Exposing Interface: Visualizing Sonic Interactions in Multiplayer Digital Performance

Abstract:

This talk will address interdisciplinary investigations into action, agency, aura and spectacle in audiovisual music performance, with a specific focus on small ensembles. Using techniques from data visualisation, machine listening and machine learning this presentation investigates poetic ways of exploring productively the tension between legibility and co-agency in performance. Real-time video can reveal and structure collective and individual activity through the capture, transformation and re-presention of interactions. Explorations of visual form and graphic mapping provide new opportunities for performers and audiences to engage with provocation and process in immersive audiovisual performance. Works discussed will include "Reqiuem for Edward Snowden," "SKR1BL" and research in progress that builds on existing strands of work in creative computing, computer music and musicology but seeks to make newly playful and adventurous use of these technique. Our current research aims to pilot a framework for experimentation in graphical representations for multiplayer digital musical instruments in audiovisual performance though visualising and sharing musical gestures in performance, and by devising collaborative strategies for integrated and embedded audiovisual performance.

Biography:

Jules Rawlinson designs sounds, visuals and interactions and performs with live electronics. Jules’ output includes "A Requiem for Edward Snowden," a collaboration with Matthew Collings which blends live electronics with a chamber trio and realtime visuals. This work was selected for Creative Scotland’s Made In Scotland showcase at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2015, and has played at Glasgow’s CCA as part of Cryptic Nights, Aberdeen’s Sound Festival and Utrecht’s Gaudeamus Muziekweek. Other projects include commissions for the BBC, New Media Scotland, Glenmorangie, Cybersonica, Future of Sound / Future of Light and the New Radiophonic Workshop. Jules regularly presents and performs work exploring symbolic notations for live electronics at festivals, conferences and symposia including Sonorities, ICLI, Sines and Squares, Art and Sound, Seeing Sound and INTER/actions. Jules is a founding member of the LLEAPP network which has fostered an ongoing series of events at UK institutions. Jules has a doctorate in composition from Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, where he is a lecturer in digital design. For more information visit http://www.pixelmechanics.com .

Marcin Pietruszewski is a composer and researcher engaged in sound synthesis and composition with computers, exploring specific formal developments in the tradition of electroacoustic music and contemporary sound art, as well as extra-musical domains of auditory design, computational linguistics and psychoacoustics. He works across performance, multimedia installation and radio productions probing the dynamics between formalism of synthetic sound and its material realisation. He has collaborated extensively with musicians and composers and recent projects include a collaboration with Florian Hecker, graphic design company NORM from Zurich; philosopher Chris Schambaugh, The New School, New York; choreographer and dancer Agnes Cebere, Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, New York; and the Laboria Cubonics Collective, the authors of "Xenofeminist Manifesto." Marcin is a doctoral candidate in creative music practice at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. For more information visit https://www.marcinpietruszewski.com