ARiADA 2003 CD information

This double CD was compiled by Matt Rogalsky, Research Associate to the Sonic Arts Research Archive and ARiADA projects run by Simon Waters at the University of East Anglia, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. It represents a slice through the activity over the past three years, rather than a comprehensive survey, and therefore excludes far more guest composers, performers, and researchers associated with the projects than it includes. The projects spawned in excess of a hundred public events, many of which are already documented within the SARA archive at:

http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/

The 2003 CD is being distributed free to Sonic Arts Network members in August.

CD#1

1.      BH2 [13:35] - John Bowers and Graham Halliwell

BH2 is a studio improvisation between John Bowers (contact microphones and computer-based sound processing) and Graham Halliwell (amplified sax) recorded at the Old School House on the 6th October 2002. It appears here unedited except for the removal of some noise and the use of modest loudness maximisation for mastering purposes. BH2 works with an improvisation style which emphasises constrained sound selection (the sax and contact microphones rubbed in the hand are the sole sound sources) and the controlled placement of sound and silence, while exhibiting varied relations between players and between source material and its tranformations. Graham Halliwell has worked with Simon Fell and Simon Vincent in the trio VHF and has ongoing improvisation projects with, amongst others, Mark Wastell, Rhodri Davies and Adam Bohman. He has appeared on recordings published by Bruce's Fingers, Erstwhile and Rossbin. John Bowers improvises electroacoustic music solo and in a variety of

Ensembles (including the Zapruda Trio with Simon Vincent and Sten-Olof Hellström). A

solo live radio show The Dial: Have You Been to Hilversum? was broadcast by Resonance FM, London, June 2002. The Zapruda Trio's Live at Smallfish is available on the vision-of-sound label. His monograph on electroacoustic improvisation 'Improvising Machines' (ARiADAtexts number 4) is available on-line at: http://www.ariada.uea.ac.uk/ariadatexts/ariada4/

2. Part 1 [1:32] - Bill Vine

3. Part 2 [2:10] - Bill Vine

4. Part 3 [2:30] - Bill Vine

Parts 1, 2 and 3 were all composed at the same time, which meant that I could aim for a clear and definite progression from one piece to another. I was trying to achieve a sequence of pieces which were at once both simple and beautiful, and as such there is very little processing of the (predominantly oscillator) source material.

5. Speechmarks - Elise Chohan

An extract from a 70 minute installation piece, made in collaboration with visual artist Caroline Wright, which was a response to a friend who had lost her hearing as a child and was relearning speech. Most of the sound material is from this source, with interventions using PD and formal structuring in Cool Edit Pro. The work was exhibited at Norwich School of Art and Design in September 2002.

6. S(The News) [0:14] - Matt Rogalsky

7. S(The Archers) [1:04] - Matt Rogalsky

In 2001, I made a limited edition box set of 24 audio CDs (plus one CD-ROM) entitled 'S', containing the 'silences' from 24 hours of BBC Radio 4, collected from midnight to midnight on December 12 (a resonant anniversary in the history of radio: 100 years since the first successful transatlantic communication by Marconi -- he managed to receive the letter S three times). These two tracks are taken from CD #15 (2pm-3pm): the 2 o'clock world news, followed by 'The Archers,' a radio soap opera set in rural England. For more information: www.silenceisntgolden.net

8. IBP3 [15:16] - Richard Barrett, Jonathan Impett, Evan Parker

A documentary recording of the first trio collaboration between three improvisors well-known for their innovations in technique and technic. The performance, in July 2001 at UEA Drama Studio as part of the Hybrids Festival, is fully documented at: http://ariada.uea.ac.uk:16080/ariadatexts/ariada3/ibp/ariada3_ibp.html

The concert starts with Evan Parker providing the input to Richard Barrett’s keyboard- and footpedal-driven instrument using STEIM’s LiSa, which processes both the live material and recordings from previous (duo) performances. Richard is joined by Jonathan Impett for the second piece, his sound now processed by the latter’s computer-expanded metatrumpet. In the third and final track, included here, the trio play together with the further addition of an ensemble of dynamic artificial life agents. These “live” in the space generated by the three musicians, consisting of both sound and performance parameters (programmed in the Santa Fe SWARM environment), and feed back into the live performance.

9. Right Foot Lower than the Left [9:27] - Mike Challis

This piece documents a personal sound journey on a 300 km anticlockwise walk which

circumnavigated eastern and central Norfolk during the hot summer weather at the end of July 2002. I started at the source of the Waveney, Redgrave Fen, and walked the river to Lowestoft. Then I walked the coast up through Yarmouth, Caister, Cromer, Sheringham and the North Norfolk Coast to Brancaster. Here I cut inland and picked up the Peddars Way and walked quickly south-east. Finally I walked to the source of the Little Ouse (at the other side of Redgrave Fen) and thus finished the circle. The sounds are as recorded on the route in chronological order with no processing other than normal editing and gain control. It was recorded with very basic portable equipment.

10. Sled Dog [9:19] - Nic Collins

Sled Dog dates from 2001. A barrage of glitches, squeals and thunks come from wiggling a laser by hand across a CD of sine waves and listening to odd points around the circuit board. This is a live recording made at a concert at UEA Music Centre during Nic’s November 2002 residency.

11. Milk Tears [5:16] - Adam Moore

Milk Tears provided a starting point for analysing my relationship with the guitar and my experience of guitar music. I used a number of dirt-cheap plug-ins in an attempt to access sounds reminiscent  of those from processors which are anything but cheap. These sounds are a part of the rock guitar music legend and have been used to create lots of exotic,

swirly music and lush corporate-production guitar sounds . Here I have tried to express the essence of  that swirly-exotic aesthetic and recreate an impression of its impact upon me as an axe-wielding teenager. This ambient aesthetic, though it may have run its course, affected me profoundly.

12. Three shorts about noise and rhythm I [3:12] - Pedro Rebelo

13. Three shorts about noise and rhythm II [2:51] - Pedro Rebelo

14. Three shorts about noise and rhythm III [1:53] - Pedro Rebelo

These three works by UEA alumnus Rebelo - now a Lecturer and Researcher at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast - pre-date the ARiADA and SARA projects by several years, but they represent an important stage in the stylistic proliferation which characterised work from the studio from the early 1990s onwards, taking as their starting point a series of instrumental improvisations by Rebelo and current UEA studio director Simon Waters.

CD#2

1. Harpo Marx Locked Inside a Piano [10:03] - Jem Finer

Jem Finer, sometime member of the Pogues, is now best known for his ongoing project LongPlayer, a thousand year long musical composition/installation which was commissioned for the Millenium celebrations by Artangel. His performance at UEA included a collaboration with Matt Rogalsky and Anne Wellmer in a networked cross-continent realisation of Cage's Fontana Mix commissioned for a recent Berlin Festival. The current track was recorded live at UEA on 30 April 2002.

2. Davros (excerpt) [5:12] - Stef Edwards

“Davros is an exercise in shared agency and exchanged prosthesis. A human agent, the system’s ‘composer’ Stef Edwards, stands encased in a steel frame to which are attached various control devices (knobs, buttons and switches), a microphone, and a system of electric motors and pneumatic devices. The motors drive nylon lines which are attached to the performer’s cheeks, and inflatable ‘inner’ lips are fed by the pneumatics, altering the resonant cavities and labial characteristics of the mouth. A laptop computer on a plinth next to the performer provides all the impulses for the control of these physical manipulations of the human performer, who reads from a text which is displayed in front of him according to algorithmic processes related to those which manipulate his vocal production. In a ‘mirror’ procedure, the performer controls the buttons and switches which algorithmically transform (in pitch, formant filtering etc.) the speaking voice of ‘Fred’- the laptop’s generic speech synthesiser, who reads from fragments of the same text as the human performer, delivered by the same algorithmic system, in a sort of disfunctional dialogue.”  [from: Simon Waters ‘Thinking the Unheard: Hybrid Thought in Musical Practice’ in John Monk and Rolf Gullström-Hughes Hybrid Thought (Open University Press, 2003)]

This is an extract from a live performance early in Davros’s development.

3. Inside-Out [10:21] - Edward Kelly

Inside-Out, composed originally for eight channel reproduction (from which this stereo version was made by the composer), explores different sound-worlds through diverse compositional techniques. The work has three main ‘phases’ – the outer two relatively abstract, and the central phase more closely related to a real-world musical phenomenon.  This explores the experiences of distance and proximity to be found in and around the dance tent at Glastonbury Festival: “ A tent so large as this creates a paradoxical context for the highly regular pulsations of the music played inside it. The arrangement of the PA system is such that the sound takes a perceptible amount of time to travel from one speaker stack to another, thus blurring the rhythms of the music.”  The experience of hearing the same phenomenon from over a mile away also informs the character of this section of the work, which was created primarily from material gleaned from improvisations on a five-spoked washing-machine flywheel and from analogue synthesis systems at EMS Stockholm.

4. Study No.36 - Swing Piano [3:37] - Phil Archer

for 2 modified CD walkmen, 2 (physically) prepared CDs, a modified Casio SK5  keyboard and a Supercollider patch. Part of a series of studies based on the names of pre-set accompaniments on the Yamaha PSS-380 keyboard

5. Flit [7:04] - Adam Green

N(n 2) – flit is a live recording (made in the King’s Hall, University of Newcastle in November 2002) of an improvisation with trumpet and live electronics, using a G3 Powerbook, Max MSP, one-dimensional Cellular Automata, Boids (Eric Singer’s implementation of Craig Reynold’s 1997 bird-flocking algorithm) and granular synthesis. The organisation of the structural components in this piece is such that they enable an environment which is structurally composed yet improvised in performance, with each component available to intersect another, embellishing or constraining the properties of the output sound material.

6. fpeak171102 [11:40] - Shigeto Wada

This track is a live recording of an improvisation involving two computers and live performer using fpeak, a component of MAX/MSP programmed in C by Shigeto Wada. fpeak provides a simple numerical calculation process, searching for and outputting the  two largest numbers from a list. The process is real-time, and dynamically updated.

Two independent computers were each equipped with an fpeak powered MAX/MSP patch. The patches were identical, however the machines were in this case different - a PowerBook G3 Lombard 233 MHz with 64Mb memory and a PowerBook G4 Mercury 400 MHz with 28Mb memory. The performer was equipped with his self-designed silverbox instrument with a patch also powered with fpeak. The three systems were individually situated in a triangular arrngement around the audience in a rectangular room (in this case the King’s Hall in the University of Newcastle). In this performance, fpeak was used to analyse numbers provided by an FFT analysis of sound input from two microphones, one associated with each computer and monitoring the other’s output. The numerical data stream was converted into sound output from the internal speakers. The two results from fpeak were filtered such that only one of the results was provided if the result differed sufficiently from previous results within a given period. The performer also produced sound, however, this was processed or mixed according to the difference between the loudest pitch he intended to provide and the result of fpeak’s calculations.

There was no direct connection (data transmission) between any of the systems except for sound. The performance is in no way automated, indeed the performer can be heard walking between the systems to activate and deactivate them.

7. Boosound [3:00] - David Casal

Boosound is an experiment in genetic algorithms programming, whereby the software receives input from a musician in terms of percussive conversation, in real-time. It then mutates its own sequence, which it composes into phrases which imitate/transform the user's input. It is meant to constitute the first block of a live improvisation system based on interaction between a performer and the software in the search for interesting material. While 'interest' is understood in terms of rhythmic complexity (though also contrast, pace and amplitude dispersion), a timeline is drawn within the software thread which tries to exemplify 'boredom' which it uses as a parameter to make real-time decisions.

Boosound was written in the Python programming language, using Matthew Plotkin's 'Boodler' library.

8. Love Song [3:58] - Tom Simmons

for Digital Video, Flute, Man, DP3, Max/MSP + Jitter (full version c.4:30).

Love Song reinvents Clive Walley’s animated film of the same name in the context of my personal cinema project. I try to construct an environment in which events that I render as being abstract sensational, organic or biological are sonically developed, forming the basis of a body-internalisation of a love song. The personal cinema project is available on request from t.simmons@nsad.ac.uk or thomsimmons@hotmail.com

Thankyou - Clive Walley, S4C, Laura Piras, Stef Edwards, Lizzie Hayes, AHRB

9. No Wonder Cassettes Came Out (Four Generations) [5:59] - Fran Overbury

Fran’s work was produced in the final year of undergraduate study, during which she discovered an open-reel tape recording of her father, as a young boy, reading a previously unseen story to his father. During the course of that recording, the latter (Fran’s grandfather) replays recordings of his aunt, and comments on the recording process. Fran incorporates all of these, via ProTools, into a new work which exists primarily on vinyl. Four generations of a family are thus enfolded in four generations of recording and reproduction technology.

10. Med Lekande Kval [3:11] - Paulina Sundin

Med lekande kval is a play with traditional Western harmonic structure. As a basis I have taken the harmonic content of Carl Michael Bellman’s Fredmans epistel No 80 and dressed it in an electroacoustic "costume".

11. 0(n) [9:04] - Nick Melia

In Pea [another Melia work not included here] and 0(n) representation is denied not by distorting the forms of ideal representation, but often by invoking silence – by offering a perceptual distortion (‘is it there?’, ‘can it be heard?’) rather than a separational, artistic representational distortion (in which sound events are addressed as like or unlike reality). This is not contextually a Cagean silence, in which the composition is entirely surrendered to the extraneous noise surrounding the performance. This is the acutely politicised silence of the ideology of electroacoustic performance, outside of an enclosing aesthetic response. In order to problematise and effectively disrupt representation, these compositions reject the ‘open to interpretation’ posturing, and minimise or distort the boundaries of what is and is not received compositionally. In this sense, Cagean silence is inverted: the environment is not pushed into the performance ‘frame’ - rather the composition is pushed out of the performance environment, into the ether.

[from Nicholas Melia - Negotiating Representation: An application and analysis of the politics of representation in electronic composition and listening (UEA MMus by Research thesis, 2001)]