of Jun 2018, 11:06
In the upcoming weeks, I will be giving some presentations on different topics in a small tour around Europe.
First, a workshop in 3D audio production tools will be held at the 2018 Sónar Festival in Barcelona, Spain together with my colleges at Sfëar. Participants will given the chance to try out our newest beta version of our software and we will guide them through the available tools and production techniques that can be achieved with these.
Next, I will go to the Sounds in Space conference at the University of Derby in England to give a talk about both my Spherical Glitch Study I and II. The talk will center around the ideas that went into those compositions and how they are composed. It will also, however, go into some implementation details about the code, as they intersect with topics the currently running Binci EU funded project, where we are developing a spatial synthesizer that produces sound synthesis solely from spatial manipulations. The Spherical Glitch Studies provide both an inspirational ground as well as a first creative use case for this technology.
Finally, I will head to my home university at the University of Music Karlsruhe in Germany to attend the Music and Sonic Arts (MuSA) conference hosted there. There, I will give a talk on the intersection point between contemporary dance notation and spatialized music composition. This talk will present work in progress and is meant to open and inspire a discussion around this topic. Dance has long worked with the semantics of space in a compositional context and looking at the literature available and the notations developed can bring some great insight and new angles when applied spatial composition techniques. Furthermore, this talk will also go into the limitations of this comparison. While both art forms share the focus on external space as a ground artistic expression, the phenomenological shape and form of the object that is actually moving is drastically different: while one is the human body, the other is the abstract sound, reproduced from a virtual representation, seemingly floating in mid air with no apparent real world body that is producing it (if one considers that the reproducing loudspeakers are perceptually sufficiently transparent.
After a short break I will head to the AES special conference on spatial audio in Tokyo, Japan to present two papers. One on a new method for apparent spatial extent using decorrelation methods in the ambisonics domain. The other talk will be closely related to the one given at MuSA, but the focus will lie more closely on the Choreographer tool developed during the Binci project. The Choreographer is designed to stimulate a thinking of movements in terms of entities, which as such can be used as building blocks for composition and interpretation. By solidifying a movement as an elementary block of composition, it could slowly be established as an cultural icon that can be recognized and related to. The choreographer then provides higher level manipulation parameters, such as intention or force of a movement that either emphasizes or weakens a vector of direction, or simply rotation parameters that enable the composer or interpreter to turn a movement as a unit into a different direction.