Erik Nyström leads a series of three Knowledge Exchange workshops, in which he shares his computer music research. The workshops are open to practitioners who have experience with composition, performance or sound design and an interest in research on sound synthesis, multichannel spatial sound, generative systems and live performance in computer music. The participants of the workshop are offered an opportunity to present work based on the workshops in a follow-up concert at SPARC Lab, City St Georges in the autumn of 2025, curated by Erik Nyström.

Please register for each workshop at the three separate links below. Workshops are free to attend, but space is limited:

• Intra-Action Workshop One: Topographic Synthesis: multichannel sound textures
  Thursday 5 June 2025, 5-7pm - Sign up to attend here
• Intra-Action Workshop Two. Intra-acting with sounds: principles of sonic influence
  Wednesday 11 June 2025, 5-7pm - Sign up to attend here
• Intra-Action Workshop Three: Cognitive assemblages: sonic cognisers and generative systems
  Thursday 12 June, 5-7pm - Sign up to attend here

Participants are strongly encouraged to attend all three workshops in the intra-action series. Limited bursaries are available for participants who are not academically affiliated and have to travel from outside of London. If you want to apply for the bursary please indicate this along with your approximate travel cost in the booking form. Participants who attend several workshops will be prioritised for travel subsidy.

When signing up, participants will be asked to provide a brief description of their prior experience in relevant areas, to help us make the content as impactful as possible.

Erik Nyström will also be presenting a solo concert, as part of the 2025 SPARC Symposium, on the evening of 5 June. Please see the separate webpage for details and sign-up forms.

Workshop Programme:

Intra-Action Workshop One: Topographic Synthesis: multichannel sound textures

Thursday 5 June 2025, 5-7pm - Sign up to attend here

Nyström presents an applied demonstration and workshop on topographic synthesis, a method of synthesising sound textures directly for multichannel distribution. The focus is not on direction and localization as is typical in most spatial sound research. Instead, Topographic Synthesis creates a distributed field of sound which has a spatial difference in timbre and texture. The workshop will let participants explore the Parameter-distribution SuperCollider class library and also consider more broadly techniques for controlling a distributed mass of sound with algorithmic methods.

Intra-Action Workshop Two. Intra-acting with sounds: principles of sonic influence

Wednesday 11 June 2025, 5-7pm - Sign up to attend here

The technologies of live performance with sound are typically framed in terms of ‘control’ and ‘interaction’ as if to suggest that musicianship is necessarily about controlling sounds and that the intentions, actions and sounds are pre-existing entities. The techniques demonstrated and workshopped here are instead focused on principles of influence and ‘intra-action’, inspired by Karen Barad. In this approach sounds are not ‘set’ to behave a certain way, as if the performer is the only agent. Instead sounds are shaped in a confluence of agency distributed across performance input, interface and synthesis. This enables a more contingent and physical approach to sound in performance. The workshop will let participants explore Nyström’s delta-control SuperCollider class library which experiments with velocity sensitivity in continuous controllers. Concepts of mapping inputs to sounds in non-linear or disruptive ways, as deployed in Nyström’s compositions, are also explored on a more general level.

Intra-Action Workshop Three: Cognitive assemblages: sonic cognisers and generative systems

Thursday 12 June, 5-7pm - Sign up to attend here

The final workshop deals with how sounds can ‘intra-act’ within a generative system. After N Katherine Hayles the ‘cognitive assemblage’ is a system of non-conscious actors which make very basic decisions but together give rise to complex sound textures. Artificial Intelligence techniques and cybernetic principles are used to achieve this, but the emphasis is less on intelligence and consciousness than on cognition, action and non-hierarchical self-organisation.

About Erik Nyström

Erik Nyström is a composer whose output includes electroacoustic works, live computer music, and sound installations. The majority of his works are created for multichannel sound projection, and among the recurring interests in his artistic research practice are synthetic sound, algorithmic and generative systems, spatial texture, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, and acousmatic listening experiences. He also writes on topics related to these themes.

Erik Nyström’s music is performed internationally and recent appearances include Bloomsbury Festival 2024 (London), AIMC 2024 (Oxford), Noisefloor 2024 (Lisbon), Conservatory of Milan 2024, BEAST (Un)festival 2023, New York City Electroacoustuic Music Festival 2023, BEAST FEaST 2022 (Birmingham), AIMC 2021 (Graz, Austria), NIME 2020 (Birmingham) Ars Electronica Festival 2019 (Linz, Austria), NEXT Festival 2019 (Bratislava, Slovakia), Influx 2019 (Brussels, Belgium). During 2019 he was also involved in CECIA (Collaborative Electroacoustic Composition with Intelligent Agents), a collaborative project hosted by ZKM (Karlsruhe). His music is released on empreintes DIGITALes and his writings have appeared in Organised Sound, EContact!, ICMC and NIME proceedings.

Currently Lecturer in Music at City, University of London, Erik Nyström was previously a Leverhulme Research Fellow at BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre), University of Birmingham. He studied electroacoustic composition with Denis Smalley at City, University of London, completing an MA and a PhD. Prior to this (2006-7) he attended the Computer Music course at CCMIX (Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis) during which he received influential composition tuition from Gerard Pape and had many formative experiences taking master classes with visiting lecturers including Curtis Roads, Trevor Wishart, Jean-Claude Risset, Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu, and Agostino di Scipio.