News

Web Audio Conference

The first Web Audio Conference (WAC) took place 26–28 January 2015 at l’Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and Mozilla Paris in Paris, France. The conference brought together Web developers, music researchers, and application designers to address research, development, design, and standards related to emerging audio-related Web technologies, such as Web Audio, WebRTC, WebSockets, and Javascript. The conference also included a plenary session led by members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Audio Working Group to discuss standardization efforts for audio software development on the Web.

WAC’s program comprised an assortment of talks, presented papers, demos and posters, and musical performances focused on Web audio. Among the research projects presented were a Web-based collaborative digital audio workstation application, a system for building and customizing Web audio instruments, techniques and applications of spatially distributing audio to Web-enabled mobile devices, and a browser-based live-coding environment for music. A keynote speech by Chris Lowis detailed his experience creating a Web-enabled version of Max Mathews’s historical MUSIC software, regarded as the first music programming language. The conference’s final evening held a series of musical performances, some of which invited audience participation with custom interfaces for Web-enabled mobile phones. In Fields #2 by Sébastien Piquemal and Tim Shaw, the mobile phones of audience participants served as additional channels for a sonic diffusion controlled by the performers; in Jesse Allison’s Traversal, audience members could engage with one another with a set of sonified interactions in a virtual space, mediated by their mobile phones.

Web: wac.ircam.fr

Dias de Música Electroacústica

Dias de Música Electroacústica 20 (DME) was held 27–30 December 2014 at the Conservatório de Música de Seia in Seia, Portugal. The event consisted of a number of workshops, lectures, and concerts relating to electroacoustic composition and performance. Since its inauguration in 2003, this was the festival’s 20th edition taking place in the Serra da Estrela region of Portugal, and the 34th such festival worldwide, in countries such as Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, and Spain.

Each of the festival’s four days consisted of a workshop, an extended seminar-style presentation, and an evening concert. Emphasizing musicians of Portuguese descent, the festival also featured invited artists from Spain, Finland, Germany, and Switzerland. Among these, João Carlos Pacheco led a percussion workshop and performed in a concert of electroacoustic percussion pieces, and violinist/violist Maria da Rocha held a workshop for “instantaneous composition,” combining live instruments, synthesis, and real-time effects. Across the four concerts were works by da Rocha, Steve Reich, John Cage, Flo Menezes, João Pedro Oliveira, and others. The festival’s closing concert heard compositions from finalists for 2014’s Nano Músicos Electroacústicos competition, sponsored by DME. As an award of the competition, the four finalists, Olívia Silva, Alexandra Lapa, Diogo Baptista, and Mariana Ramalhete Vieira, were further invited to perform their works at the Monaco Electroacoustique 2015 in May.

Web: www.festival-dme.org/2014/12/dme-20.html

MusicAcoustica-Beijing 2014

The MusicAcoustica-Beijing 2014 electroacoustic music festival took place 20–26 October 2014 in Beijing, China. Hosted and sponsored by the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) and organized by the Center for Electronic Music of China at CCOM and the Electronic Music Association of China, the festival’s theme was “Cross Boundary.” Among the festival’s activities were a range of lectures and concerts, as well as two competitions for electroacoustic compositions.

The concert series spanned an extensive variety of genres and practices, including two concerts of Chinese student compositions, a concert featuring the ensemble Percussions Claviers de Lyon, two concerts of telematic music, a concert of works by composers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, and a concert of music for harp and electronics. The festival’s lecture series included talks by Yu-Chung Tseng, Jeffrey Stolet, Kasper Toeplitz, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, Anthony Paul De Ritis, and Christian Eloy.

The festival also held the Eleventh MusicAcoustica-Beijing Composition Competition, open to young and student composers from around the world and with categories...