by Pedro Rebelo
A short electroacoustic piece composed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Miso Music Portugal in 2010.

Miso25

Culinary Belfast: Soundscaping Food
Pedro Rebelo, 2013
Duration: 8m

The Culinary Belfast project is an exploration of the city's food culture through sound. Field recordings and interviews from the kitchens of the city's top restaurants, St George's market and numerous food outlets make up a collection of sounds that tell the story of a city through food. 
"Culinary Belfast :Soundscaping Food" collates some of these recordings into an 8 minute composition exploring, on one hand, the verbal articulation of food sounds by the city's chefs and food vendors and on the other, the more abstract, close up and microscopic sound qualities of processes like chopping, frying and boiling. 

Culinary Belfast is part of the Belfast Soundwalks project (www.belfastsoundwalks.org).

Culinary Belfast: Soundscaping Food

Recording from flat in Copacabana of thunderstorm on the 16th January 2014

Rio_Thunder2014

Music by strings is an immersive sound work in Ambisonics format which explores environmental sound and field recordings through the entities of strings. From string instruments placed in natural locations to accelerometer recordings of fences and wires vibrating with the wind, the piece challenges the lister to encounter musicality in both the everyday sound and the extraordinary. Like the extremes encountered in our soundscapes, the strings in the piece vary in their modes of vibration, resonating bodies and tension, occasionally reaching breaking point… The piece utilises recordings made in Northern Ireland, Mozambique and Portugal. 


Music by Strings was composed at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast and was commissioned by Festival DME in the context of the European project “The Soundscape we live in” financed by the Erasmus+ programme.

Music by Strings

Title: "Music by Wind". 
Location: Shrigley, Downpatrick, Ireland.
Author: Pedro Rebelo.
Date: 13th April, 2020.
Time of the day: 02.00 pm.
Music by Wind is a recording of whistling gates in rural Co Down, Northern Ireland. With the significant decrease in noise pollution in nearby roads these sound events become ever more pronounced and attractive to listen to. The recording has no human intervention in terms of sound production and all sounds are the result of wind across the metal gate's holes.
The recording was made with an ambisonic microphone, an omni microphone inside the gate and an accelerometer on the metal surface. The mix is in binaural and should be heard with headphones.

Music by Wind

Celebration in Rio de Janeiro recorded from high up in Santa Teresa as Brazil scores against Cameroon on the 23rd June 2014, World Cup. 

golbrasil140623.WAV

This work is part of a series of pieces that explore the notion of prothesis in relation to the interface between acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. The quartet’s resonant materials are derived from four old violins (thank you to Tom Davis for sourcing these!). Resonant analysis from each violin body were used to create pitch and harmonic structures which are explored throughout the piece in an attempt to address the specificity of these instruments’ bodies and their resonant potentials. The four suspended violins act as loudspeakers for the sounding of the work’s electronic part. The relation between the quartet and the four prosthetic violins ranges from ambiguity to contradiction by both extending and reacting against the material played by the quartet. Score and parts can be obtained through the Portuguese Music Research and Information Centre

Shadow Quartet

xStreams
for piccolo, bass flute and live electronics 
Commissioned by Carin Levine and Rodrigo Cicchelli Velloso
2015

The piece has a starting point in the project Cidade Museu, a site specific performance designed for Viseu, Portugal and exploring five derelict spaces in the city. The Cidade Museu project is based on the notion of overlaying resonance as a way of articulating identity and memory in everyday places. 

xStreams represents a further stage in this overlaying process and uses recordings from Cidade Museu featuring saxophone (Franziska Schroeder), cello (Ricardo Jacinto) and piano (Pedro Rebelo). These materials determine harmonies, gestures and rhythms of xStreams. The notion of extremes (dynamics, pitch, articulation…) informs the process of overlaying; this is evident in how the original recordings are treated and how they are used to derive pitch and timbral material for the piccolo and the bass flute, two instruments at the extremes of the flute family range. 

xStreams is notated using a scrolling animated graphic score which combines both conventional and unconventional music notation. 

This recording was made during the premiere at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen's University Belfast, 5th November 2015 and featured Carin Levine on Bass Flute and Piccolo.

xStreams

A recording of a live performance of Cipher Series. Performance by Pedro Rebelo (solo piano) at the EarZoom festival Llublijana, October 2010. 

Cipher Series (Solo Piano)

"An Instrument of Dissection" is an attempt at breaking up conventional articulation in order to give room to the accident, the cut, the residue, the parasitical, the awkward... the instrument...

Instrument of Dissection

Music for Prosthetic Congas (Pedro Rebelo, 2004)
Congas, Bongos and Rontontons
For Pedro Carneiro

Music for Prosthetic Congas

Listening to Voices
Pedro Rebelo, 2015

Binaural Sound Piece - To be heard over headphones only
Duration: 29 minutes

The Listening to Voices piece was created in the context of the project “Listening to Voices: Creative Disruptions with the Hearing Voices Network”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Dr Gail McConnell, Dr Jo Collinson Scott and Dr Deborah Maxwell. This Connected Communities project was a collaboration with Time and Space (Glasgow), Hearing Voices Ireland and Hearing Voices Belfast. The piece is an immersive audio work employing three dimensional binaural audio techniques and is to be experienced with headphones.
The piece aims to delve into the experiential phenomenon of hearing voices. All vocal materials for the piece were gathered during a retreat with voice-hearers in 2015 during which activities focusing on listening were conducted, as well as interviews and field recording sessions. The work takes the listener through different sound environments and introduces the experience of listening to voices through short narrative fragments, descriptions articulating how the voices relate to the acoustic world and enacted performances.
The work is structured in four sections. A long introduction presents the experience of voice-hearing through short personal stories and ends with an enactment of the experience of hearing negative voices. The remaining two sections are episodes (“Lab” and “Restaurant”) which focus on the relationship between voices and the acoustic environment. “Lab” features accounts which attempt to describe the phenomenon of hearing voices and reflects on the challenges the medical profession has in understanding this condition. “Restaurant” explores how voices are triggered by everyday sound environments and often arise out of saturated listening experiences. The piece ends with a third episode “Night” which is based on an enacted performance exploring the role of positive voices and thoughts.
The enacted performances were fully improvised and featured only members of the voice-hearing community. I would like to thank the extreme generosity, sincerity and positive energy of all participants. This piece would have not been possible without their contribution and guidance.
Warning: The piece includes explicit content and adult language. Some listeners may find the voices featured in the piece very disturbing.

Listening to Voices

New Media Performance (2004)
Duration: 12 minutes
sub_friction is a prescribed space where (dis)ordered sound is articulated by movement. Seven virtual 3D enclosures are brought into presence through the movement of sound, exploring the dynamics of the inside and the outside.
The sound world of the piece is based on pre-recorded materials that are linked through the use of harmonic distortion. The sources, derived from instruments such as the electric guitar, saxophone and violin, co-exist in an ambiguous territory between noise and sound.
The performance of sub_friction entails interactive spatialization of these materials. Sonic and visual materials are triggered using a custom-designed interface based on a digital graphics tablet.
An extrapolation in scale transforms the small surface of the tablet into a 20m2 virtual sound world in which events seem to fly around the listener. Processes such as the Doppler effect as well as room filtering allow for a coherence between the visuals and the sonic events in the work.
Project site: http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~prebelo/lautnet/Pages/partialspace/index.htm


Sub_Friction

Alto Saxophone and Live Electronics (1999)
Written for Franziska Schroeder

Visceral ReActions

Tabacaria (2002) is a multimedia performance for the Projekt Pessoa (Vienna) - a music-theatre project which takes as its main impetus the heteronymous character of the work of poet Fernando Pessoa. It does so by exploring notions of fragmentation, multiplicity and disruption that form the basis for the design, programming and structure of the event. The performance of Tabacaria has a role of fragmentation in a concert/theatre environment composed by staged excerpts from Pessoa's texts with works by composers Alexander Stankovski, Germán Toro-Pérez and João Pedro Oliveira.

Tabacaria [boxed] is a CD version of the performance that uses as sound sources a recording by João Villaret of Pessoa's poem "Tabacaria", and excerpts from the works of the three works in Projekt Pessoa. The sound materials which in performance are used as a basis for improvisation, become, in this version of Tabacaria, re-contextualised in order to derive the contour of a sonic simultaneity from the structure of the text and its reading.

Tabacaria [boxed]

Interview with Pedro Rebelo on U105 (Mornings with Frank Mitchell) on the Belfast Sound Map 2012.06.13

Pedro Rebelo u105 130612

An Instrument of Dissection 
Pedro Rebelo, 2006
Duration 6'19'' 
Format: Stereo

"An Instrument of Dissection" is an attempt at breaking up conventional articulation in order to give room to the accident, the cut, the residue, the parasitical, the awkward... the instrument...


Partial Space (1998) is an interactive sound installation consisting of an environment in which inhabitants perform a resonant space.

Partial Space (excerpt)

Szechuan pepper (also Sichuan), is a widely used spice in the cuisine of China's Sichuan Province. In addition to its aromatic profile and citrous flavour, the spice produces a tingling and numbing sensation in the mouth when eaten. This is due to an active ingredient known as hydrixy-alpha sanshool (also present in the Amazonian herb Jambu). Sichuan pepper tingling works through the sanshool acting on multiple nerve endings at once, increasing sensitivity in the mouth and causing vibration on the lips measured at 50 Hertz.

In collaboration with Professor Barry Smith (School of Advanced Studies, University College London) we developed a cross-modal experience exploring the vibro-tactical and hence potentially sonic properties of Sichuan pepper. To experience this put 3-4 Sichuan peppercorns in your mouth, start the track below (listen over headphones) and start crunching the peppercorns. The sound piece aims to follow the various sensations, ending in the infamous 50Hz tingling. In addition to the entertaining value of eating the pepper while listening to a sound piece, this work asks questions around food-sound cross-modality. How does sound affect our food perception? Previous research (by for example Charles Spence) shows numerous relationships showing the effects of sound on taste.

One of the aims of this piece is to ask whether while listening to the piece the tasting sensation can be shared if experiencing it as a group. For example, do most people experience the tingling sensation at the same time and can the sonic domain help 'synchronise' our sensations? The sonic experience in food is pervasive is somewhat understudied. From the effect of the sound of crunch on our sensation of crunch (see - The Crunch Test)to our attuned listening to the sizzling pan telling us the perfect Maillard reaction (caramelisation) is taking place, sound plays a fundamental role in the preparation and consumption of food. The creative interplay between the two open fertile ground for understanding cross-modality and reconsider our food experiences.

Sichuan Pepper Experience

Pedro is a composer, sound artist and performer working primarily in chamber music, improvisation and installation with new technologies. In 2002, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Edinburgh where he conducted research in both music and architecture.

His music has been presented in venues such as the Melbourne Recital Hall,  National Concert Hall Dublin, Queen Elizabeth Hall,  Ars Electronica, Casa da Música, and in events such as Weimarer Frühjahrstage fur zeitgenössische Musik, Wien Modern Festival, Cynetart and Música Viva. His work as a pianist and improvisor has been released by Creative Source Recordings and he has collaborated with musicians such as Chris Brown, Mark Applebaum, Carlos Zingaro, Evan Parker and Pauline Oliveros.

His writings reflect his approach to design and creative practice in a wider understanding of contemporary culture and emerging technologies. Pedro has been Visiting Professor at Stanford University (2007) and has been Music Chair for international conferences such as ICMC 2008, SMC 2009, ISMIR 2012. At Queen's University Belfast, he has held posts as Director of Education and Acting Head of School in the School of Music and Sonic Arts and is currently Director of Research for the School of Creative Arts, including the Sonic Arts Research Centre. In 2012 he was appointed Professor at Queen's and awarded the Northern Bank's "Building Tomorrow's Belfast" prize.

Pedro Rebelo

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