"Activating Memory" is a performance piece for 8 participants: a string quartet and BCMI quartet. BCMI stands for Brain Computer Music Interface.

The BCMI quartet involves four persons wearing a brain cap furnished with electrodes to read information from the brain of 4 persons. I teamed up with g.tec, a manufacturer of biomedical technology, and Joel Eaton at ICCMR, to design an extraordinary machine that converts brain information into musical scores.

During the performance, the BCMI quartet generates musical scores to be performed by the string quartet in real-time: each member of the BCMI quartet generates an individual part for a musician of the string quartet.

The first public performance of "Activating Memory" took place on 09 February 2014 at Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, Plymouth, UK, by the Bergersen String Quartet. Each time the piece is played it will sound different. Here is a historical sample from the first performance.

See also movie documentary in my Vimeo channel: http://vimeo.com/88151780


Activating Memory - Experiment

"Sonnet 55" is the 3rd movement of "Sound to Sea", a choral symphony composed in 2011-2012.  This is the recording of its premiere at Plymouth’s Minster Church of St. Andrew by Ten Tors Orchestra, Peninsula Arts Chorale and phenomenal mezzo-soprano Juliette Pochin, under the baton of Simon Ible. 

"Sound to Sea" alludes to voyages: voyages of discovery and exploration, and also voyages of the mind. 

The book "Thinking Music" tells the inside story of "Sound to Sea". It describes in rich detail the concepts and processes with which I engaged in the composition of the symphony. 

More information here:

http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/Thinking_Music.html

Sonnet 55 - 3rd Movement of Sound to Sea

This is the third intermezzo for pipe organ and percussion, from "Sound to Sea", a choral symphony composed in 2011-2012. This is the recording of its premiere at Plymouth’s Minster Church of St. Andrew by Ten Tors Orchestra, Peninsula Arts Chorale and phenomenal mezzo-soprano Juliette Pochin, under the baton of Simon Ible.

"Sound to Sea" alludes to voyages: voyages of discovery and exploration, and also voyages of the mind.

The book "Thinking Music" tells the inside story of "Sound to Sea". It describes in rich detail the concepts and processes with which I engaged in the composition of the symphony.

More information here:

neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/Thinking_Music.html

Maranatha - Intermezzo from Sound to Sea

This is the first movement of "Sounds from Underground" for prepared piano, 3 cellos and 1 double bass.

Some notes of the piano are distorted by earplugs and drinking straws inserted between the strings. Other notes are played by means of magnetic resonators that are placed inside the instrument to vibrate the strings.

"Sounds from Underground" was composed during a residency at Banff Centre, Canada, in collaboration with pianist Luciane Cardassi.

This is a live recording of its premiere in February 2014, in Plymouth, UK, by pianist Lauryna Sableviciute and musicians from Ten Tors Orchestra.

A short documentary about this piece is available:

http://vimeo.com/90796612


Feelings Unheard of - 1st movement of Sounds from Underground

Biocomputer Music is an experimental one-piano duet for a pianist and a biocomputer.

The biocomputer listens to the pianist and generates musical responses in real-time. It plays the piano through electromagnets that sets the strings into vibration, producing a distinctive timbre.

This is an experimental recording of a rehearsal. Bear in mind that the biocomputer's response changes every time the piece is performed; the part played through the electromagnetic vibrations of the piano's strings will be different for every performance.

Please refer to the documentary posted on Vimeo for more information: http://vimeo.com/111409050

Biocomputer Music

Shockwaves is a violin concertino for orchestra, percussion and electronics. It evokes a multi-coloured soundscape of an immense stained glass window shattered by an impactful blast. After the blast free tonal palettes of varying complexity are interspersed by musical passages evoking the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. 

Recorded live at The House, Plymouth, in June 2015. The soloist is Pierre-Emmanuel Largeron.

"It isn't Mozart. But it's rather fabulous." (Michael White, Classical Music, Apr16)

Shockwaves

Also known as "Canival for Piano".

Piece for piano composed in 2003, for brilliant Brazilian pianist, Catarina Domenici. Released on her solo CD, "Porto 60".

Three movements:
I - Banana Mecanica
II - Grenal
II - Salario Minimo

Ex Tetika Doquenti

Electroacoustic composition. Composed in 2002 at Tempo Reale, Florence, Italy.

Robotapithecos

Commissioned by Bourges Institute of Electroacoustic Music. Composed and recorded in 2001 at Bourges Institute of Electroacoustic Music, Bourges, France. Premiered using the Gmebaphone sound diffusion system at the Synthèse Festival 2002 in Bourges.

In this piece I used sophisticated vocal synthesis techniques that allowed me to synthesise a number of utterances that we would not normally produce ourselves but nevertheless sounded very realistic. Extra-linguistic utterances are prominent in this piece, where recordings of laughter, coughing, singing, crying and exclamations were combined with recordings of insects, synthesised voice and granular synthesis sounds. The piece is inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's triptychs The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Waywain. I find these paintings inspiringly musical. I wondered whether I could portray in this piece the sounds that those earthly characters would be producing in these two triptychs.

More pieces inspired by the human voice and the origins of language, where I used voice synthesis and voice manipulation methods can be found in the CD "Mother Tongue", released by Sargasso, UK: 

http://www.sargasso.com/

Le Jardin de Jerome

"Entre l’Absurde et le Mystère" (a.k.a. "Entre o Absurdo e o Mistério") is a piece for chamber orchestra composed with a piece of software of my own design, which generates music from Cellular Automata. I used an automaton known as Game of Life, which simulates the behaviour of simple living beings by means of rules for the birth, death and survival of life forms. My software, CAMUS, translates Cellular Automata behaviour into music. 

This piece was premiered in Edinburgh, in 1995, by The Chamber Group of Scotland, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

More information about my software CAMUS can be found in my book "Composing Music with Computers", published by Focal Press, 2001.

Entre l'absurde et le mystere - for chamber orchestra

Piece for a group of berimbaus. The berimbau is a single-string percussion instrument, a musical bow, from Brazil. This recording (done with a portable cassette recorder) is from the premiere in June 1990 in Santa Maria, Brazil, by Ney Rosauro and his percussion group (Grupo de Percussão da UFSM).

Zenrimbau - for percussion group

"Olivine Trees" is - to the best of my knowledge - the first piece of music ever composed using a high-performance parallel computer. The piece was specifically composed using sounds synthesised by Chaosynth on the Connection Machine CM-200 computer (one the largest computers in the world in 1993). Chaosynth is a sound synthesis system that I developed at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), in Scotland during a research residency in 1993-1994. The synthesis technique of Chaosynth is based on granular synthesis; it functions by generating a large amount of short sonic events, or particles, in order to form larger, complex sound events. It produces a wide range of bubbling sounds in various flow speeds and tone colours; most sounds resemble the morphology of the sounds of flowing water.

This piece is inspired by Van Gogh's painting, "Olive Trees". The varied and individually identifiable brush strokes of this painting inspired the composition of the sounds of the piece; in direct correlation, colour relates to timbre and length of brush stroke relates to the duration of individual, "granular" sounds. It was premiered in a concert at the University of Edinburgh in 1995.

For information about Chaosynth, please refer to my book "Computer Sound Design: Synthesis Techniques and Programming", Focal Press, 2002.

Olivine Trees

Part of a collection of electroacoustic pieces exploring Brazilian rhythms. Electroacoustic Samba II is dodecaphonic and was composed for contemporary dance performances that took place at various locations in Brazil in the early 1990s. Electroacoustic Samba II and III won a Puy Prize in the category of Electroacoustic Music for Dance at the Bourges International Competition in 1994, France. It was released in 1999 on the CD Cultures Electroniques 12, Mnémosyne Musique Média IMEB/UNESCO/CIME series, France.

Electroacoustic Samba II

Part of a collection of electroacoustic pieces exploring Brazilian rhythms. Electroacoustic Samba III was composed for a series of contemporary dance performances that took place at various locations in Brazil in the early 1990s. Electroacoustic Samba II and III won a Puy Prize in the category of Electroacoustic Music for Dance at the Bourges International Competition in 1994, France. It was released in 1999 on the CD Cultures Electroniques 12, Mnémosyne Musique Média IMEB/UNESCO/CIME series, France.

Electroacoustic Samba III

This is the first movement of "Grain Streams", for piano and electronics, which has three movements. The composition of this piece started in 1997 in Glasgow, but the electronic part was completed only in 1999, at the Studio Forum, in Annecy, France. The piano part was composed algorithmically with the aid of a Artificial Intelligence software of my own design, which simulates the behaviour of simple living beings by means of rules for the birth, death and survival of life forms. The piece was premiered in a festival in Annecy by pianist Jerome Vallet, in 2000. The present recording is by fantastic pianist, Catarina Domenici, with James Correa on the electronics, for the CD Plural, released in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2003. This piece has been performed various times by a number of different interpreters all over the world.

Grain Streams: Maelstrom - for piano and live electronics

"Hip-Hopped" is the third movement of "Mozart Reloaded", for piano and electronics, which has three movements.  "Mozart Reloaded" is a Mozart re-mix (or perhaps more than just a re-mix), which I composed for the BBC Concert Orchestra's Mozart Mash-up project, featured as part of BBC Radio 3's  "The Genius of Mozart" season in January 2011. The piece is dedicated to pianist Luciane Cardassi, who premiered it at Banff Centre, Canada. Cardassi's recording, the score and an essay on the compositional process and thinking behind the piece was released by Sargasso in 2011. This project is a real gem - it is not often that a composer would reveal the inner secrets of his/her compositional practice.

Sargasso - http://www.sargasso.com

Mozart Reloaded: Hip-Hopped - for piano and electronics

This piece was commissioned by i-DAT for the opening of Plymouth University's Portland Square building in July 2003. This is a generative piece controlled by data from the building's management system, which is a computer-based control system installed in buildings that controls and monitors the building’s mechanical and electrical equipment such as ventilation, lighting, power systems, fire systems, and security systems.

Because the piece is generative, it has no beginning or end; it could go on forever provided the system is switched on. Here is only an except.

PSQ Symphony #1

"Raster Plot" is the second movement of "Sound to Sea", a massive choral symphony I composed between 2010 and 2012. Here is an excerpt of the premiere by Ten Tors Orchestra under the baton of Simon Ible, in September 2012, at St Andrews Minster, Plymouth. The mezzo-soprano is Juliete Pochin, who also sung on the soundtracks to Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Star Wars. Only an excerpt is provided here because the full symphony will be released on a CD, score and book combo shortly. I composed "Raster Plot" entirely with rhythms generated by a computer simulation of a network of interconnected neurones that simulates the way in which our brain encodes information. In a nutshell, each instrument of the orchestra corresponds to a neurone. Scientists refer to the graph plotting the activity of the neurones as "raster plots", hence the title of the movement.

Raster Plot (excerpt) - for orchestra, percussion, organ, choir and mezzo-soprano

A few years ago John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York granted me a Fellowship in composition to conduct research into phonology, computational modelling of the human voice and evolution of music. One important outcome of this work is the piece "Sacra Conversazione", for strings orchestra, percussion and electronics (and versions for other formations), in which surreal voices sing in a "global" synthesized language combining utterances from seventeen different languages from all over the world (German, Japanese, Hebrew, English, Spanish, Arabic, Persian and so on) and other "impossible" vocal sounds (e.g., by artificially enlarging the vocal tract to gigantic size).

In June 2011 a new version of "Sacra Conversazione" was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra (Charles Hazlewood, conductor) at the Sount Bank Centre, London, as part of the Electronica III series presented by Jarvis Cocker. 

Only an excerpt is provided here. The whole piece lasts for approximately 20 minutes divided into five movements

Sacra Conversazione (excerpt) - concerto for synthesized voice and orchestra

"Batuke" is the third movement of "Mind Pieces", a symphonic composition in five movements for prepared piano, orchestra and percussion, which was premiered by the Ten Tors Orchestra (Simon Ible, conductor) in February 2011, at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, Plymouth, UK.

"Mind Pieces"  explores the notion of ear-worm. It is inspired by the phenomenon of memory retrieval by the brain and how our memory frequently distorts information. This composition uses musical materials generated with A-life simulations (or Artificial Life), models of the way in which information travels through networks of neurones in the brain, bird songs, and Villa Lobos-inspired rhythms.

Mind Pieces: Batuke - for orchestra, percussion and prepared piano

This is a preview my “Symphony of Minds Listening", which was premiered at Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival on the 23rd of February 2013, Plymouth, UK. The symphony is based on the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony and uses the same instrumentation as the original. 

I deconstructed and reassembled Beethoven’s music according to fMRI brain scans taken from three people while they listened to Beethoven's movement. Each person yielded a different movement of “Symphony of Minds Listening”. 

In this preview, scored for a string quartet, a flute and a clarinet, I tested some of the methods I developed to reassemble Beethoven’s music. 

My heartfelt thanks go to Dan Lloyd and Zoran Josipovic in New York for their support with the fMRI scanning and data analysis.

Beethoven Deviations

My repertoire includes music for symphonic orchestras, chamber groups, solo instruments - with and without live electronics - and electroacoustic music.

Here in SoundCloud is a sample of representative pieces from my diverse repertoire, illustrating various stages of my career. Diversity is an important word in my dictionary. I am interested in melting barriers, and mixing and re-mixing musical influences. In addition to concert music, I have composed for theatre and contemporary dance. 

Recently, I was composer-in-residence at the Science Museum, London, working with Lottolab Studio. Previous residencies include: CCMIX (Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis, Paris, France), IMEB (Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, France), Fundació Phonos (Barcelona, Spain) and Luciano Berio's Centro Tempo Reale (Florence, Italy).

http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/

A Vimeo channel with a few videos of concerts is also available:

https://vimeo.com/channels/miranda

Eduardo R Miranda

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