News

Network Music Festival

The Network Music Festival was held 22-24 February 2013 in Birmingham, UK. The event presented performances, installations, and workshops focused on music in which networking is central to the aesthetics, creation, or performance practice.

The event featured five concerts of telematic music, works for live instruments with electronics, audiovisual works, live coding, and vocal music. Many of the pieces incorporated networking in novel ways. John Eacott's Floodtide, for example, generates music notation in real time using streaming data from a water flow sensor submerged in the River Thames in London. Over 130 performers took part in the event. Many of them were local musicians, including the members of BEER, the Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research. One concert featured The Hub, an ensemble that has devoted itself to networked music for over two decades.

The festival included a series of technical and general interest talks. The four technical talks dealt with a streaming engine for telepresence applications, the WebPd project for running PureData (Pd) in Web applications, transmission of musical data, and designing for networked musical collaboration. Talks in the general interest track included a talk about presence in network-enabled shared spaces; a talk on musical notation in a networked, digital world; and a talk on sound as augmented reality. Scot Gresham-Lancaster of The Hub also delivered a talk in this track, discussing differences between networked music played by performers in the same room and music played by remotely located performers.

Two workshops were presented at the festival, one devoted to collective and interactive recording with collaborative electronics, and the other focused on the WebPd JavaScript library.

Web: networkmusicfestival.org

Exhibition of Sound Art in China

A survey exhibition of sound art in China was held 26 March-26 April 2013 at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, USA. The event was titled "Revolutions Per Minute: Ten Years of Sound Art in China," and it featured new and existing works by 30 Chinese sound artists. The exhibit was curated by Wenhua Shi, a Colgate University professor of art and art history, and sound artist Dajuin Yao. The event featured five artists in residence: Wang Changcun, Xu Cheng, Samson Young, Qu Qianwen, and Xie Zhongqi.

Each of the five artists in residence presented a workshop. Workshop topics included the use of brain waves in composition, real-time audiovisual performance, field recording, Max/MSP improvisation, and electronic circuit bending and effect box building. The visiting artists and curators participated in live performances and in a panel discussion on Chinese sound art.

Figure 1.

An audio sculpture by Wenhua Shi, titled Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing Roars, Bangs, Booms, on exhibit at Revolutions Per Minute. (Photo: Mark R. Williams.)

In addition to hosting information about the artists, installations, and performances associated with the event, the Revolutions Per Minute Web site features two scholarly essays on sound art in China. One, titled "Revolutions Per Minute: Sound Art China," was written by event organizer Dajuin Yao; another, titled "Decay, Resonance, Auditory Space: Sonic Materiality and Culture," was contributed by guest artist Samson Young.

Web: http://www.rpm13.com/

SEAMUS 2013

The Society of Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) held its national conference 18-20 April 2013 at McNally Smith College of Music in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. The conference featured conventional presentations of academic papers and of musical works in concert, as well as a "piece plus poster" track for compositions that were both performed in concert and discussed in a poster presentation. The conference included three sessions of paper presentations on topics such as computational thinking in music; preservation of electroacoustic works; visual freedom in electronic music performance; performance with the Microsoft Kinect depth sensor; audience interaction in "middle America"; and a musical development platform for mobile applications, synthesis, and gestural control. The conference's 15 concerts included acousmatic music, music for instruments and electronics, and music for laptop orchestra. Many performances featured ensembles-in-residence Zeitgeist and Ensemble 61, as well as guest soloist Keith Kirchoff. The conference also presented two installations and an electroacoustic music listening room.

Web: blog.mcnallysmith.edu/seamus2013

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