There are sounds all right but where is music?

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

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

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

Biocomputer Music

Eduardo R Miranda

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