Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Exploring The Relationship Between Designing And Composing With An Analog Synthesizer, Felix Morrissey

Honors College

For my electrical engineering capstone, I designed and built a handheld analog synthesizer. This analog synthesizer is a musical instrument which uses electrical analog components to generate sounds with properties based on the user’s input. My goal when creating this device was to maximize its utility while remaining within the scope of the capstone project. After the synthesizer was built, I wrote and recorded several pieces of music which each utilized the synthesizer prominently. The aim of this process was to be able to explore the relationship between an instrument’s design and the quality of the music produced utilizing it. …

52 Nanotone Symphonies, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

The 52 Nanotone Symphonies is a work of expanding and contracting nature, which reflects the paradox of size, length, speed, and tone of a work: a symphony is traditionally a massive orchestral work with many interactive parts, while a tone is an elemental form of sound, at the foundational level of music. This work distorts and challenges those categories, allowing for each measure (in 12 + 4 time) to constitute an entire "symphony" of sound in miniature: using a single piano (keyboard or organ) instead of orchestra. Performers are encouraged to play each as slow or fast as they wish. …

Sound In Color, Amber Rhodes

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

“Sound in Color” is an interactive audio-visual experience designed to explore the relationship between sound, color, and emotions. Taking place on the Massey Concert Hall stage, the project is inspired by synesthesia and incorporates research on color psychology. Participants are invited to select an emotion and color. As the user hums into a microphone, they hear their emotions expressed through sound in their headphones and watch as the lights on stage respond to their vocal cues.

Pursuing Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language Revitalization Through Song, Sophia Crockett-Current

Honors College

Passamaquoddy-Maliseet is an Algonquin dialect spoken by the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet Indigenous Peoples in Maine and Canada. With an estimated 500 speakers, most of whom are over 60, it is highly endangered. There have been attempts to preserve Passamaquoddy-Maliseet that focused on direct translation through use of recorded interviews with Passamaquoddy People, namely the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language portal pmportal.org and Jesse Walter Fewkes' cylinder recordings of Passamaquoddy people in the 1890s Passamaquoddy People. However, this method is ineffective for revitalization; it did not help to establish new speakers, and due to Passamaquoddy-Maliseet’s more contextbased language structure, direct translation often destroys the …

Lamin Fofana: Blues, Alaina Claire Feldman, Dino Dincer Sirin, Lamin Fofana

Publications and Research

Catalogue for the exhibition "Lamin Fofana: Blues" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery in 2020.

Kioto Aoki Interview, Austin Sandifer

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Kioto Aoki is a conceptual photographer and experimental filmmaker who also makes books and installations engaging the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Her work explores modes of perception via nuances of the mundane, with recent focusing on perceptions of movement between the still and the moving image. She received MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a 2017-2018 HATCH artist in residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition.

https://kiotoaoki.com/

Looking Through The Glass: An Album Of Original Music And Accompanying Artist Book, Sam Genualdi

Lawrence University Honors Projects

“Looking Through the Glass” is a 12 track, 38-minute long album of original songs accompanied by a hand-bound artist book. The book houses the CD as a well as an accordion-structure text block of original prints. The content and form of the work draw upon the experiences of the author to create a unique and personal take on memory as a human experience. Sam Genualdi composed and produced all of the music as well as created all of the art.

Sonic Activation: A Multimedia Performance-Installation, Alex Joseph Lough

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sonic Activation is a multimedia performance-installation featuring sound sculptures, video projections, and performance with live electronics for solo and mixed ensembles. The work aims to unpack the nature in which we hear and interact with sound, space, and gesture. It is a project that recontextualizes the typical practice of performance and installation modes of music and art. The event uses 12 loudspeakers spaced around a gallery to create a densely layered sonic atmosphere that gently fluctuates and slowly evolves. Throughout the event, the audience is encouraged to freely navigate the gallery and experience the subtle changes in sound as they …

Off The Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches To Cognitive Innovation. Conference Proceedings, Sue Denham, Michael Punt, Edith Doove, Martha Blassnigg, Raluca Briazu, Kathryn Francis, Agi Haynes, Guy Edmonds, Adam Benjamin, Matthew Emmett, Iris Garrelfs, Christopher B. Germann, Joanna Griffin, Diane Humphrey, Bryanna Lucyk, Christie Purchase, Rachel Sansone, Emily Baxter, Amy Ione, Frank Loesche, Abigail Jackson, Alexis Kirke, Eduardo Miranda, Luke Rendell, Simon Ingram, Yutaka Nakamura, Gi Taek Ryoo, Eugenia Stamboliev, Michael Straeubig, Chun-Wei Hsu, Pinar Oztop, Mihaela Taranu, Sundar Sarukkai, James Sweeting, Minami Hirayama

Off the Lip Conference - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Cognitive Innovation

The promise of cognitive innovation as a collaborative project in the sciences, arts and humanities is that we can approach creativity as a bootstrapping cognitive process in which the energies that shape the poem are necessarily indistinguishable from those that shape the poet. For the purposes of this conference the exploration of the idea of cognitive innovation concerns an understanding of creativity that is not exclusively concerned with conscious human thought and action but also as intrinsic to our cognitive development. As a consequence, we see the possibility for cognitive innovation to provide a theoretical and practical platform from which …

Music In Alternative Spaces, Seán Mac Erlaine

Books/Book Chapters

Chapter from Dublin’s Future: New Visions for Ireland’s Capital City, Dr. Lorcan Sirr (ed.), (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2011).

Dublin’s Future is a collection of essays, which, for the first time, recognises that the future of the island’s largest and most important urban conurbation is about more than the engineering of roads and the colouring of development plans.

Seán Mac Erlaine’s chapter explores the performance of music in Ireland’s capital city, documenting the currently vibrant use of alternative art spaces for niche markets of improvised, experimental and non-mainstream music practice.

Contributors are recognised authorities in their fields. They cross …

Correspondences And Complementarity In Visual Music, Bill Alves

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Visual music is an art form that implies intermodal connections between the senses but which has historically often failed to identify aesthetically satisfying correspondences. Artistic success does not automatically emerge in one medium when its elemental characteristics are mapped to those of an existing work from another medium. I offer examples from my own abstract animations with music, which draw upon John Whitney's concept of complementarity, a more intuitive correspondence at a higher level of aesthetic qualities, that of stasis and dynamism or tension and resolution.

Surface Noise, Philip Samartzis

Sound Scripts

This paper seeks to trace the genealogy of surface noise as a tool of musical expression by surveying a range of artistic practices based around the record and turntable that privilege detritus, abrasion, repetition and decay as key compositional devices. The paper begins by examining the acoustic properties of the oldest playable recording (Frank Lambert's talking clock) in order to outline the numerous characteristics and flaws inherent in early models of mechanical reproduction and storage that vigorously conspired to interfere with the listening experience. This is followed by an examination of the way recording technology was converted from a tool …

Preface: Sound Scripts: A Word From Tura New Music, Tos Mahoney

Sound Scripts

The Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference was a bold initiative by its partner presenters Tura New Music and the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Perth, including the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. In an arts milieu which is increasingly becoming “industrialised” and the dollar the bottom line criteria for success, it is reassuring to have the confirmation that there are those—in fact there is a strong cohort—who are dedicated to delving the depths of the meaning of their own and others’ practice.

Sound Art / Mobile Art, Cat Hope

Sound Scripts

This paper examines the role of sound installation and music composition practices in addressing the relationship between sound and telecommunications devices, in this case the mobile phone. The popularity of mobile phone artworks is rapidly increasing, with handsets readily available, artists excited about sponsorship opportunities, and the general push in electronic arts. This paper focuses primarily on work by Perth mobile phone Sound Art collective, Metaphonica, which explore many issues raised by this art form. "Phonebox" (2005) was a site specific sound installation where phones are called from a remote computer, presenting a synchronized composition featuring sounds created by the …

I.B.R. Variation 1, Miha Ciglar

Sound Scripts

In this paper I would like to introduce my recent composition: "I.B.R. Variation 1" (a composition for computer, electrified guitar, mixing board and human body), which is derived from three different projects, - Illusions, Body Mix, Resistance -, fusing three different and already unusual interfaces for musical expression into a powerful new musical instrument. The piece is implemented by employing computers and common sound synthesis/processing techniques in combination with a rather primitive manipulation and misuse of low tech analogue equipment. The main idea was to assign unusual tasks to usual pieces of musical equipment, transforming a mixing board into an …

Modernist And Postmodernist Arts Of Noise, Part 2: From The Clifton Hill Mob To Chamber Made Opera’S Phobia, Linda Kouvaras

Sound Scripts

This paper will continue to trace negotiations outlined in Part 1 of the music/noise dichotomy as expressed in modernist and postmodernist works.1 Drawing connections with the trajectory of "glitch" in popular music since the 1970s. The paper will examine a number of key ways in which the music/noise dichotomy has been addressed as a borderline dispute between, for example, the embodied and the disembodied, the scored and the unscored, the accidental and the intentional, sense and nonsense, culture and nature. Two key figures from the highly influential group of sound artists who came together at Melbourne's Clifton Hill Community Centre …

Modernist And Postmodernist Arts Of Noise, Part 1: From The European Avant-Garde To Contemporary Australian Sound Art, David Bennett

Sound Scripts

The broad aim of the paper that follows is to test the claim of critics such as Miriam Fraser and Steve Connor that the modernist deconstruction of the music/noise dichotomy has entered a distinctively postmodern phase. The article below therefore traces the history and poetics of this dichotomy from the modernist avant-garde to contemporary Australian postmodernist Sound Art, moving from a discussion of the ideas of Russolo, Cage, Boulez and Schaeffer, to a close reading of Ros Bandt's "Stack" (2000- 01). These themes as expressed in contemporary Australian composition are then explored in Part Two.

Invisible Symmetries: A Retrospective Of The Work Of Lindsay Vickery, Jonathan Mustard

Sound Scripts

The following is a retrospective of the work of Western Australian born composer Lindsay Vickery. The paper examines the composer's diverse output in composed and improvised instrumental and electronic music and multimedia works. A nine digit string of numbers that the composer calls a "cypher", ties together a significant portion of Vickery's output for almost two decades of compositional activity, but the sense in which these works are about something else is palpable in each and every one. Iconic pieces where a serial-like method is an anathema and cypher based pieces all seem to point to a structure the composer …

How To Prepare A Piano, Annea Lockwood

Sound Scripts

My original Piano Transplants (1969-72) were about relishing the shock of displacement: pianos planted in an English garden, sinking in a Texas cattle pond, pianos beached and aflame; observing their slow transformation through natural processing the five year decay. My relationship with the piano did not end with the Piano Transplants, though. I will also discus more recent works stemming from my fascination with the rich array of sounds which can be drawn from every part of the instrument once the keyboard is dethroned.

A “Hidden Centre”: Crossing Cultural Boundaries And Ecstatic Transformation, Liza Lim

Sound Scripts

The following is an edited version of Liza Lim's keynote lecture presented for the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference (Perth: 8 Oct. 2005). It examines cross-cultural aesthetics and ethical questions arising from non-Indigenous Australian composers interacting with Australian Indigenous cultures. The paper begins in a formal and framed way and then moves towards more personal and speculative comments.

Introduction: A New Historicism? Sound, Music And Ruined Pianos., Cat Hope, Jonathan Marshall

Sound Scripts

One of the highlights of every New Music festival which we attend is the banter that goes on between artists and audiences about what we have experienced together. The Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference was a way to formalize these discussions for the 7th Totally Huge New Music Festival of 2005, and it was a privilege to have been able to attend a conference about New Music in the midst of it actually happening. The Conference was opened by the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Professor Robyn Quin, and it …

Radio Art : A Slovak Perspective, Michal Murin

Sound Scripts

January 16, 2000, marked the history of Slovak New Media art and technologies with the first international internet radio art project. Entitled "LENGOW and HEyeRMEarS Meet Radio Artists", it was a live acoustic performance that utilized radio internet broadcast between ORF1 Kunstradio Vienna with its project Arts Birthday 1.000.037,1 Radio Free B92 Beograd, and Tilos Radim Budapest. The performance took place on 16 Jan 2000, from 11 p.m. to midnight in Nové Zámky, Slovakia (Klik Klub). An edited soundtrack of the event was captured on a CD titled "SOUND OFF 1999-2000". On the occasion of the staging of the performance, …

Western Electric: A Survey Of Recent Western Australian Electronic Music, Lindsay Vickery

Sound Scripts

This paper surveys developments in recent Western Australian electronic music through the work of a number of representative artists in a range of internationally recognised genres. The article follows specific cases of practitioners in the fields of Sound Art (Alan Lamb and Hannah Clemen), live and interactive electronics (Jonathan Mustard and Lindsay Vickery) and noise/lo-fi electronics (Cat Hope and Petro Vouris) and glitch/electronica (Dave Miller and Matt Rösner).

Elephants And Suffering In Dusty Corners, Susanna Ferrar

Sound Scripts

The following non-refereed paper has been compiled by the editors from the audio transcript and notes provided by Susanna Ferrar for her talk delivered to the Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference (Perth: 9 Oct. 2005). The original program note to her presentation reads: "I keep talking about this project I'm doing, visiting places where the ashes of my grandparents' children ended up, who were all born and raised in Western Australia. As I proceed, adventures seem to be befalling me. Sometimes it seems more important to hang out the washing or change the cat litter. The level of …

Rice And Celery (Toglen), Domenico De Clario

Sound Scripts

Berenice is the name of the last of fifty five imaginary cities that Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan. These descriptions and further dialogues between Marco and the Khan constitute the substance of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities". The just in Berenice constitute a secret society, recognizing each other through the pronunciation of certain words (especially commas, parenthesis and the space between things) and through their simple diet of broad beans, zucchini flowers, rice and soup. In recent projects I have been examining the idea that evidence of the existence of a single and independent fixed self cannot seem to be …

The Bent Leather Band Ensemble : Children Of Grainger, Stuart Favilla, Joanne Cannon, Garry Greenwood

Sound Scripts

This paper discusses technical issues confronting the contemporary electronic instrument builder and presents Bent Leather Band's aim to develop playable instruments.