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Seoul International Computer Music Festival and Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society Annual Conference

The 2016 Seoul International Computer Music Festival (SICMF) occurred 13–16 October 2016 in Seoul, Korea. The festival hosted five concerts over four days, presenting electroacoustic works from a variety of Korean and international composers. Two concerts were hosted in conjunction with the Lyon, France–based Group de Recherche en Acoustique et en Musique Electronique (GRAME), featuring works by French composer Vincent Carinola and by GRAME members James Giroudon and Jean François Estager. Among the works performed at the festival, Kotoka Suzuki's In Praise of Shadows (2015) was inspired by the significance of shadows and emptiness to the composer's conception of traditional Japanese aesthetics, and it set a performance for three performers of custom paper instruments against a four-channel fixed-media track. In Tacit Group's System 2 (2015), three performers live-coded music and video using a programming system of their own creation.

In conjunction with SICMF, the 2016 Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society Annual Conference (KEAMSAC) took place 14–16 October 2016 at Seoul National University. KEAMSAC hosted a variety of presentations of computer music-related research, such as the use of electromyography to control acoustic instruments and a digital instrument inspired by the gamelan. A workshop demonstrated tools for mapping live digital video signals to audio synthesis. Jon Appleton gave the conference's keynote speech, "The Rise of the Anti-Aesthetic in Electro-Acoustic Music."

Web: computermusic.asia

Festival L'Espace du Son

The 13th international festival of acousmatic music L'Espace du Son was held 19–21 October 2016 at Théâtre Marni in Ixelles, Belgium. Organized by Musiques & Recherches, the festival celebrated the 90th birthday of Francis Dhomont with ten concerts of acousmatic music presented through Musiques & Recherches's 80-piece Acousmonium speaker array. In one concert, Dhomont performed his work Deep Forest (1994–1996); a so-called "blank check" concert presented a number of pieces chosen by Dhomont for the occasion; and another concert had several of Dhomont's works performed by invited acousmatic performers. The festival also dedicated portrait concerts to each of the composers Mario Mary, François Bayle, and Philippe Mion, and these composers additionally each curated a concert of works by other artists.

L'Espace du Son opened with a concert to present the finalists for the 2016 Métamorphoses acousmatic composition competition. Selected by a panel consisting of Jean-Pierre Deleuze, Francis Dhomont, Mario Mary, Philippe Mion, and Jean-Louis Poliart, the first prize was awarded to Mirtru Escalona-Mijares for his L'Ermitage au Toit de Chaume.Nicolas Nuyens' Le Fil Ébréché and Alexis Langevin-Tétrault's Apax tied for first place of the student category, and Rafaël Muñoz Gomez's Stuck and Sophie Delafontaine's Ressort Spiral tied for the audience award. Awarded biennially, Métamorphoses is organized by Musiques & Recherches with the help of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels.

Web: www.musiques-recherches.be/fr/agenda/concert-acousmatique/item/5546-festival-acousmatique-international-qlespace-du-sonq

PdCon16

The 5th International Pure Data Convention (PdCon16) took place 16–20 November 2016 at New York University in New York City, the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and other locations in New York City. PdCon16 celebrated the 20th anniversary of the ostensible starting point of the Pure Data (Pd) programming language, indicated by the organizers as the 1996 publication of Miller Puckette's "Pure Data: Another Integrated Computer Music Environment." The convention comprised oral and poster presentations of research papers, concerts, workshops, roundtable discussions, and installations related to Pd. Oral presentations included topics such as creating mobile phone software in Pd, using Pd for arts education, and techniques like granular synthesis and spatialization. The convention held seven concerts, presenting works such as Shawn Greenlee's improvisation with objects and IOhannes M. Zmölnig's pointillism. Hans Tammen's Dark Circuits Pd Orchestra had the composer conducting a group of eight individual laptop performers. Miller Puckette and Shiau-uen Ding performed Philippe Manoury's Pluton (1988), the first musical work to employ Pd's predecessor Max. The convention's workshops covered spatialization with Ambisonics, audiovisual programming...