jingeejerdup (Lindsey Vickery)

• Notes: In the Whadjuk Noongar language, jingeejerdup ("the place of the honeyeaters") is the name for the locality in which I live. This work includes recordings of honeyeaters from my garden and also a recording of "dry arrangement", an installation by guitarist Jameson Feakes and myself in which native flora (also from my garden) is used to prepare and activate the strings of a suspended de-tuned electric guitar. The recording was processed using Max' Flucoma and FFTease spectral manipulation plugins - convolving the bird and installation sounds and foregrounding different spectral components (harmonic/transient etc) in response to the indeterminate chime-like sounds of the installation. In this approach the pre-recorded element is similar to earlier works such as "between states" and "inhabited matter" [2015] in which formal divisions in a more-or-less continuous material are created principally through timbre changes.

ViiR for HyperTheremin, live electronics and visuals (2020) (Jan-Bas Bollen)

• Notes: In ViiR, a virtual, spectral fire storm is ignited. Its digital nature is gradually emphasised through glitchy distortion, caused by the performer’s efforts to control and extinguish the synesthetic plasma. ViiR is the first part of a trilogy for my HyperTheremin (2020); 3 works concerned with the "taming" of digital entities. The full trilogy in live performance can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/637886066, and other works for HyperTheremin at https://vimeo.com/showcase/7838334.

• About the Artist: Jan-Bas Bollen (1961) had a musical upbringing and later studied violin at the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam and composition at the Royal Conservatory The Hague. Active as a composer, performer and educator, he creates music for soloists, ensembles, theatre productions and installation art. In many of his works he employs live-electronics with visuals and he is often using cutting-edge technologies such as the HyperTheremin, a combination of a non-touch controller and software of his own design. He regularly collaborates with dancers and choreographers. Bollen is also an electric bass player, DJ and producer of club tracks under the moniker BAZR.

Still moving (Jesse Austin-Stewart)

• Notes: Still Moving aims to make spatial audio more accessible for those who are hard of hearing. Localization of sound relies on equal spectral and amplitudinal hearing in both ears. If an individual doesn’t have equal spectral or amplitudinal hearing, they will be unable to accurately localize a sound source. As people, our ability to localize sound is also strongly informed by what we see. As a result, visual cues can be used to dictate our spatial perception.

  The artist has developed ‘imagined localization’, an approach where all horizontal and vertical spatiality is removed by only using mono audio while implying sound movement through visual cues. The resultant work from this strategy is Still Moving.

  In response to the work, hard of hearing spatial audio composers were surveyed and were surprised by their experience of the spatiality. No composers felt as if their spatial experience was hindered because of their hearing, and both found the work to be spatially interesting.

  These responses demonstrate that imagined localization can allow for those who have a particular type of hearing to engage with spatial audio in a way that doesn’t feel hindered by the format and where they are able to perceive works as spatially interesting. By working with mono sound, the perceived salient feature of spatial audio of panning and physical spatial movement have been removed and replaced by the psychoacoustic effect of perceived spatial movement through visual aid.

  By creating spatial movement only through visual implication, and sticking with mono audio, barriers of physical capital have been moved for some individuals who are hard of hearing and who have similar types of hearing to the two composers surveyed.

Pas de son...pas de son ? du son ! (Yu Jinqiao（余金桥）)

• Notes: This piece was inspired by the French director Henri Diamant-Berger's "L'accordeur". It also pays tribute to a highly controversial accidental musical work in title and duration, with the voice of a child running through and developing with an "overall symmetrical structure". Accompanied by bicycles, children playing on the grass, birdsong, the sound of blues music and more. These sounds are very easy to ignore, but, are "silent" sounds really "silent"? In fact, the mostly ignored "silent" sound is also the cells that make up the "sound" world.

• About the Artist: Yu Jinqiao, young composer, game audio designer.He Borns in ShenYang (China) in 1997, he will receive a master's degree in electronic music composition from Shenyang Conservatory of Music in 2022. Yu Jinqiao has been engaged in commercial music production, improvisation, and creation of electro-acoustic Music. Among them, the research on auditory hallucinations acousmatic music is the most profound. He is not obsessed with the research on the level of music technology. Musical texture and expression are the main elements, inspired by various figurative sounds, and contain typical oriental aesthetic ideas in the sound. His works have won or performed at WOCMT2020 (Taiwan), IEMC2020 (Shanghai), Denny Award 2021 (Beijing), La Hora Acusmática 2022 (Córdoba) and so on.

the tears of things (Lindsey Vickery)

• Notes: This work is a sibling to a solo I wrote for Paul Tanner over 30 years ago called The Giant is Speaking Through You [1991]. It revisits that work's inspiration: the principle of planned organic, naturalistic structure of the Ryoanji Stone Garden in Kyoto. This landscaping style, Sharawadgi in Japanese, is sometimes defined as having the quality of "being impressive or surprising through careless or unorderly grace". The 1991 work prominently featured samples of reversed cymbals, the tears of things draws all of its pitched material from the overtones found in four of Tanner's actual cymbals, outlining them on marimba and vibraphone in equal temperament and also electronically at their untempered pitch.

  
  The title is from Virgil's Aeneid: "there are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind", thought to refer to the concept of "the spirituality of all things, even material things (...) even the most fixed and substantial things of all – stones" (Tim Fulford 2013) or as Shakespeare put it so hauntingly in Macbeth "stones have been known to move, and trees to speak".

Nor Hope (Wenbin Lyu)

• Notes: Nor Hope was written for soprano and fixed media in the summer of 2021. The music was composed based on William Butler Yeats's poem Death. The vocalist sings the melody without words, showcasing a soprano's radiant high register. Most of the electronic sounds are generated and processed by the programming software. I used electronics to create a tranquil soundscape to fit the atmosphere of the poem. For presenting the music at a digital concert during the pandemic, I edited a music video that was filmed by the soprano, Stephany Svorinić, in Salem.

  Death by William Butler Yeats

  ‘Nor dread nor hope attend

  A dying animal;

  A man awaits his end

  Dreading and hoping all;

  Many times he died,

  Many times rose again.’

• About the Artist: Wenbin Lyu is a US-based Chinese composer and guitarist. Lyu has received fellowships from Tanglewood Music Center, Cabrillo Festival Composers Workshop, and Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme. Lyu’s works have been performed at many events, including ICMC, EMM, NYCEMF, TUTTI, SPLICE, SCI, Alba, Cabrillo, and Tanglewood. His music has been performed by Beijing Symphony, Tianjin Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Fifth House Ensemble, Del Sol Quartet, icarus Quartet, Society for New Music, Transient Canvas, and Vicki Ray.

  Based on his outstanding academic performance, he was honored to receive the China National Scholarship in 2016 and Donald Martino Award for Excellence in Composition in 2020. Lyu is the recipient of the 2021 ASCAP Young Composer Awards. Two VR movies he composed premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2016. Lyu serves as a composer-in-residence at HAcappella based at Harvard University, and the all-female musician group New Downbeat in Cincinnati.

Whale Song Stranding (David Q. Nguyen)

• Notes: Inflections as sound process to sound quality

  Emanating otherness of the
  Sound quality to sound process from the reflective
  
  Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the omnipresent of the
  dream like and the very literal
  
  As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above, below, before, and after, to neither rise nor sink but only float
  
  A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and dream-like
  
  And
  
  A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a constant movement and the abstract ingenuous stillness, a sound world of the discursive and the narrative
  
  Chiastic process and quality are undermined as the reflections and inflections recur in rounded proportions. The immersive and form is only tangible through this insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in real-like time
  
  Figuratively
  Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is
  
  Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
  The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding within,
  Stranding

Toy_3 (Eric Lemmon)

• Notes: Music was generated live through Python 3.7 and Pyo based on textual input given by the performers. During the course of the work, the performers are asked to give over messages that are directly inspired by water. The graphics of water at a molecular level that are interspersed between shots of the performance were created by Masakazu Matsumoto based on data generated by a molecular dynamics simulation performed on the K-super computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computation Science in Kobe, Japan. The model shows the peculiar ways in which water's hydrogen bonding network behaves when in the supercritical state. 

  Github repo here: https://github.com/eclemmon/toy_3 

  Performers: Eric Lemmon & Niloufar Nourbakhsh from Ensemble Decipher

• About the Artist: Composer Eric Lemmon’s artistic practice and academic research is preoccupied with the politics that circumscribe and are woven into our musical technologies and institutions. His music has been reviewed by the New York Times and featured on WQXR’s Q2 and has been performed in venues ranging from underground bars (le) Poisson Rouge and SubCulture to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music and FIGMENT arts festival on Governors Island. Eric’s work has been recognized locally and internationally with grants and residencies like MetLife’s Creative Connections Grant, UMEZ and LMCC Arts Engagement Grants, multiple Puffin Foundation Grants, a Tofte Lake Center Emerging Artist Residency, a Can Serrat International Artist Residency, a Westben Performer-Composer Residency, and ConEd’s Exploring the Metropolis Residency. Further, he has been awarded a Mancini Fellowship, a long-term fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Stony Brook University’s Presidential Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and a Fulbright Award for his artistic research and profile as a performer. Eric has written works for Yarn/Wire, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Jacqueline LeClaire, and The Chelsea Symphony. He is a member of the experimental and technology-focused music collective Ensemble Decipher and received his Ph.D. in Music Composition from Stony Brook University.