"Windswept invites us to listen to breath, 
noise, gesture, and silence. 
The performers' breath resonates in their instruments and produce a 
universe of harmonics that the computer manipulates - delaying,
 overlapping and displacing harmonic spectra in time and space."

[TEASER] Windswept - Marc Ainger

Externalities for amplified cello, digital audio, and digital video was completed in 2011. The piece reflects on economic externalities—costs of economic and consumer actions that are not reflected in the pricing of consumer goods. The piece focuses primarily on negative environmental externalities. The cellist represents a consumer who is trying to figure out how she wants to relate to this system. In the first section she experiments with different actions and experiences the results, which are represented in the digital audio and video. In the second section the cellist takes a broader look at the global economy and the climate. In the final section the cellist imagines alternatives to the present system.

[TEASER] Externalities - Christopher Biggs

"The title comes from Charles Babbage’s The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: 
A Fragment (1837) that puts forth the idea that all sounds on Earth are etched into the Earth’s atmosphere, where—presumably—they circulate, waiting for the right kind of stethoscope to come along and listen. 

The electronics recycle the live violin playing through a recursive process of recording and playback, using the room as a filter."

[TEASER] The Latest Sighs Of Mortality - Daniel Fox

I have been interested in speech and soundscapes as separate entities for a while now, and through Anthrophony I, I explore speech as perhaps the purest extraction from the human soundscape. The texts, which discuss sound, are driven by feature data from the recorded soundscapes of both New York and Prague, expressing the speech-scape quite literally. Navigating the space between documentary and composition has been important for me lately, 
especially with recorded media. The speech-scapes allowed me to work with language in a purely syntactic way, as one might hear in instrumental or acousmatic music, but also brought my to 
attention a sort of, semantic Hauptstimme in the texture, in which the meaning of the words, however abstracted, became relevant again. I would like to thank recordist Darien Henshaw, and performer Sarah Segner for their contributions to the piece.

[TEASER] Anthrophony I - Evan Kent

2001 March, Rodney McAllister is the fifth piece in a larger series of compositions called The St. Louis Blues. The series is based on a documentary called “Bob’s Tour: Understanding What We See” directed by Jun Bae. The main subject and narrator of the documentary and this piece is Bob Hansman, a professor at Washington University, and the founder of City Faces, an arts education non-profit in the St. Louis inner-city. Bob brings real, human stories to the forefront of his conversations, in order to provide a deeper understanding of the city’s complicated and controversial history to all those who comes on his tours. Each piece within The St. Louis Blues focuses on one of Bob’s stories from the documentary. 2001 March, Rodney McAllister tells the story of one boy’s tragedy, and the reactionary tales of a broken system that follow.

[TEASER] 2001 March, Rodney McAllister - Leo Chang

“Collection” was created using sounds that the composer collected in Japan using a portable recorder.  Walking around with a recorder always ready in one's pocket is a great way to study a place or culture from an aural perspective.  This particular collection of recordings reveals Japan as a fascinating place with many contrasting aspects.  For example, the quiet environment of a mountainside forest or a Buddhist temple differs dramatically from the often noisy and energetic urban soundscapes.  In creating this composition, the composer wanted to explore these contrasts.

[TEASER] Collection - Michael Pounds

This piece uses recordings of voices from ASEFUAN members (a group of young leaders from 43 Asia-Europe Meeting countries that graduated on the ASEF University Programmes), recorded in the woods of Solvalla, Finland (2009) and Mount Fuji, Japan (2010), using more than 15 different languages, expressing concerns on world problems.  The main concept of the piece is that Omniscience is a state that can only be achieved by the Collective of Humanity and that to solve world characteristics that inhibit World Harmony, all Humanity must dialogue, create and share knowledge. It was premiered in November 2009 for more than 3000 people in a concert with Portuguese famous rock band Blasted Mechanism and sculptor Pedro Carvalho, in Lisbon. It won the first prize in competition arte! ⋈ clima 2014.

[TEASER] ominiscience is a collective - Part 1 - Jaime Reis

“…of pulses and times…” developed out of several improvisations playing around the experience of metre, pulse and time. The piece tries to exist on the boundaries between extremes. The synthesis methods in this piece build on the noise-based synthesis methods first developed in “Morphons and Bions” (2011). It has 44 synthesis modules that use frequency and amplitude modulated noise to create its sounds. In some synthesis cases, modulated noise is summed in a kind of additive synthesis. Sounds are generated in real-time entirely by the computer. The performer has several levels of control, from manual triggering of specific events to running a version of the piece entirely under computer generation.

[TEASER] ...of pulses and times... - Kerry Hagan

On Frogs is an interactive computer improvisation based primarily on field recordings of North American frogs. In addition, there is a spoken-word component that is based on written reflections (scientific, historical). The live signal processing of the spoken voice may resemble frog sounds, an interesting juxtaposition. Other ambient soundscape sounds are played as well. While the performance is primarily a creative endeavor, it also raises issues of location and dislocation: natural sounds that may, or may not, belong together; sounds that may have disappeared due to extinction or endangerment; processed sounds that are unnatural but may sound natural.

NoiseGate