SPARC Symposium Concert: Ville Raasakka  and David Monacchi

Ville Raasakka

Ville Aslak Raasakka is a Helsinki-based Finnish composer specialized in ecology. His works incorporate field recordings from coal power plants, coal mines, oil rigs, forests, trees, insects, plants and underwater sites. He is currently working with bioacoustics and composing in cooperation with biologists.

His works are performed by the Klangforum Wien, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mivos Quartet at festivals including Eclat, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and June in Buffalo. He has composed for soloists and conductors such as Marco Blaauw, Chloé Dufresne, Anssi Karttunen and Bas Wiegers.

Raasakka works as a part-time lecturer in composition at the Sibelius Academy (Helsinki), where he researches and teaches ecological practices. He studied composition with Veli-Matti Puumala at the Sibelius Academy and with Georges Aperghis as his private student in Paris 2008. He is currently finishing his Doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, and is a research member of the Critical Academy in the University of the Arts Helsinki.

David Monnachi, Fragments of Extinction

Eco-acoustic works in immersive 3-D sound, featuring higher-order Ambisonics recordings from Malaysia, the Amazon, Africa, and Borneo.

About David Monacchi

David Monacchi (1970) is an eco-acoustics researcher, composer and interdisciplinary artist. He has been developing the project "Fragments of Extinction" since 1998, conducting field research in the world’s remaining areas of undisturbed primary equatorial forest. The recipient of multiple awards throughout Europe and North America, Monacchi is pioneering a new compositional and science dissemination approach based on 3D soundscape recordings of ecosystems to raise awareness on the biodiversity crisis through science-based sound art. His Eco-acoustic Theatre invention (a full-periphonic space dedicated to soundscape listening) has received the international patent in 2014 and is now being built in museums and public spaces as SONOSFERA®. He has worked extensively in cross-disciplinary contexts (contemporary music, cinema, video-art, site-specific public art, bioacoustics, natural history and science museums), and is founding member of artistic and scientific networks as the International Society of Ecoacoustics.

A research fellow at Simon Fraser University – Vancouver in 1998 and a Fulbright scholar at University of California, Berkeley in 2007, Monacchi has taught at the University of Macerata since 2000, and is now professor of Electroacoustics at the Conservatorio "G. Rossini" of Pesaro (IT). A TEDx speaker in 2017, Artistic Research fellow at IRCAM-Paris in 2018, Monacchi is author of the multi-awarded documentary film "Dusk Chorus - based on Fragments of Extinction". Collaborations with ICCROM and IUCN to promote advocacy in primary forest soundscape conservation, culminated in a recent invited talk for the plenary session of the 2018 United Nations Biodiversity Conference, UN COP-14.