hyperlocal’ is a journalistic term defined by Radcliffe (2012) as “Online news or content services pertaining to a town, village, single postcode or other small, geographically defined community.” (Radcliffe, 2012, 9). Radcliffe argues that the definition of the term ‘hyperlocal media’ is not straightforward, because “audience perceptions of what constitutes ‘local’ vary considerably” stating that “a sense of place is at the core of all hyperlocal services” (Radcliffe, 2012, 9).
My practice-based research includes the formation of a compositional methodology that includes elements of socially engaged practice via the notion of hyper-locality and site-specific working methods. My fieldwork is being carried out through a series of community-based collaborative composition project which includes for-Wards; a 2-year citywide music programme. for-Wardscelebrates Birmingham’s communities by commissioning 10 composers to co-create 10 bespoke musical pieces with 40 community groups (one from each of Birmingham’s 40 wards). Each piece is informed and inspired by the communities, stories and found sounds in each locality. Each work is performed back to the communities in the locality where the sounds and communities are found.
This research project actively undermines the ongoing threat of the marginalisation of contemporary music which often separates the creation of artistic work in social communities from having the same aspiration as ‘high art’, thus labelled as “community arts”.
Radcliffe, D. (2012) Here and Now: UK hyperlocal media today. Available at:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/here-and-now-uk-hyperlocal-media-today.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Sunday 10.30
Caroline Waddington, Andrew King, Pam Burnand
{1,2} University of Hull, {3} Cambridge University
c.waddington@hull.ac.uk, a.king@hull.ac.uk, pab61@cam.ac.uk
Minute of Listening: Engaging primary school children in new music
Minute of Listeningis a digital tool created by Sound and Music, the UK’s national charity for new music, that introduces pupils to a wealth of exciting sonic experiences. Pupils listen actively to a minute of creative music or sound at some point during the school day and teachers may choose to employ various extension activities to focus on creative, musical, or cross-curricular development. For Hull 2017and as part of the PRS Foundation’s New Music Biennial, over 50 primary schools in Hull participated in Minute of Listening. The majority of the Minutes were excerpts of new music expertly selected and curated by Sound and Music and connected in some way to Hull to further engage the children in the New Music Biennialand the wider City of Cultureprogramme.
This paper will consider the benefits of engaging children in new music through Minute of Listening, with reference to the perceived impact on children’s musical and extra-musical skills and wellbeing. The study had 3 research questions:
- How do teachers use Minute of Listening to support learning?
- What might be the musical or extra-musical benefits of participating in Minute of Listening?
- What effect might Minute of Listening have on pupils’ wellbeing?
Six Minute of Listeningsessions were observed and video-recorded at three Hull primary schools over the course of four months during 2017. Observational data were analysed in NVivo and various teaching strategies facilitating the children’s engagement with Minutes of new music were identified. Data analysis also revealed three types of listening that were encouraged and developed during Minute of Listeningsessions: focussed listening, critical listening, and listening to others. Subsequently, several potential benefits, both musical and extra-musical, of listening to and participating in activities exploring new music were determined. In addition to the expected musical benefits, analysis suggested that participation in Minute of Listening supported development of descriptive vocabulary, creative expression, concentration, self-reflection, perspective-taking, and critical evaluation.
The possible impact on children’s wellbeing at two of the schools was also estimated through the collection of repeated measures questionnaire data using the EPOCH Measure of Adolescent Wellbeing (Kern, Benson, Steinberg, & Steinberg, 2015). A clear positive effect was found for all participants at one of the schools. These initial findings suggest that there may be a positive relationship between pupils’ engagement with Minute of Listeningand their wellbeing and that this relationship merits further exploration in the future.
REFERENCES
Kern, M. L., Benson, L., Steinberg, E. L., & Steinberg, L. (2016). The EPOCH measure of adolescent well-being.American Psychological Association, 28(5), 586–597.
Abstract – Paper
Time – Sunday 11.00
Isabel Jones, Takashi Kikuchi
Salamanda Tandem
isabel.jones@salamanda-tandem.org
Salamanda Tandem: White Cane
Salamanda Tandem: White Caneis a quartet created by composers Isabel Jones and Duncan Chapman, and long-cane players Takashi Kikuchi and Mickel Smithen.
This site-specific work reveals a hidden sonic world made audible for the first time to a public of passers-by and invited audiences through wireless headsets.
White Canedraws on 29 years of Salamanda Tandem’s dedicated collaboration between blind, sighted and visually impaired artists and audiences. The provenance of the work lies in giving voice to the long cane, ever present in the room or out on the street with us, and to the potential of audio description as an artform. Tools, that for most sighted people are objects for identification of disability or deficit, here instead we invite audiences to hear the white cane’s choreography of sound and be the catalyst for a libretto of sung audio description. Tuning in to this parallel universe, audiences hear the ground underneath their feet, sense the shift of air between the buildings, and re-imagine the space around them, entering into dialogue with VI performers, to become part of the performance itself. White Caneutilises the sonification of tactile sensation performed by 2 long cane performers. The raw sound of the live cane is transmitted live, preserving the individual gestural ‘voice’ of the performer. The cane sounds are augmented by live performance (acoustic and electronic), and sung audio description which is taken out from its pedestrian interpretive root to become an integral part of the soundworld.
As a visually impaired person, Mickel describes his use of the long cane as ‘sensing the ground like cats whiskers’, and Takashi, who is totally blind, connects the playing of his viola in White Caneto the long cane, which he uses like a bow to expertly play the performance site and reveal a sound world of surfaces, gaps and vibrations.
A variety of bespoke performances of this work have been created for Huddersfield
Contemporary Music Festival, Spitalfields Music Summer Festival, Flipside YAK Festival @First Site Gallery Colchester, Ludus Leeds Performance Festival, Wirksworth Festival, West Bridgford Park /The Rushcliffe Wellbeing Hub Nottinghamshire & as the closing ceremony of an international dance and visual impairment symposium at Tallinn University, Estonia.
Access As Art
Access is central to the art and ethos of Salamanda Tandem: White Cane. Tactile maps, braille, large print, audio information, and people who know how to facilitate access, and an inherent flexibility is embedded into the work to enable audiences to engage on their own terms.
Support
Development of the work has been supported by: Leeds University Department of Performance and Cultural Industries, (Ludus Festival), Sound And Music (as part of the Composer-Curator scheme), Grants For The Arts, Arts Council England, Nottinghamshire County Council’s Co- Production team and Seldom Heard Carers Commissioning Fund.
See also: performance immediately after the talk
Abstract – Workshop
Time – Saturday 14.00
David Holland, Duncan Chapman
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
dholland@dmu.ac.uk, dchapmanhoot@gmail.com
Compose with Sounds (Sound-based musical creativity)
Compose with Sounds (CwS – cws.dmu.ac.uk) is a pedagogical software for making music out of sounds, which is being further developed as part of the EU Interfaces project that aims to increase interest and participation in various forms of new music. Compose with Sounds has been created to enable people to either record sounds or use sounds offered by CwS as sonic material from which music can be created in an engaging and intuitive way.
For this conference we would like to propose demonstrating the potential of CwS by running a ‘taster’ workshop in which conference delegates will have the opportunity to learn and experience the software for themselves. By participating in the workshop, delegates will be able to use sounds recorded by pupils in order to try out creating a piece in CwS. Delegates will be given a tour of the CwS environment in the same way that pupils are introduced to the software in Interfaces workshops in schools. Delegates will be able to then experiment with adding effects, editing and arranging sounds in CwS as a pupil would do when composing using CwS.
Prior to the conference we will run a CwS workshop in a school in Loughborough (De Lisle College) with Year 9 students in which the pupils will produce their own compositions in CwS. A selection of the work that these pupils have produced will be available for delegates to view in CwS as part of the workshop so they can witness how the software has been used in a real classroom situation. The teacher and some of the pupils will also be present to answer questions from delegates about their experience of using the software. Delegates will have the opportunity to take CwS away on a memory stick, which will be given to them at the event.
At 19.15 the pupils’ pieces will be presented in a diffusion concert performed by the pupils themselves to an audience of delegates.
Abstract – Workshop
Time – Saturday 15.00
John Richards
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
jrich@dmu.ac.uk
Music for DIY Electronics
A floor and table covered with crocodile clips, wire, capacitors, and resonator tin cans and boxes. These materials form the basis of a workshop to explore music for DIY Electronics. The process of charging and discharging a capacitor in an electronic circuit becomes analogous to a musical phrase or envelope. And by connecting and patching different combinations of capacitors in a circuit, a variety of behaviours and morphologies of sound can be produced. Make complex beats, rhythms, pops, clicks and chirps with relay-based oscillators amplified by everyday objects. Play a large-scale electronic instrument by generating electricity through movement. Listen to a motor by exploiting alternating current as a sound wave. Mix these processes and actions with other sounds and instruments at hand.
As part of the interfaces project, a series of workshops has been given exploring music for DIY electronics. These workshops set out to explore and define a new type of materialism in electronic music, where composing inside electronics and code, instrument as composition, and object-based music are prioritised. The making of musical sound apparatus or instrument, composition/the creation of pieces, and the use and exploitation of resources are seen as an holistic practice; whilst making and performing are group-based and realised in ad hoc or non-specialised spaces. Furthermore, the principle aim of these workshops was to: place an emphasis on music rather than electronics; explore a range of materials that were cheap and readily available; categorise pieces and circuits by difficulty rather than age; incorporate a variety of hand skills; place all objects, instruments and actions in a musical context; and develop extensible pieces/instruments (things that could be adapted or extended). This workshop for ‘Bringing New Music to New Audiences’ conference combines some of these workshops and approaches into a single musical event where performance and making co-exist.
http://www.interfaces.dmu.ac.uk/
http://www.dirtyelectronics.org/
Abstract – Workshop
Time – Sunday 16.00
Rodolphe Bourotte, Sharon Kanach
Centre Iannis Xenakis, University of Rouen
rodolphe.bourotte@centre-iannis-xenakis.org, sharon.kanach@gmail.com
UPISKETCH: An old idea revisited (UPIC)
Please refer to the abstract for their talk – Saturday 9.00
Programme – Performance
Time – Saturday 17.45
Barbara Lüneburg
Slices of Life (2016/17) for amplified violin and voice, video and soundtrack
Barbara Lüneburg developed Slices of Life (2016/17) in the framework of the artistic research project TransCoding-From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture supported by the Austrian Science Fund as PEEK-Project AR 259-G21). The topic of the artwork is identity and the many facets identity can take on. The purpose of TransCoding was to encourage participation in art and generate new audience in classical contemporary music/art by initialising an online community that picked up on the theme of ’identity’ in an artistic, social and interactive way. The main target group was an internet-literate young audience who were interested in creatively expressing themselves, came from popular culture, and wouldn’t necessarily attend classical contemporary multimedia performances.
The central social media and content base was the blog what-ifblog.net. On the social media channels around this blog, Lüneburg designed ‘calls for entries’ in which she asked for creative contributions on topics she raised around the theme ‘identity’. Content needed to be carefully prepared for people who she wanted to interest in the project, especially when posts were concerned with contemporary (classical) art music or new multimedia art. She needed to find an angle that would talk to the community of mostly non-professional creatives, most of whom they had never met, who came from different cultural backgrounds, and who had little or no experience with this kind of art form.
The community interpreted calls for entries in a way that met their personal interest, and influenced the emergent fields of interest by passively rejecting or actively reacting to what the TransCoding team presented, and they shaped the content by way of their submitted narratives, imagery and sounds. If the community couldn’t be engaged through a call for entry, Lüneburg and her team didn’t continue on that particular path anymore. Topics such as spirituality, human rights or gender were brought up in guest blog posts that later became an undercurrent of the narratives for the show. Stories were told by individual community members that served as text material. The visual and compositional aesthetic of Slices of Lifewas similarly influenced by the community, and sound and compositional contributions of members were woven into the soundtrack of Slices of Lifethat turned into a mélange of classical music, popular culture and contemporary art music.
Slices of Lifehad contributors from Cuba, Spain, Canada, Croatia, USA, Austria, Philippines, Armenia, Russia, England, Poland, Bulgaria, New Zeeland, Germany, Romania, France. Its contributors are: Louis Aguirre, Victor Barceló, Julien Charest, Gloria Guns, Anthony Green, Camilla Hoitenga, Olivia Kieffer, LIA, Feliz Anne Macahis, Katarina Michelitsch, Anahit Mughnetsyan, Alina Murzakhanova, Paul Norman, Heghine Ohanyan, Mikolaj Pociecha, Alexandra Radoulova, Hali Rey, Damian Stewart, Felix Christian Thiessen, Sabina Ulubeanu, Isabelle Vigier, Michael Wolters, Susanne Wosnitzka and students of Karl Franzens University Graz and University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
Slices of Life on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOzfntqyq1w
Programme – Performance
Time – Sunday 12.00
Isabel Jones, Duncan Chapman, Takashi Kikuchi and Mickel Smithen
Salamanda Tandem: White Cane
See programme under Isabel Jones and Takashi Kikuchi’s talk – Sunday 11.00.
Installation PACE 2
Time – Friday–Sunday
Peter Batchelor
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
pbatchelor@dmu.ac.uk
Cascades (2018)
Much of my research to date has been concerned with the relationship between acousmatic compositional practice and sound art. In Batchelor 2015, I attempted to identify some potential overlaps and compatibilities between these two apparently incompatible forms which might prove fruitful when applied to broader, Sound Art-related practice. A not inconsiderable part of my discussion concerned the relevance of acousmatic music to a wider listenership, and how such work might be brought to new audiences. I argue that there is much to be gained from the application of acousmatic compositional techniques and practices to sound art contexts, and that detailed ‘musical’ as well as referential listening might be encouraged in real-world contexts if appropriate strategies are implemented to accommodate it.
One of the aspects of acousmatic music most immediately compelling to the uninitiated listener is the deployment of sound in space. However, the large-scale coordinated multichannel speaker arrays required for the high-quality presentation of acousmatic works are usually seen as the preserve of institutions who can provide the resource required for reliable, high quality signal processing and sample-accurate digital audio conversion. Recent developments in low-cost computing, however, allow affordable distributed networks which, while requiring certain compromises and modifications to workflow, can nevertheless accommodate rich acousmatic soundscape generation over multiple channels at a relatively low cost. This in turn permits the development of particularly extravagant multichannel arrays.
As such, since 2004, I have been developing a series of works, collectively entitled GRIDs,comprising such affordable, user-defined multichannel arrays. These are sculptural insofar as they are physical, navigable objects comprising geometric configurations of many (in some cases potentially hundreds of) loudspeakers. Being so massively (and geometrically) multichannel, they permit the generation of extremely intricate and immersive spatial sound environments, which encourage ambulatory investigation and scrutiny. My approach to the composition of material for all of these environments has emerged directly from an acousmatic compositional aesthetic and associated spatialisation practice, employed with a view to exploring how listeners might engage with constructed image space (e.g. experiencing it through, beyond, or within the physical object).
The current work, Cascade(2018), presents a flat-panel array of 256 small loudspeakers suspended in a 16×16 array above the listener. The volume of speakers is accommodated by the use of affordable technologies as described above—in this case, networked Raspberry Pi computers and cheap multichannel gaming interfaces. Aside from exploring the technical and aesthetic challenges inherent in managing such volumes of loudspeakers with a view to creating a coherent spatial sound environment, the installation seeks, through a series of short compositions, to consider the deployment of acousmatic compositional materials and strategies across the ‘flat panel’ speaker space.
Batchelor, P., 2015. Acousmatic Approaches to the Construction of Image and Space in Sound Art. Organised Sound, 20(2), pp.148-159.
Installation
Time – Friday only
Alison Ballard, Mike Blow
Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University
mike.blow@dmu.ac.uk
Pod (2009, 2018 version)
Pod (2009; this version, 2018) is a tactile sound art installation by Alison Ballard and Mike Blow. A large inflatable sphere is presented, containing a battery and a speaker system. The pod plays a pre-recorded audio composition which emphasises low frequencies. These cause the skin of the pod to vibrate. The audience are invited to touch and hug the sphere, creating a combined audio, visual and tactile experience.
Pod is a work that addresses the physicality of sound and encourages whole-body listening. It bridges – somewhat according to its presentation – the contexts of experiential artwork, public entertainment and education. The piece is not, in the action-response sense, interactive; but it rewards interaction, as by hugging the sphere or placing your ear against the skin and listening inside, the experience becomes qualitatively different. Because of this multisensory aspect, and the unusual interface between artwork and audience, the piece was commissioned for Science Museum London’s Wonderlab and has been installed there for a five-year period.
Installation
Time – Friday-Sunday
Seiichiro Matsumura
Tokyo University of Technology – School of Design
smatsumura@stf.teu.ac.jp
Sound Wrinkle and Your Angelic Voice
Interactive sound installations “Sound Wrinkle” and “Your Angelic Voice – Ambient Expansion” focus on people’s experiences of exploring inside their own voices and discovering their beauty. They demonstrate that music is not only derived from professional composers or musicians, it can also be created and defined by the audience members themselves. The auditory (and visual) feedback including resonance coming from these installations are intended to be an entry point to new music. Furthermore, guiding audiences’ attitudes towards sound exploration might be a key to the development of new audiences.
These installations are technological environments which transform vocal sounds and extract characteristic essences by using several computational technologies, such as micro-regions of sound, granular synthesis or FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) for smooth time stretching, for example.
People do not need to have knowledge or any experience of computer music technology. All they need to do is to participate and interact with the installations in simple ways such as just talking to the microphone, moving their bodies and seeing/hearing the results. They enable non-professional audiences to access sound fragments which are part of their own voices through playful experiences. It is expected that they discover that those fragments are utilised for structuring musical materials. Subsequently participants are invited to think about what sound or music might be and which element of sound helps to make the connection.
John Cage, the American experimental music composer, suggested that actively listening to your surroundings – “open your ears” – could offer the path to new aspects of music including the notion or lack of silence. Therefore, this did not mean only focus on listening, it also pointed out an audience’s attitude towards sound by way of a radical change of perception. His philosophy has influenced, for example, the notions of Deep Listening and Sonic Meditation by Pauline Oliveros and the sound installations series “Catch the Wave” by Takehisa Kosugi and “Lower Sound Case” by Taylor Dupree.
These two interactive sound installation projects for the conference started with similar motivations but also focused on how to design a system which assists people to expand their listening experience and to reveal possibilities of the sonic electroacoustic world derived from their own interaction and participation.
The piece “Sound Wrinkle” sees participants exploring their own voices’ subtle texture. Just like a moving tape head back and forth on an audiotape, the participant becomes a virtual tape head facilitating the playback of a recording of his/her voice by moving themselves side by side in front of the display which indicates the visualisation of the spectrogram of the recorded sound. They can control and hear the resulting transition of their own vocal sound leading to the discovery of aesthetic aspects of their own voices in both audio and visual dimensions.
The piece “Your Angelic Voice” has the system transforming any sounds into “angelic” sounds by way of combinations of manipulating parameters of delay effects, pitch shifting and granular synthesis.
