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 Manufacturing Audible Truth. The program shows a variety of styles of multichannel music from around the world.
Jakob Gille (DE)
La porta nel dado (2023)
11:09
I took the wood and crumbled it up so I had nothing left but it seems that there was still something.
Do I open the door or use the sledgehammer?
La porta nel dado is an electroacoustic ambisonic composition that delves into the complex dialectic of truth and illusion in creation and destruction, offering the audience a transformative journey through an immersive sonic world. Drawing inspiration from Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir from 1963, the piece commences with recognizable soundscapes, altered and redefined by spatialization techniques. This auditory exploration progresses by deconstructing and obliterating initial sonic elements, leaving behind a small, pulsating sphere. This sphere then expands, filling the entire ambisonic sphere and manifesting into ever-changing rhythmic patterns. As the piece progresses, these rhythms undergo transformations, eventually imploding until a seemingly divergent entity emerges at the sphereโs summit, reminiscent of the original rhythms but comprising entirely novel material.
Throughout the creative process, the major challenge was synthesizing diverse sonic elements into a coherent narrative about the transformational power of destruction, thereby embodying the paradoxical nature of truthโits malleability and enduring core.
Manu Meier (CH)
FUTURE SOUNDSCAPES, a speculative electroacoustic interpretation of the soundscape of tomorrow (2023)
11:28
Changes in our environment are affecting the habitat of all species. Some factors of this change include climate change, population growth and technological development. What is becoming increasingly apparent are the interdependence and interaction of the changing conditions of all living things on Earth. The effects are apparent, palpable as well as audible on multiple levels. What does our future sound like?
The rapidly advancing development of technologies, digitization and automation, is already having a major impact on our everyday lives and will continue to have one on our sound environment in the future. Accordingly, it is assumed that our way of communication, locomotion and organization will change. Systematic analysis and control by machines will also have a major impact. What impact will this have on our future soundscape? How will machines with artificial intelligence influence this? Will there be more artificial biophony? What will become louder? What will become quieter? What will remain and what will be new?
In this work, research and conversations were conducted to investigate the soundscape, analyzing current acoustic conditions. The relationships and mutual influence of living organisms and humans in our common environment play an essential role. The study mainly considers biophony, antropophony and geophony. The acoustic conditions change through the factor of time. Parameters, such as temperature, humidity, the course of the day, the season (time) affect the sound environment.
The sound sources that are most evolving or will be acoustically prominent in the future are used as source material. The rapidly transforming states of our environment are artistically represented through synthetic sound processing. Together with unprocessed field recordings, the processed sounds are composed into a multi-channel composition in an abstract narrative. Through the specific movements from sound in space, a unique and spherical ambience is created. A fictional reality or a real fiction of a future soundscape is speculatively elaborated. An auditory journey through a speculative creation of the future soundscape.
Chin Ting Chan (HK)
Mirror Sculpture (2023)
09:10
The musical material of Mirror Sculpture comes from a variety of sources, including recordings of analog camera clicks, a printer at work, glass chamfering, piano strings and different synthesis models. It plays on the ambiguities between the contextualization of sound material and the use of it as purely an abstract musical gesture completely disassociated from its physical origin, as described by Pierre Schaefferโs definition of a sound object through the process of reduced listening.
The music is inspired by over twenty years of observation of a Ficus tree. While its surroundings have changed dramatically, the tree remains vigorous and intact. This shows the impact of time on things at different paces. Our perception or memory of them can vary
dynamically, transforming them into a mirror that reflects who we are at different times and stages of our lives. When we are able to adapt to our surroundings with an open mind and curiosity, we not only see a clearer image of ourselves from this mirror, but also through it.
Ewa Trabacz (PL/US)
UMBRAE (Ambisonic soundscape) (2023)
11:30
Umbrae (Shadows) is a personal reflection on fragmentation and distortion of human memoryโa particular subjective distortion of reality, unique to each individual human being, yet a universal experience of humankind.
I have played a perilous game of moving a magnifying glass through my personal latent soundspace. I found it filled with glitches of corroded memories, inaccessible to another human being. A half-forgotten poem escaping translation from the language of my childhood; a disembodied scrap of a musical phrase erroneously preserved by my violinist muscle memory.
The original impulse for this piece was sparked by a glitch of personal memory, seeded by a 1920 poem by Polish poet Bolesลaw Leลmian titled Departure. The poem itself evokes feelings of grief associated with leaving something precious behind, irreparable loss and the realization of the inevitable final departure. The fragmented memories of the poem, which I memorized in my early teenage years, returned to me in shattered pieces, attached to other fragmented memories in paradoxical configurationsโyet the feeling evoked by the poem not only remained, but seemed amplified.
Should one never abandon anything forever? asks the poet.
Is this loss? a random response generated by AI seemed to be a mockery at first, yet the question felt strikingly real.
Tolga Yayalar (TR)
Impulse Impromptu II / (2023)
07:47
Impulse Impromptu. Each piece in the series takes up an instrument and explores its sonic possibilities through virtual improvisation. The pieces explore the transformative potential of sound and challenge conventional perceptions of reality within the realm of music. Focusing specifically on the Japanese instrument Koto, Impulse Impromptu II takes the instrument out of its traditional context and reimagines it as a sound-emitting object.
In this piece, I delve into the sonic essence of the Koto, utilizing its inherent sounds and the reverberations of its soundboard. By manipulating these sonic elements, I aim to transcend the instrumentโs conventional boundaries. One of the key aspects of Impulse Impromptu II is the incorporation of spatial models and High Order Ambisonics. Through these technologies, I aim to immerse the audience in an expansive sonic landscape, pushing the limits of traditional stereo imaging and inviting listeners to experience a multidimensional sonic experience.
Berk Yagli (CY)
Hypnagogic Hallucination Machinery (2023)
11:41
Hypnagogic Hallucination Machinery is about the twenty-first-century condition. Living in a hyper consumer-based world, where everyone happily becomes a commodity to take part in society, it once again becomes crucial to question and discuss concepts of individuality, freedom, privacy and humanity. The sea of endless escapism, simultaneously fractured and monotonous people and ideas; we are now a part of the systematic hallucination machine more than ever. This piece aims to reflect on these topics in an auditory way.
This piece acts as a trajectory between unfolding realities and positing a degree of fiction to tell a story. One of the beautiful things about art and music is the ability to talk about factual matters while using abstractness to make the whole more powerful and significant through the audienceโs perception.