Metaverse

“Timbila Live Aid – Play or Burst” is a music-based fundraising initiative exploring new forms of engagement between people and digital media for problem-solving in the physical world. It works as a facilitator for showcasing socio-cultural diversity from the community. Though the Chopi Timbila from Mozambique, a xylophone-like African instrument, was proclaimed Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005, it is still a symbol of one of the disappearing cultures of the world. Come to the Timbila Pavilion, make music and dance like a Chopi. But be careful: the lack of music and rhythm in the virtual village will endanger the whole ecosystem’s health. Our large mwenge tree will slowly die, leading to a quasi-total devastation of the Chopi culture. A piece of advice: if you visit us, you will embody a timbila’s calabash -so you either play, or burst.

See the list or participants

Ivan Petkov (BG/AT)

“Vocal Recomposer” is an interactive sound installation based on the history of the vocoder. A technology best known for its use in science fiction and popular music, it was mainly developed in military research during WWII as part of the then-secret Project X / Sigsaly. Through a custom interface, I acoustically magnified the very point where the original voice is deconstructed beyond intelligibility, just before the moment of stitching-together takes place. The proposed virtual version for the metaverse allows people to move around the different stages of the deconstructing and reconstructing of voices.

See the list or participants

Oliver Lehner (AT)

This work proposes a sonic intervention into virtual space influenced by Mario De Vega’s “Untitled: Ice-cream Truck in Rent Driving around the Gallery’s Neighborhood for Two Hours. Ice-cream truck, driver and audio recording (MUCA Roma. Mexico City, Mexico)”. “Untitled 2020” is a possible answer to the question of how to present sound recordings created in physical space in a virtual space. By using a contact microphone to pick up the music box’s vibrations, I am skipping soundwave propagation in air and working with a signal that is pure to resonate in virtual air.

See the list or participants

Malte Steiner (DE)

This work is part of Malte Steiner’s project, “The Big Crash.” Its thematic departure point is the instability of the real estate market as a consequence of extreme gentrification. With a custom software, data is taken from online housing advertisements in Berlin, i.e. images from ads are analyzed to identify and separate objects from the background, and then used to create a surreal architecture. Square-meter prices generate music fragments which are combined into a durational sound installation in virtual space. The spectator’s position defines the piece, and walking through it lets the audience discover new details.

See the list or participants

Leonid Kuzmenko, Carlos Guedes, Franziska Schroeder (UAE/UK)

“Mirage” is a multiuser virtual reality (VR) experience where users can manipulate a lush soundscape and musical composition by moving around the space and interacting with the objects that populate the scene. The user finds herself in a desert space, with sand and warm lighting, where she can enter an 8-channel loudspeaker array, inside which an eerie soundscape of moving bodies in the sand -derived from recordings of dancers in sand dunes- is layered with sounds from the trio’s distributed improvisational playing.

See the list or participants

Alex Hofmann (AT)

This work is an artistic research project-in-progress that explores VR as a performance space for experimental music. It puts the listener into a scene with stroboscopic lights and dissolving walls of a large and almost empty hangar. A group of listeners can explore the scene that comprises both light effects and sound. The scenery contains a saxophonist avatar, two loudspeakers and a sofa, placed with enough distance for the listeners to move between the sound-radiating objects.

See the list or participants

Martin Ritter and Alyssa Aska (DE)

This project is a series of escape rooms that focus heavily on sound and/or musical concepts as keys for escape. The puzzles will primarily be solved by interpreting auditory cues and events, including pitch and sequence matching, auditory clue matching, rhythm puzzles and knowledge of basic theoretical or historical principles. While most rooms are geared towards single play, cooperation is always possible.

See the list or participants

Jaime Munarriz (ES)

A soundwalk in a closed dome. Old speakers emit sound textures, soundscapes and fragments of my album compositions. Black cubes, an homage to the box with the sound of its own making, and some enigmatic spheres complete the sound environment. A place meant for slow listening and curious appreciation of the sonic material; choosing your own spots, turning your head to find the right balance.

See the list or participants

BFA & MFA students from Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (KiT),
NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The KiT Pavilion inside the Sound Campus, “Metaverse,” presents an exhibition of works by artists challenging aesthetic and political hegemonies from diverse positions. The artists featured are drawn from BFA and MFA programs at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (KIT) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in collaboration with luminary practicing artists. The KiT Pavilion cuts across disciplines, histories, identities, and futurities by exploring the ways in which codes of economic and cultural normativities are reified, enforced, and performed, and how the lived consequences of such power dynamics are experienced and transcended.

See the list or participants

BFA & MFA students from Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (KiT),
NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Multichannel sound studios are typically limited access academic infrastructures, due to the complicated technical infrastructure they embed. However, state-of-the-art audio rendering engines are becoming accessible to the mass public through commercial VR products. While VR audio will probably never be able to substitute the experiential nuances of a concert in physical space, it has become a creative milieu for spatial audio experiments. With this gallery of multichannel works, we want to assess the experience of listening to spatial electroacoustic music when it is embodied as a VR social event at a large scale festival.

See the list or participants

Music works created for acoustic territories arrive in the virtual deck of the metaverse. This pavilion is conceived as a large group of boat cabins featuring compositions created at diverse latitudes in our real world.

See the list or participants

Hara Alonso (SE)

“Brytningsindex” is a sonic choreography, an investigation of physical gesture as sound interface. The work settles around the concept of refraction as a metaphor for a human-digital refraction generated between different mediums. The physical space -the hands/arms rotations, traces and angles- transforms the digital space to generate an organic dialogue, an immersive dance of textures, rhythms and timbral atmospheres. The strategies to decode the data include complex mapping systems as well as machine learning tools. As a result, the stage becomes a responsive environment whose visual and acoustic properties emerge from the mutual interactions between performer and software.

See the list or participants