uneasy in my easy chair
for oboe, harp, percussion and electronics

May 8, 2021, Empyrean Ensemble
Sam Nichols, Director
Matilda Hofman, Conductor
Pitzer Center, UC Davis

Kyle Bruckmann, Oboe
Jennifer Ellis, Harp
Mckenzie Langefeld, Percussion

Production Staff:
Sam Nichols, electronics
Stephen Bingen, audio engineer and video editor
Joshua Paterson and Caitlin Sapunor-Davis, camera operators

uneasy in my easy chair (2021)

isto é muito natural
for Berimbau quintet

February 14, 2021, Arcomusical
Boutell Memorial Concert Hall, School of Music, Northern Illinois University

"isto é muito natural" (Portuguese, "it's only natural"), is a quote from Antonio Carlos Jobim’s "Desafinado," (Portuguese, "slightly out of tune") one of my favorite bossa novas. On the surface level I borrowed fragments of melodies and harmonies from this tune and on a conceptual level I played around with the notion of being out of tune primarily by means of an extended technique called "pressure strokes," a technique in which the performer presses their stick into the wire to generate a slightly muted and subtle pitch. Organized in two halves, the first half presents these pressure strokes, harmonics, bowing, and other extended techniques. The second half presents a polyrhythmic texture inspired by the basic berimbau toques.

Performance video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZR7fLrnQcQ&ab_channel=arcomusical

isto é muito natural (2020)

As part of my master's thesis, I trained Project Magenta's Performance-RNN with my improvisations at the piano. This short composition is a collage of some of the fragments I enjoyed, all outputted by the model after training. The result is arguably a "comprovisation," with a neural network interfering before the improvisations culminate into a composition. 

I made minor changes in pitch and rhythm to facilitate smoother transitions. Dynamics and articulations are mine. 

The recording is made with MIDI input and a sampler instrument.

miniature for piano - assisted by a neural network (2019)

blame it on my youth
for two pianos and percussion

June 20, 2021, Yarn/Wire
at the Yarn/Wire Institute 2021

performance video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84GJHkyPdg

blame it on my youth (2021)

statistical contemplations on the marimba
for vibraphone, nicophone and electronics

collaboration with Reed Puleo

June 20, 2021, Reed Puleo
at the Yarn/Wire Institute 2021

performance video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvgFvyclVBY

statistical contemplations on the marimba (2021)

multiphonics 
for electronics

multiphonics is a fixed media piece created with a Max patch developed by the composer in collaboration with Kyle Johnson based on the concept Johnson and Janko Gravner developed in their paper “Coupled Map Lattices as Musical Instruments”. Coupled Map Lattices (CML) are iterative systems, in which an ordered series of numbers are updated using a weighted average of a function of itself and its nearest neighbors.

In this piece, I generated audio with the patch once and overdubbed with a second stream, imitating a live laptop duo performance. There are no edits in the audio file except for compression. Four channel audio is summed up to stereo for practical purposes. The following are among the processes I used:
(1) Deterioration of audio files: Initializing the lattice with an audio file and moving very slowly from the initialization stream towards the stream generated by the lattice can distort the audio file or introduce elements of noise to the texture. This depends on the spatial organization of the initial audio file and the set of parameters used. The audio stream may quickly decay into chaos if the user moves too quickly from one end to another (14:00 - 14:45).
(2) Instantly/gradually increasing the lattice size: When instantly increased, the initial portion of the lattice is filled with the previous state of the lattice, whereas the rest of it remains empty. Thus, a silent portion is inserted into the stream, changing the perception of the listener from a continuous sound to a slowly evolving loop (pulsating noise at 11:00). On the other hand, a gradual increase from the order of 100s to 1000s results in a glitchy high frequency sound, which can be heard starting from 15:05.
(3) Careful exploration of the parameter space: The resulting sounds are particularly sensitive to the phase shift parameter 𝜔. An interesting case occurs around 10:00, where increasing 𝜔 above 0.8 (which can be considered as an extreme value, as we calculate the mod 1 in f(x)) results in a state of silent equilibrium. Lowering 𝜔 back under 0.8 results in transient clicks followed by the re-initiation of the texture.

multiphonics (2022)

thousand regrets
for solo violin

April 7, 2023
Hrabba Atladottir, violin
Pitzer Center, UC Davis

thousand regrets (2023)

when the brightness came again
for dancer and live electronics (pose tracking with Open CV's AI Kit)

video link: https://www.youtube.com/live/0M5LE6S1rlA?feature=share&t=3631

May 25, 2022, part of See/Hear/Say Collaborative Concert
Tessa Fray, Dancer
Orkun Akyol, Kyle Johnson, Electronics

when the brightness came again (2022)

i saw the river man 
for bari sax and cello

September 1, 2023, MotoContrario
Trento, Italy

i saw the river man (2023)

stable diffusion
for oboe, harp, viola and electronics

March 26, 2024, Ensemble Dal Niente
Kemp Recital Hall, Illinois State University

guided improvisation with AI-assisted electronics

stable diffusion (2024)

past time pastimes
for percussion and electronics

May 30, 2024
Chris Froh, percussion
Stephen Bingen, audio engineer
Pitzer Center, UC Davis

past time pastimes (2024)

ekaterina 
for solo violin

Concert by klank.ist
June 11, 2018 
İkinci Kat, İstanbul

Seçil Işıksoy, Violin

“Ekaterina” is a short piece for solo violin, which focuses on the timbre of harmonics and harmonic trills. Throughout the piece, melodic line segments shine through the texture. Playing with the listeners musical memory, these segments build up an inexact quotation from the third movement of Borodin’s second string quartet. Inspired by the days when he first met Ekaterina, Borodin dedicated his quartet to her. She was later to become his wife.

Orkun Akyol

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