MEDIUM SONORUM CONCERT

Dive deep into freshly-made immersive electronic music with the 20.4 system of the Sonic Lab. This is a concert designed to perceive spatial music selected from the call for contributions that relates to Audible Denial, Sonic Unheard. 
The program shows a variety of styles of multichannel music from around the world. 
 
Program: 
 
Zhao Jiajing (CN) 
Glitchopolis  
Glitchopolis (2024 / 6:50 min) is an electroacoustic composition exploring information overload. Drawing inspiration from the metropolis of London, the piece captures the intense flux of information through countless encounters, dynamic traffic, and bustling construction sites. Leveraging the expansive sound canvas of an ambisonic surround sound system, Glitchopolis crafts a condensed, morphing auditory landscape using primarily field recordings obtained in London city. The composition unfolds across two layers of musical space: a realistic space featuring intensive sound collages created with field recordings, and an abstract mental space characterized by artificial reverb and granular processing. The mental layer of space serves as a playground for glitching and feedback as analogies for overwhelm. The composition therefore communicates the frequent experience of a “brain crash” or “brain freeze” for individuals dealing with an excessive amount of information. 
 
Rosario Di Rosa (IT) 
S’Animu  
S’Animu (2025 / 5:28 min) is an acousmatic composition that explores the inner soundscape as a space of resistance and transformation. Born from a personal migration experience—from Sicily to Sardinia—the piece confronts the tension between deep-rooted cultural memories and the uncertainty of new territories.
In dialogue with the festival theme, S’Animu inhabits the space between revelation and concealment: material and ritual sounds dissolve into electronic abstractions, while the sonic landscape builds and disintegrates, evoking both lost memories and emerging possibilities of listening. Through a tapestry of organic and synthetic textures, enhanced by psychoacoustic spatialization, S’Animu creates a space of suspension—neither pacifying nor alarming—but open to the ambiguity of a world in transition.
In a time of structural collapse and invisible fractures, S’Animu questions our relationship with loss, identity, and belonging, crafting a fragile sonic refuge between ritual and emptiness. 
 
Dominic Sambucco (IT/CA)  
Iterations 
Iterations (2025 / 8:29 min) is a multichannel electroacoustic work that explores the concept of repetition. This piece examines the nature of iterative sounds, pushing the perceptual boundaries of this category. Through this exploration, I sought to address questions about how repetition is experienced: When accelerated, at what point does repetition transform into a continuous sound, and what new auditory phenomena emerge? Similarly, when does repetition cease to be perceived as a unified whole?
Michel Chion’s Guide to Sound Objects provided a theoretical foundation for this work. In his typology of sound objects (TARTYP), iterative sounds are represented by the symbol “ and occupy the entire right section of the recapitulative table. Chion observes that “depending on context and listening intention, the same sound phenomenon could be perceived in three different ways: as a grainy, sustained sound, as an iterative sound, or, at a pinch, as a series of isolated impulses.” These observations highlight the fluid nature of perception and the thresholds at which repetition takes on new forms of meaning. Building on this idea, Dominic Sambucco poses the question: When does a repetitive sound stop being perceived as a sound and start being perceived as a rhythm? 
 
Itza Garcia Ordoñez (MX) 
Generation Loss  
In this piece titled Generation Loss (2024 / 7:33 min), Itza Garcia Ordoñez explores the sonic consequences of generation loss in analog reproduction and machine learning generation. In archival research, generation loss refers to the gradual degradation of quality that happens in the physical reproduction of analog media, leaving out digital reproduction, where quality stays consistent. Nevertheless, digital reproduction in generative AI follows a different logic. Copies often involve the re-introduction of a prompt rather than the preservation of a generated result and, in some cases, they fail to produce an output altogether. 
Itza Garcia Ordoñez generated AI outputs from complex, unconventional prompts—such as electric hums, woodwind and string multiphonics, and extended techniques of the voice. When faced with prompts outside its training, commercial AI often responds with an empty audio file. Yet, by compressing the audio of these “empty” files, Garcia Ordoñez was able to reveal a residual signal—a dense, gritty noise that arose from the failure of generation. She compounded one hour of material and bounced it onto cassette tape, then she trained an AI-timbre transfer model with the digitized cassette recordings. Finally, she fed the original hour-long AI material to the timbre transfer model and curated a selection of sounds that make up the piece. 
 
Daniel Neumann (DE) 
A Sited Thought for Heaven & Earth 
A Sited Thought for Heaven & Earth was a live performance on Emmett Palaima’s sound installation Heaven & Earth Diptych (Rhizome World, NYC). It used the installation as a site to explore dynamics between felt vibration and audible sound in embodied listening. The work here (2025 / 13:28 min) is a spatial sound mix for octophonic cube, from the recording of the performance, creating a new acousmatic site, disconnected, representational, and strained. 
 
Ana Dall’Ara-Majek (FR)  
Pixel Springtail Promenade 
Collembola (springtails) are small arthropods; some of them as small as pixels. This work, called Pixel Springtail Promenade (2015 / 15:15 min), explores the notion of the “parasite” in music through the use of granular synthesis, glitch, micro-montage, and abrupt aleatoric cuts. The 16-channel system serves to create an aural version of The Alice Illusion; a “body swap” experiment where scientists manage to convince people that they are the size of dolls or giants (Björn van der Hoort, Arvid Guterstam, Henrik Ehrsson, 2011). Inspired by this experiment, Ana Dall’Ara-Majek sought to alter the scale of familiar environments and bring about in the listener the sensation of changing size—to the point of becoming as small as a springtail. This piece is part of Nano-Cosmos, a cycle of acousmatic pieces dedicated to insects, small arthropods, and microorganisms. 
 
Varun Kishore (IN) 
Kraken  
Kraken (2024 / 03:15 min) is an exploration of thalassophobia-as-sublime, realized through recorded manipulations of unplugged electric guitar with modular synthesizer, glitchy polyrhythms, and musical gestures reminiscent of extreme metal music. Small gestures are stretched, expanded, and combined with oppressive low frequencies to convey the sense of depth, pressure, and darkness the artist associates with the deep ocean.