This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Music Research Seminars”
Abstract
City St George's, University of London composers and researchers Claudia Molitor and Erik Nyström share and discuss their latest work from the City Studios, SPARC (Sound Practice and Research at City) research centre, and beyond.
Claudia Molitor: "Rewilding Music”
What might the music of the lichen be? Why would we want to imagine that? ‘Being seen’, ‘being heard’ suggests a sense of being recognized, of being valued. Yet visibility and audibility can also expose.
On the other hand, the invisibility and inaudibility of nature in urban spaces can protect it from eradication, for example in the case of what is considered a weed or a pest.
But then again it might also lead us to ignore it, trample on it; not open to how important it actually is to us. This talk will tell the story of creating imaginary music of and for the un-hearable worlds nestled in the urban landscape.
Erik Nyström: "Unformation and information, more or less human"
Unformation is a composition which could be classified as non-fixed acousmatic computer music. Artificial intelligence, machine listening, and cybernetic structures are used to generate a unique version of the work at every run of the algorithm, deriving structural ‘information’ from noisy ‘unformation’.
Algorithms, in this context, are not a convenience for composition, but a way of modelling a music that has ‘systemic agency’. The talk discusses how such agency is modelled with technology in composition and performance, and possible acousmatic effects and interpretations that could arise with weak information.
About the speakers
Claudia Molitor is a composer, artist and performer whose work draws on traditions of music and sound art but also extends to video, performance and fine art practices. Exploring the relationships between listening and seeing as well as embracing collaboration as compositional practice is central to this work.
Her work is regularly commissioned, performed and broadcast throughout Europe, working for example with festivals such as Wien Modern, hcmf//, Spor, BBC Proms and Sonica as well as organisations such as Tate Britain, NMC Recordings and the Science Museum. Recent work includes Sonorama with Electra Productions, Turner Contemporary and the British Library, Vast White Stillness for Spitalfields Festival and Brighton Festival and The Singing Bridge, installed at Somerset House during Totally Thames 2016.
Erik Nyström is a composer working in the field of electroacoustic and computer music. The majority of his works are created for multichannel sound projection, and among the recurring interests in his practice are synthetic sound, spatiotemporal processes, texture perception, and visual and physical listening experiences.
His current practice is focused on live performance using interactive algorithmic systems for spatial sound synthesis.
His theoretical work concerns texture, spatiality, sound synthesis, and algorithmic music and has been published in Organised Sound, EContact! and ICMC Proceedings. His music is performed worldwide and he has presented both theoretical and artistic work at conferences such as ICMC, SMC, NIME, and Beyond Humanism.
In 2014 his music was released by empreintes DIGITALes on the disc Morphogénèse.
The Music Research Seminars hosted by the Department of Performing Arts at City St George's, University of London bring together world-leading artists, practitioners, and scholars in the broad fields of music and sound.
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