News

Audio Mostly

Audio Mostly 2009 was held 2–3 September 2009 at the Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. This was the fourth in this conference series, which focuses on interaction with sound. Keynote speakers for the event were Kim Papworth of the Wieden and Kennedy advertising agency in London; Geraint Wiggins, professor in Computational Creativity at Goldsmiths College; and Patrik Juslin, researcher in music psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden. A Best Presentation award was given to Valter Alves for “A Proposal of Soundscape Design Guidelines for User Experience Enrichment,” and a Best Paper award was won by Scott Beveridges for “An Exploration of the Effect of Structural and Acoustical Features on Perceived Musical Emotion.”

The next Audio Mostly is scheduled for 15–17 September 2010 in Piteå, Sweden.

Web: www.audiomostly.com

Diapason Presents Xenakis

As part of the festival “Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary,” which was organized by the Drawing Center and curated by Sharon Kanach and Carey Lovelace, the Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn, New York hosted weekly performances during February 2010 of Xenakis’s electronic works. The music included Bohor (1962), Persepolis (1971), Hibiki-Hana-Ma (1969–70), Polytope de Cluny (1972), and La Légende d’Eer (1978). On 6 February German sound artist Daniel Teige diffused the works live in concert over an eight-channel system made possible by Joel Chadabe and the Electronic Music Foundation. The concert was recorded and played as a sound installation in the gallery on 13, 20, and 27 February.

Figure 1.

Participants are gathered around Michael Hlatky presenting “A Graph Editor for Remote Composition of Game Music” at Audio Mostly 2009. (Photo: Stefan Lindberg.)

Diapason is dedicated to supporting the creation and presentation of multichannel audio works. The gallery hosts sound installations, live performances, and public discussions about audio and visual arts.

Figure 2.

Live Gear at the Blip Festival. (Photo: blipfestival.org/2009/press.)

Web: www.diapasongallery.org

MusicAcoustica

The Beijing International Electronic Music Festival was held 25–31 October 2009 in Beijing, China at the Central Conservatory of Music. The theme for the 2009 event was “Interaction.” The festival included a performance series, master classes, lectures, and an electronic-music composition competition. It was also the venue for a day-long Electroacoustic Music Studies Asian Network (EMSAN) Colloquium, built around the themes “Visions of the Future of Electroacoustic Music in Asia” and “Projects of Publications on Electroacoustic Music in Asia.”

Web: www.musicacoustica.cn,omf.paris-sorbonne.fr/EMSAN

Beauty, Horror, and Silence

The 12 Nights music series capped their 2009 season with Beauty, Horror, and Silence: The Electronic Arts and Music Festival, a three-night event held 4–6 December at the Harold Golden Gallery in Miami, Florida. Over 100 works were selected from artists including Flea (FIU Laptop and Electronic Arts Ensemble), Paula Matthusen, David Mendoza, Sarah O’Halloran, Margaret Schedel, SofIA Ensemble, Jorge Variego, and Nathan Wolek. A jukebox program ran daily in the gallery, and live performances were hosted in the evenings.

The 12 Nights 2010 series is planned to reach out and connect with a broader range of Miami venues and artists.

Web: www.12nights.org

Blip 2009

The 2009 Blip Festival was held at the Bell House in New York City 17–19 December. The festival, now in its fourth year, celebrates “eight-bit” chip music and arts that showcase the capabilities of the computers of yore, such as the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST, and the Nintendo and Gameboy game systems. The festival consists of workshops, film screening, and open-mike events for neophytes and professionals. The evening concert schedule hosted eight-bit artists such as Bitshifter, VBlank, and David Sugar. The festival included a screening of the full-length documentary film Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, which explored the underground Chip Tunes scene and the genesis of the Blip Festival. David Viens conducted a workshop covering hardware and sonic analysis of the sound-generating integrated circuits (ICs) of the 1970s and 80s and exploring the possibility of modeling these chips’ capabilities in software for contemporary computing environments.

Web: blipfestival...