Geometria Vitale

Fixed media

Gianni Dell Vittoria

The piece represents the concept of vital survival filtered through a geometric vision of nature. It is as if the vital impulses were carried to the extreme boundary between existence and non-existence. Technically it is built on the Bohlen_Pierce intonation, a system of pitches set to the centrality of the 12th, rather than the 8th. All sounds are synthesis sounds made entirely with Csound

Caged Structures IV

Fixed media

Alessio Rossato

Dynamic and temporal structure of this work is inspired by the J. Cage's piece 7’10.554” for a percussionist, specifically the electronic realization of a voice/line (A - All Others) of the score, left (freely) interpretable by John Cage who did not exclude a realization (freely) with electronic/electroacoustic devices supports already in 1956... Realized the line A “electroacoustically” usable for the performance with a percussionist (original version of the score), this electronic material is elaborated and re-organized to give shape to different acousmatic pieces. The acoustic material is modeled, redesigned and sculpted to shape new pieces with common source material. In this way a sort of wide range of sound variations / sculptures is generated which see material as the main focus in the relationship between space and the vibrational energy (timbre) of sound. I then created a layering of the resulting “voices“ reaching the overlap of 28 independent voices (Digital Tracks) divided into periods. The periods are delimited by reverberated sound events and granulated events. My main interest is the spatial dramaturgy of music, which in this case allowed me to work on at least three spatial planes at the same time, hoping to have created a musical event that would transmit a totally immersive and engaging experience.

Impro Duo

Instruments and Live electronics

Marijana Janevska & Joachim Heintz

This piece is an improvisation with voice and live electronics (ALMA). Throughout the improvisation different atmospheres/moods/expressions are built by exploring different sounds produced by the voice, like: breathing, whispering, humming and so on, while being recorded, analyzed, transformed and played back in different ways by ALMA. The communication and interaction between the voice and the electronic instrument is extremely important- they are sometimes treated like one entity, layering on top of each other and sometimes like two opposites.

Daramad

Fixed media

Ali Balighi

In Persian, “Daramad” means to start music and also, it is a classical form of Persian music, however, it means to learn music with a deep perspective to theory and techniques for me. In this music, I tried to make a connection between language from a sense point of view and fixed media as a musical atmosphere. The relation between sopranos parts is based on rhythm, counterpoint movements, nonmeaning words and alone letters. This piece won the third place in the fifth international Reza Kourorian electroacoustic composition competition, and was played in the forth tehran international electronic music festival (TIEMF 2021)

Jazz

Jean-Basille Sosa

Fixed media

Jazz, without being essentially jazz or pop, looks like yet a bit jazz and pop music. Electroacoustic work originally composed for the dance, it is also for the situation of the concert situation. In its acousmatic concert version Jazz gives to hear more distinctly the principles of an ‘electronic writing’ which from an initial set of abstract formal ideas deploys a material physiologically palpable, embodied to the sensory. A specific consideration on the musical time as well as on the rhythm perception is in the heart of this work, both popular and abstract.

...e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa

Fixed media

Enrico Francioni

The work wants to return the sound image evoked in the mind of the Supreme Poet who in Paradise is overwhelmed by the One who with "Amore", "muove il sole e le altre stelle". The crescendo corresponds to the approach to the divine [0'00"-6'26"], to reach a blinding sound texture that I love to approach the encounter with the Immanent [5'00"-6'26"], unspeakable state of grace suspended and suddenly interrupted [6'26”] to lead us elsewhere; perhaps to reality [6'26"-8'00"]. In this sense the painting tries to make its own the concepts of "Inaudible" and "Thresholds of perception", but also of continuous flow, circularity, harmony, song and dance, the latter, well described by William Mahrt. It is the idea of immobility that is aimed at, which implicitly underlies the silence, here conceived not as the absence of sound, but as a state of general expectation.

Ganges River Empties Itself into Ocean

Fixed media

Wanjun Yang

The title of the piece comes from the Buddhist classics, Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra. Buddha said that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. We come to the world with bare hands, spend our lives pursuing material things and desires, and finally remain naked, taking nothing with us. This piece uses a single Buddha singing bowl as the musical instrument, which is one of the commonly used Dharma instruments in Buddhism. The main sound material is the sound of strike and resonance of the bowl, different sound modules are designed in Csound, the sound of the bowl striking is picked up by microphone, processed in real time by digital signal processing. The musical form of the piece is A-B-A', which expresses the process of human being from the true nature at birth, to being lost in the material world, and then to realize the true meaning of life.

Five Short Studies

Fixed media

Victor Lazzarini

1. Golgotha

2. Haggai

3. Lazarus

4. Virtus

5. Golgotha Reprise

These are short studies based on a recording of a sermon by Iain Paisley, exploring resynthesis and re-characterisation of the voice from various angles.

Planula

Fixed media

Enrico Fiocco

Shin Kubota is a marine biologist at Kyoto University and research on a species of jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii. If one of these jellyfish is exposed to environmental stress or to physical aggression, if it is sick or just old, it loses its tentacles, sinks to the bottom of the sea and returns to its primitive stage, thus forming a new colony. This process can continue indefinitely, making this creature biologically immortal.

Kagemusha: for Live Pipa and Csound

Instruments and Live Electronics

Ningxin Zhang

Inspired by Akira Kurosawa's film “Kagemusha”, this duet for live pipa and electronics aims to depict how people struggled in the cruelty and impermanence of ancient wars, as well as the prosperity and end of a turbulent era. Musically, the pipa playing and electronics are always echoing each other in the whole piece. It starts with electronic sounds and slowly introduces the playing of pipa. The acoustic pipa part follows traditional pipa form and shows a variety of techniques of the left and right hand. All the electronic sounds were generated based on the melodies played by both acoustic pipa and Csound pipa, and were processed mainly with Cecilia, Puremagnetik plugins and Cabbage modulation, spectral and time effect plugins to create the dark atmosphere, the ferocious metallic sounds of swords colliding and a state of chaos that people were suffering from.

Lightcycle

Niall O’Connor

Fixed Media

The underlying aim of the piece is to use lightbulb's as a musical instrument and to examine all the different aspects of it by looking at the finite life cycle of a lightbulb, from when it first gets turned on to its inevitable demise. The different stages the lightbulb passes through would parallel stages of a human life. The piece was originally intended as a reflection of my life at the time and while the subject matter was open enough to allow me to explore the usage of texture in the piece. The materials and aesthetics in the piece draw from varying aspects of my life and present them in one overarching theme, for example some of the electrical hum’s are based around a recording of meat been prepared. At the time I was completing an apprenticeship in butchery as an extension of my love for culinary arts.

Hope – DSPoemscape

Aman Jagwani

Fixed Media

This piece is a soundscape for the poem Hope Is The Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson. It feautures the recitation of the poem with an evolving underscore supporting and creating an immersive atmosphere for it. It also features a harmonic and melodic composition that flows with the ethos of the poem.

Seven Trumpets

Fixed Media

Chris Arrell

I was especially interested in combining digital additive and subtractive synthesis techniques with algorithms generating aleatoric panning processes while writing Seven Trumpets. The result is a series of vast spectral chords that coalesce and dissolve as their requisite frequencies fuse and diverge in time and space. These chords, or trumpets, serve as large-scale structural pillars throughout the composition..

Spring Roll

Fixed Media

Irene Tanuwidjaja

This piece derives from one recording of a spring rubbed along the surface and is meant as an exploration of texture manipulated by clusters developed from the single recording. It used granular synthesis as the main method digital alteration.

Love

Instruments and Live Electronics

Jean-Basille Sosa

Initiated by Laura Muncaciu, Love is a mixed music project for soprano and electronics based on five texts by George Herbert (1593 - 1633), poet and English clergyman. Like a songbook,the five poems chosen for this composition determine a musical work in five parts that constitute a kind of testimony of the religious path: Denial, Hope, Redemption, Virtue, Love.

Forged Effervescence

Fixed Media

Christopher Poovey

Forged Effervescence is an exploration of synthesized metals created to showcase my modal synthesis VST Bellforge. The piece develops on the ideas of envelope shape, resonance, and inharmonic timbre through the transformation and juxtaposition of a large pool of sound sources created entirely through modal synthesis..

Transmission Chain Experiment

Instruments and Live Electronics

Labdi Ommes, Bernt Issak Wærstad & Alex Hoffman

This piece takes its title and inspiration from experiments in cultural evolution research that are used to identify the type of information that is more easily passed on from one person to another. Starting from 3 solo compositions of each of the three performers, a live Csound performance will be developed remotely. The different compositions will be based on vocal/orutu, guitar and saxophone sounds. Each performer sends their solo composition to one of the other collaborators who then adds material to this foundation. Using the cosmo-dsp Csound effect library, the material will be modified into electro-acoustic compositions. These multi-layer tape-music recordings will then be used as source material for a live-performance of the trio at the ICSC. Since all three performers are based in different countries, this procedure allows them to work remotely towards a live-performance.

Ideale Landschaft Nr. 6

Fixed Media

Clemens Von Reusner

"Ideale Landschaft Nr. 6" (engl. Ideal Landscape No. 6) was inspired by European landscape painting of the 17th and 18th centuries and by an etching by the German artist Ernst von Hopffgarten. This etching was the untitled sixth part of a cycle called "Variations in G". Although the composition is not a setting of the graphic etching, there are structural similarities. The sound material consists of sounds created mainly with "Csound" using additive and subtractive synthesis.

Nuk(넋) for Live Contrabass and Csound

Instruments and Live Electronics

Hyunkyung (Luhee) Shin

The title "Nuk" is a Korean word for the soul, or spirit, and represents a non-material and supernatural being that is considered to govern the body and mind in a person's body. This piece is a solo song for Contrabass. This is an approach of personal unconsciousness to the collective unconscious, a central concept discussed in Karl Jung's analytical psychology, a very personal but at the same time innate structural domain that exists in a group, and a memory of tears that permeates without learning. It can be expressed as the concept "한," and this sentiment contains both perceptions of life and futility. The piece expresses sentiments expressed through sound through individual emotion-level experiences, which combine bass sounds with various effects using Csound to reveal the characteristics of human life that cannot be expressed in a single melody.

Resemblance

Fixed Media

Emiliano del Cerro

Resemblance is a piece designed as homage to Charles Dodge and it is related to voice analysis processing and computer music composition. The basic material is based on children songs and came from the idea by Noam Chomsky that describes that children recognize the contour and melodic patterns of his mother voice that the semantic meaning of the words According with this theory the melodic contour of general children songs and lullabies are very similar all over the world. The piece is an electroacoustic work with prerecorded sound precedent from children songs, female voice and acoustic recorder. The main DSP algorithm used came from cross synthesis, LPC phase vocoding and shuffling of musical motifs and sentences.

To The Rain

Fixed Media

Stefano Cucchi

You can hear the rain, and you can also feel the rain, the vibrations, the flow of waves of rain and the singles drops. The rain changes to a new life when beating on different surfaces. The metamorphosis of sound is closely linked to different directions; the rain can slip and wash, or fill, or soak. The rain in something that strikes and beat externally but also affects our inner poetic imagery, so “rain” is a starting point for an inner journey in which every gesture is connected to an memory of rain. “To” the rain means also asking to the rain and stay listening and wait.

27 Ossos

Instruments and Live Electronics

Luis Antunes Pena

27 OSSOS is a piece for one performer playing two drums with lights, relays, sensors, piezo microphones, microcomputer and video projection. The percussionist takes control of the whole performance playing the two drums with his hands and also by activating the sensors that control light and sound. Our hands have 27 bones, 33 muscles and 3 nerves but besides that they can be a repository of information of the long life experience, of accumulated habits and movements they stored. The starting point for the composition where the hands both as sound producer and sound controller as well as a carrier of symbolic meaning. The composition of the piece followed and is the result of the construction of the instrument which includes the two drums, the video projection, the electronics and its sensors. This piece was made in a close collaboration with Nuno Aroso.

Ghost Quartet

Live Electronics

Marijana Janevska

"The piece “Ghost quartet” for violin, voice and live electronics, is connected to and inspired by Beethoven’s “Grosse Fugue” and Beckett’s theatre play “Play”. The material is built upon the decoupling of the melodic, rhythmical and gestural aspects of the theme of Beethoven’s fugue, while the structure of the piece is derived from Beckett’s theatre play. The piece uses three speakers that, together with the player, form a "ghost quartet”. Everything that is played live is being recorded and then played by the speakers building a kind of a double cannon, that is being more and more distorted. There is a dialog between the violin, voice and electronics where the musical gestures pass from one to the other, but at the same time merging into one meta-sound, where it is difficult to distinguish what is played live and what comes from the speakers.

For Reza

Fixed Media

Joachim Heintz

Encountering a dead person. Pursuing a way to him. A way to his music, here the beginning of Violet Room. The bells, bells, loud, persistent, thousand years without any change. Encountering the unbearable, perhaps that which was unbearable for him. That had no way out, that failed, that was too tight, that was hard, a burden, more and more burden, less and less relief, less space. Encountering the mercilessness of the real, the mighty, the real mighty. No, it cannot be continued. Really not. Written to the 50th birthday of Reza Korourian (1971-2015), invited by the friends of Yarava Music Group in Tehran, Iran.

HYPNOS

Fixed Media

Domenico De Simone

Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and Death. Death mirrors Sleep, because it is the latter that interacts with life; it is life itself, while Death represents its mirror opposite: life is mirrored in Death. Now Hypnos is introduced ... Thanatos can wait. Starting from the sounds recorded on the lakeside of the town where I was born, I imagined what the soundscape will be in the future.

The Limit of Symbiosis

Fixed Media

Anthony Di Furia

Exchange between soundscapes SAN ROMANO (Italy) – VILLE DE QUÉBEC (Canada)

The exchange is the sharing knowledge. Sharing a soundscape means to somehow understand a different environment, listening to both the diversity and the similarities in order to recognize the one in the other. During the compositional journey, the two soundscapes meet, merge, until the pursuit for symbiosis and the study of its symbolic limits. Mixing the sounds of San Romano and of the Ville de Québec, creates a sense of profound friendship between the two locations. The piece was made starting from field recordings made in Qubec City (Canada) and in San Romano, a small village in central Italy. The recorded materials were transformed with Csound in time (slowing down) and in frequency (Shift) also using glissandi lenses. The sound textures we hear are "compressions" in the frequency space. Synthetic sounds are used to integrate parts of the composition and are created through a simple sine wave generator. Dedicated to Eugenio Giordani, who was my professor of electronic music, who passed away due to covid in 2020.

Artic Cave

Fixed Media

Jonathan Walter

Arctic Cave is a 1 minute and 46 second noise piece exploring the limits of noise. Made using a custom plugin built in Csound and Cabbage, it uses the impulse based noise generator dust2 as the exclusive sound source. The piece opens with simple filtered white noise setting the scene of an arctic tundra. Over time the noise is transformed beyond recognition into explosions, water droplets, hissing, scratching, and alien textures. Inspired by the works of Francisco López, Carsten Nicolai, and Luhee Shin, it paints the picture of a winter wanderer taking refuge in a cave as the storm outside takes its course. Using fibonacci proportions, this piece aims to explore and harness the musical capabilities of using noise as a sound source, and through this, discover how its limitations can uncover beauty.

Púrpura

Fixed Media

Caio M. Jiacomini

Púrpura (“Purple”, in Portuguese) is a generative piece fully written in Csound. In my mind I always associated the word with the concept of blossoming and I wanted to translate that feeling into the piece by creating a soundscape that swells in and out like it’s breathing. The piece consists of four instruments, Bass, Pad, Glide, and Bell, with every instrument sharing the same basic system for generating sound, but with their own twists. Each time an instrument plays, it selects a random note from the B lydian scale (within a more specific pool for each instrument), pays it for a random duration, and waits a random amount of time before repeating the cycle. Púrpura is also the title track of my latest EP, consisting of 5 ambient generative pieces that explore different affects that can be achieved with a simple system like this one.

Feu!

Live Electronics

Johann Phillipe and Jacopo Greco d’Alceo

Free rider of the frail skiffs, itinerant stranded, over to you... Designs so long postponed, expected horizon, to what comes. Our wooden ship, our iron insurrection, Swell our joys, break howling our uprising

All sails out, the shout says

Fire!

Feu! is a musical piece performed by duo HYDRA SUPERCLUSTER. The duo uses two instruments : Csound live coding and a modular synthesizer powered with Csound (through the Expert Sleepers ES-8 module)

A un Tempo

Fixed Media

Antonio Scarcia

"A un tempo" is a personal reflection on value of the Time, inspired to an Euripides' tragedy. It is a fixed-medium work alternating tonic and non-tonic materials organized with a hierarchical approach. CSound synthesis largely uses sampling technique from a wide set of samples and all its scores are previously generated by computer. It was first performed during the 2010 edition of the International Computer Music Conference (at Stony Brook NY). The piece - although conceived as an acousmatic work - was subsequently synchronized with a video made with generative technique in the Processing environment; over the years it has been represented in various events both in the audio and multimedia version.

Action Potential

Fixed Media

Mateo Larrea

Action Potential is a 2 minutes and 32 seconds sound exploration inspired by the revolutionary work of Morton Subotnick. Through the use of an artificial neural network, the piece attempts to emulate the various voltage levels and complex textures involved in the electrical signalling of neurons. Structurally, it is divided into two main audible firings, several contrasting ‘failed initiations’, and instances of aperiodic amplitude and frequency modulation. The gestures and dynamics presented in the composition allude to Subotnick’s metaphor system proposed in “Until Spring” (1976), including:

thrusting out <—> repolarization

becoming <—> depolarization

being <—> action potential (peak).

Machair Impressions

Fixed Media

Mark Ferguson

Machair (Gaelic; roughly pronounced ‘mah-hur’): fertile, wildflower-rich grassland habitat found on the northwestern coastlines of Scotland and Ireland. Five sonic impressions, composed out of source materials gathered around the Hebridean Island of South Uist in August 2019: Open grassland with red clover and knapweed, from Daliburgh to Askernish. Thistle, burdock, ragwort and Yorkshire fog grass internals. Great yellow bumblebee queen (reconstructed nest interior). Bumblebee mating activity (reconstructed nest entrance). North Atlantic surf under dark clouds, from the ancient burial grounds at Cladh Hallan. The piece was constructed exclusively out of my own wildlife/nature source recordings (all made on South Uist), with Csound playing a pivotal role in delicately shaping sonic materials: particularly those with strong gestural bases. In combination with GRM Tools SpaceGrain and finely tuned Reaper EQ, a Csound instrument with randomly modulated granular processing parameters (largely based on randomi > grain interactions) was used to process contact microphone recordings of island vegetation (thistles, burdock, knapweed, etc.), open-air recordings of wind and grass, and rare great yellow bumblebee recordings (to create imaginary swarms). My main intention with the piece was to use Csound to subtly augment recorded gestural contours and create imaginary behaviours based on field experiences, bringing the listener down to ground or ‘great yellow bumblebee’ level.

Untapped Impulse

Instrument and Live Electronics

Aman Jagwani

This piece was written for live percussion, voice and synthesizers. It embodies the spirit of discovering and creating something new by being immersed in the moment. The concept of the piece is to use objects present in the performance environment, play them through percussion gestures and process them to create an accompaniment for a vocalist. Both the percussionist and vocalist improvise, while being guided by the processing to find their way to the pre-defined modern jazz fusion end section of the piece. Every time the piece is performed, the journey will be different depending on the space and the objects present there, but the destination will be the same.

Homo Homini Lupus

Fixed Media

Fernando Egido

This work experiments with the relations between music movement and voice recognition. A literal imitation of the voice is not intended, but an ambiguous one. There is an ambiguous continuity between the vocal timbre and timbres quite related to voice changing by morphing. To provide it, I have used a voice synthesis system based on format synthesis (FOF algorithm). I never use parameters set too near to the human voice, there is always a parameter that is different from the human voice recognition perspective. Sometimes the voice is reckonable, sometimes not, and this is different for each person but the patch is always the same, depending on how the music evolves. Sometimes the voices work together in such a way that they are heard just as a single voice or provide critical band interferences from which individual voices can arouse. Giordani, who was my professor of electronic music, who passed away due to covid in 2020.