Disembodiment: Reproduction, Transcription, And Trace

This article poses the question, what is so great about the body? Recent scholarship has emphasized the concept of an embodied cognition and reminded us of the significance of embodiment in musical performance. Yet, vital as these observations may be, they offer only a limited view of what ‘touch’ can mean. Following the semiotic notion of the index as a sign with a real connection to its object, writers and artists such as Friedrich Kittler, Ai Weiwei, Kenneth Goldsmith and Nicolas Donin have reflected on how the reproductions of the gramophone needle, the calligrapher's brush, the blogger's keyboard, and the programmer's code can trace meaningful points of contact. Examples from my own practice illustrate some of the many possible ways that digital traces can be touching

Mapping the Klangdom Live: Cartographies for piano with two performers and electronics

The use of high-density loudspeaker arrays (HDLAs) has recently experienced rapid growth in a wide variety of technical and aesthetic approaches. Still less explored, however, are applications to interactive music with live acoustic instruments. How can immersive spatialization accompany an instrument already with its own rich spatial diffusion pattern, like the grand piano, in the context of a score-based concert work? Potential models include treating the spatialized electronic sound in analogy to the diffusion pattern of the instrument, with spatial dimensions parametrized as functions of timbral features. Another approach is to map the concert hall as a three-dimensional projection of the instrument’s internal physical layout, a kind of virtual sonic microscope. Or, the diffusion of electronic spatial sound can be treated as an independent polyphonic element, complementary to but not dependent upon the instrument’s own spatial characteristics. Cartographies (2014), for piano with two performers and electronics, explores each of these models individually and in combination, as well as their technical implementation with the Meyer Sound Matrix3 system of the Su ̈ dwestrundfunk Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, Germany, and the 43.4-channel Klangdom of the Institut fu ̈ r Musik und Akustik at the Zentrum fu ̈ r Kunst und Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The process of composing, producing, and performing the work raises intriguing questions, and invaluable hints, for the composition and performance of live interactive works with HDLAs in the future

Spherical correlation as a similarity measure for 3-D radiation patterns of musical instruments

We investigate the use of spherical cross-correlation as a similarity measure of sound radiation patterns, with potential applications for their study, organization, and manipulation. This work is motivated by the application of corpus-based synthesis techniques to spatial projection based on the radiation patterns of orchestral instruments. To this end, we wish to derive spatial descriptors to complement other audio features available for the organization of the sample corpus. Considering two directivity functions on the sphere, their spherical correlation can be computed from their spherical harmonic coefficients. In addition, one can search for the 3-D rotation matrix which maximizes the cross-correlation, i.e. which offers the optimal spherical shape matching. The mathematical foundations of these tools are well established in the literature; however, their practical use in the field of acoustics remains relatively limited and challenging. As a proof of concept, we apply these techniques both to simulated radiation data and to measurements derived from an existing database of 3-D directivity patterns of orchestral instruments. Using these examples we present several test cases to compare the results of spherical correlation to mathematical and acoustical expectations. A range of visualization methods are applied to analyze the test cases, including multi-dimensional scaling, employed as an efficient technique for data reduction and navigation. This article is an extended version of a study previously published in [Carpentier and Einbond. 16th Congrès Français d’Acoustique (CFA), Marseille, France, April 2022, pp. 1–6. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/28202/]

Noise in and as music

One hundred years after Luigi Russolo’s “The Art of Noises,” this book exposes a cross-section of the current motivations, activities, thoughts, and reflections of composers, performers, and artists who work with noise in all of its many forms. The book’s focus is the practice of noise and its relationship to music, and in particular the role of noise as musical material—as form, as sound, as notation or interface, as a medium for listening, as provocation, as data. Its contributors are first and foremost practitioners, which inevitably turns attention toward how and why noise is made and its potential role in listening and perceiving. Contributors include Peter Ablinger, Sebastian Berweck, Aaron Cassidy, Marko Ciciliani, Nick Collins, Aaron Einbond, Matthias Haenisch, Alec Hall, Martin Iddon, Bryan Jacobs, Phil Julian, Michael Maierhof, Joan Arnau Pàmies, and James Whitehead (JLIAT). The book also features a collection of short responses to a two-question “interview”—“what is noise (music) to you?” and “why do you make it?”—by some of the leading musicians working with noise today. Their work spans a wide range of artistic practice, including instrumental, vocal, and electronic music; improvisation; notated composition; theater; sound installation; DIY; and software development. Interview subjects include Eryck Abecassis, Franck Bedrossian, Antoine Chessex, Ryan Jordan, Alice Kemp (Germseed), George Lewis, Lasse Marhaug, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, Diemo Schwarz, Ben Thigpen, Kasper Toeplitz, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay

Le Cabinet des Signes

for eight players and electronics, Staubach Honorarium commission for Ensemble Cairn, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, 2010. Performed by Le Balcon, Paris, 2011; Ensemble SurPlus, Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2011; and Ensemble Mosaik, Acht Brücken, Köln, 2012. Broadcast on radio station WDR3, 21 May 2012

(Un)original(ity)

"Clearly this is setting the stage for a literary revolution. Or is it? From the looks of it, most writing proceeds as if the Internet had never happened." — Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing In an age where improvisers, sound-installation artists, programmers, hackers, smartphone users, video- game players, flash-mobs, and kindergarteners can produce compellingly-creative sound worlds, often electronically generated, why bother to define oneself as a composer at all? How have 21st-century technologies required us to redefine terms like “original,” “musical,” and “expressive,” even further than the collage, détournement, cut-up, re-contextualization, and sampling of the 20th century? While works in other fields, from Christian Marclay’s The Clock to Ai Weiwei’s internet activism to countless pop-musical mash-ups, have embraced the enormous computational possibilities of digital information, why have concert music composers lagged behind? Preparation: Each discussant is requested to bring two sound examples, no more than ten minutes combined. One of the examples should be a “non-musical” sound, and the other an “un-original” copy, transcription, borrowing, or allusion which may or may not be “musical.” The discussant may appropriate both examples from any source, including his or her own workshop, and should address how technology is implicated in the process

Music of the Hemispheres

Multimedia event featuring a performance by Yarn/Wire of composition Passagework at Issue Project Room, New York, 2011. Passagework was premiered at Greenwich House Music School, made possible with support of Meet the Composer, 2010

Sound Studies Lecture No. 35

Montag - 12. November 2012 - 19:00 Uhr Aaron Einbond aus New York stellt seine Arbeiten vor Aaron Einbond's work explores the intersection of composition, computer music, music perception, field recording, and sound installation, combining the spontaneity of live performance with technological interactivity to impact and challenge the listener with new modes of perception. His work has been performed in the U.S., Europe, and Asia by groups including Ensembles Recherche, Dal Niente, Cairn, Eco, Yarn/Wire, L'Instant Donné, L'Itinéraire, Mosaik, Empyrean, SurPlus, Left Coast, and Antonio Politano. He was born in New York and has studied at Harvard, the University of Cambridge, the University of California Berkeley, and IRCAM in Paris where his teachers included Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion, and Philippe Leroux. In 2008 he participated in the European Course for Music Composition and Technologies in Berlin including seminars by Martin Supper, Wolfgang Heiniger, Kirsten Reese, and Folkmar Hein. From 2009-2011 he was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University and he is currently Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. Upcoming projects include a Giga-Herz Prize from ZKM to produce a new work for piano, percussion, and electronics at the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, and a Franz Liszt Prize for a sound installation in Weimar in celebration of John Cage's hundredth birthday. http://aaroneinbond.wordpress.com/ Was sind Sound Studies Lectures? Die öffentlichen Sound Studies Lectures geben einen Einblick in die künstlerischen, wissenschaftlichen, gestalterischen und konzeptuellen Fragestellungen des postgradualen Masterstudiengangs Sound Studies. Der Studiengang Sound Studies verfolgt die Idee eines fachübergreifenden und damit fächerverbindenden Studiums des Klangs. Ein Studium jenseits eines Musikstudiums, das aber dennoch die Musik nicht ausschließt, ist neu und einzigartig. Der Begriff Sound Studies ist angelehnt an den mittlerweile etablierten Terminus Cultural Studies: http://www.udk-berlin.de/soundstudie