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  • Leonardo Network News

The Newsletter of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and of L'Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et Technosciences

Latin American Electroacoustic Music

An archive to preserve and document compositions by Latin American electroacoustic composers is currently under development at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, under the direction of LMJ Editorial Board member Ricardo Dal Farra, as part of the foundation's Researchers in Residence program. The project will feature a collection, dating back to the 1950s, of recordings of and documents relating to electroacoustic pieces created by artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela. The collection to date includes pieces by artists such as Jorge Antunes, Aurelio de la Vega, Jose Halac, Jônatas Manzolli, Ileana Pérez and Edson Zampronha, among many others. The project aims to make these rare materials available to the general public as well as to scholars, researchers and musicians. For more information, visit the Daniel Langlois Foundation web site <www.fondationlanglois.org> or contact Ricardo Dal Farra <ricardo@dalfarra.com.ar>.

Lou Harrison Memorial Concert

A concert to celebrate the inauguration of the Lou Harrison Percussion Instrument Collection at Mills College, Oakland, California, is scheduled 23 February 2004 to include William Winant, percussion; Belle Bulwinkle, piano; I Nyoman Windha and the Mills College Gamelan Ensemble; Chris Brown, piano; David Abel, violin; Joan Jeanrenaud, cello; and David Tannenbaum, guitar. The concert will be a tribute to Lou Harrison, the legendary composer who passed away in February 2003 on the way to a festival of his music at Ohio State University. Harrison was a very active member of the North American gamelan community, and supported many composers and groups in their involvement with gamelan. Harrison's composition Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan is included on Interaction: New Music for Gavelan, Volume 2 of the LMJ CD Series, curated by LMJ Editorial Board member Jody Diamond. A world premiere performance, directed by Diamond, of Harrison's last pieces composed for gamelan (Gending Bill; Ladrang in Honor of Carter Scholz; For the Pleasure of Ovids Changes; and Orchard) took place in June 2003 as part of the New Edge Festival, University of California, Berkeley. Some of these pieces may be included in the upcoming performance at Mills College. For more information, visit the Mills College web site <www.mills.edu>. To learn more about gamelan and Lou Harrison, visit <www.gamelan.org>.

Plymouth Neuroscience of Music Group

The Neuroscience Music Group at the University of Plymouth was formed recently to address questions of how the brain processes music, a problem that has been found to be difficult to study in neurological terms. The research group consists of scholars from different faculties and institutes across the university, including neuroscientists, psychologists, engineers and musicians, who will study how, why and where such musical aspects as pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm, meter and timbre are processed in the brain. The aims of the group are twofold: to gain a better understanding of the brain from a musical perspective and to study music from a neurological perspective. In addition to developing fundamental research, the group is committed to rendering scientific discovery into technological development, and theoretical innovation into new musical practices. LMJ Editorial Board member Eduardo Reck Miranda leads the Neuroscience of Music Group. For more information on the research group, including Ph.D. and post-doctorate opportunities, contact Miranda at <eduardo.miranda@plymouth.ac.uk>.

A Nucleus for Integrated Instruments

A series of workshops exploring the potential of the gluiph is planned for early 2004 in Berlin. The gluiph, as presented at the 2003 New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, is a single-board computer conceived as a platform for integrated electronic musical instruments. The goal of the gluiph is to untether new and existing instruments from lablike stage set-ups, thus granting them the strong cohesion of acoustic instruments. The board, which integrates a flexible sensor subsystem and multi-channel audio I/O while utilizing the popular music programming language PD, can be used as is and also offers the opportunity for musicians and technicians...

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