I am curating an event called ‘Sounding Bodies’ as part of Fringe Arts Bath’s 2012 Festival. The aim is to explore the body as a producer and receiver of sound, through performance, installation, broadcasts and any other medium that might seem relevant. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, check out the call for expressions of interest on FAB’s website.
The deadline for submissions is Friday 17th February 2012, and the festival runs from 25th May to 10th June 2012.
Rostratt: The Mobile Room, Interactive Environments and Music Sharing.
Just before Christmas I received a newsletter from MEDEA (a centre for collaborative media at Malmo University) about a project being carried out in a pre-school. Researchers are designing various interactive technologies to allow the children to explore the corporeal experience of sound and music-making. The games and instruments being developed include a visualisation tool that allows participants to see the correlation between vocal qualities and the amount of air in the lungs (I’m a bit sceptical about role of, and need for, visualisation in this one) and ‘The Insect Instrument’ for ‘singing and composing quiet sounds’. The project is still at the pilot stage at the moment, but I’m looking forward to hearing more about its findings as the research develops.
You can read more about the project by clicking on the orange subtitle at the top of this article, or by visiting The Right to your Voice: New Musical Instruments, Environments and Creativity.
Composer/Choreographer/Performer Collaborations Conference
of Contemporary Music and Dance 2012
19-20th April, 2012
Chancellors Hall, Senate House, University of London
Conference focus: In order to see and hear divergent views of practitioners and researchers on the topic of music and the moving-thinking body the 2012 Composers/Choreographers/Performers Collaboration Conference will focus on innovative interdisciplinary relationships involved in creating and performing new music and dance/ movement.
Call for papers: In particular we are seeking proposals that adventurously explore the creative interaction of the moving-thinking body and the collaborative process of new sound/music/movement making. Thus we are interested in proposals from music/dance practitioners, researchers, post graduate students and educators from diverse backgrounds who are engaged in this process to share their work and views.
Sub themes include but are not restricted to:• Embodied music practice and theory
• Creative music/dance collaboration and employability
• Cultural exchange in music/dance making
• Intersection between music/dance/technology/performance
• Musical communication and perception through the moving body
• The learning connections between the moving body and creating and performing musicWe are now accepting proposals for lectures, demonstrations, workshops-as-research, performances as well as research papers that address the theme of artistic collaboration in sound/music/dance making with the moving-thinking body in mind.
• Lectures and demonstrations/recitals will be 20 minutes in duration
• Workshops will be 30 minutes in duration
• Performances/Lecture 20 minutes in durationPlease submit proposals of no more than 300 words plus short biographies to Marilyn Wyers [edp01mw@gold.ac.uk].
Contemporary New Media and Audio-Visual Festival
12 – 18th December 2011
Madrid, Spain.
More info from the festival website: www.madatac.es/
[Recycled from the AMS Annouce mailing list]
Cornell University
11-13th May 2012
Technology plays a crucial role across a broad spectrum of sonic
activity, offering new cognitive frameworks and reshaping social
networks in ways that challenge the conventional binary of the
individual subject versus the collective. It mediates performance and
listening, provides new modes of analysis, and inspires musical
creation. It conditions our perception of sound as well as our ability
to change it, and is thus both an appropriate tool and topic of aural
research.The nexus of social, cultural, and political issues in and around
music, cognition, and technology encompasses a range of
interdisciplinary approaches to the question of musical meaning, and
therefore this international conference will draw on a wide range of
scholarship from across multiple disciplines. We hope to integrate,
rather than simply collate, these different methodologies, inviting
papers that attempt to reconcile the hermeneutic and the performative,
the empirical and the abstract. To this end presenters will share
their papers with the other participants in their session two weeks
prior to the conference, in order to foster productive dialogue.Keynotes will be given by Eric Clarke (University of Oxford), Ichiro
Fujinaga (McGill University) and Carol Krumhansl (Cornell University).
The guest composer will be Tod Machover (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology).Abstracts of no more than 300 words must be submitted by 1 February
2012. Drafts of accepted papers must be submitted by 26 April 2012.
Further information is available from www.mcts2012.com
Much of my recent research has been about musical works that sample the sounds of the body. While my study has focused largely on electroacoustic music, I’ve also gathered examples from pop music, live and performance art, installation, and dance. Earlier today I came across another such dance piece: Onde de Choc, by Ginette Laurin and O Vertigo. The work, created in 2010, uses a long wooden box as a resonator for the sounds of the dancers’ movements. Microphones are used to capture these sounds for further electronic processing. The work also draws on internal bodily sound, especially the heartbeat.
You can read more about Onde de Choc in an interview with Ginette Laurin (in The Chronicle Herald). A short preview of the piece is available on YouTube.
Similar works include Garth Paine’s Escape Velocity (which uses dancers’ movements to trigger electronic and sampled bodily sounds) and Brandon LaBelle’s Notes Toward a Sketch of a Sonic Body (which I wrote about back in September).
bodies|sounds|technologies 