Digital Culture Speaker Series: Future Perfect — Immersive Music Using Ambisonics and Audience Smartphones

Bio: Garth Paine is a composer, performer and scholar. He has created interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the soundfield through their presence and behavior and composed many music scores for dance works, generated through realtime video tracking and bio-sensing. He was awarded a Green Room Award for Outstanding Creativity, for Escape Velocity (Company in Space) and was a finalist for the Best New Musical Score for Dance, 2014. Recent performances in Australia, USA, Korea and Europe include works for percussion and live electronics, new techniques for sound spatialization, resonating metal instruments and Tibetan singing bowl robots. The breadth of his practice is expressed through an enquiry into sound as material. 

In 2018, Paine was researcher-artist in residence at IRCAM/ZKM, developing a new performance work, Future Perfect for spatial audio, cell phones and VR.

Paine established the Virtual, Interactive, Performance Research environment (VIPRe) and is internationally regarded as an innovator in interactivity for experimental music and performance. He presented the Keynote at NIME2016 which outlined a framework for digital music instrument design and a keynote at 2014 Ecomusicologies conference on listening to place. Dr. Paine is a Professor of Digital Sound and Interactive Media at Arizona State University, A Professor of composition in the School of Music, a Senior Sustainability Scholar in GIOS and the founder and co-director of the Acoustics Ecology Lab at ASU.  His creative work can be found at activatedspace.com and his recent albums at garthpaine.bandcamp.com. 

Abstract: Garth Paine will outline his research and composition work for high order spatial audio which he undertook at IRCAM, Paris and ZKM Zarlsruhe, Germany as the 2018 artist/researcher in residence.

He will discuss the 50 minute piece Future Perfect for 59 loudspeaker dome, VR film and the audiences smartphones.  He will outline the software development for a new performance framework allowing sound playback, sound spatialization and sound granulation across the audiences smartphones in addition to the high order ambisonic spatial score. He will conclude with a short performance of a new work for smartphones only,Sydney Set, on the audiences smartphones

A highlight of »inSonic 2018: Algorithmic Spaces« was the world premiere of »Future Perfect«, which was presented in the ZKM cube. Garth Paine, media artist and sound researcher, was a guest artist at the IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) in Paris and at the ZKM in 2018. With »Future Perfect«, he developed an immersive 3D video performance for High Order Ambisonics and Virtual Reality for smartphones.

Here is a documentary video of made by ZKM on research and performance of Future Perfect.