Saturday November 02, 2019 | 8:30 pm | free
DIFFUSION Festival for Multichannel Electronic Music Night 1 of 4
Saturday November 2nd, 8:30PM High Zero’s DIFFUSION Festival invites you immerse your ears in a soundbath of new synthesis techniques, and then, if you like, hear a talk about the hows and whys of these techniques. This first evening of DIFFUSION is free, but High Zero always needs help presenting things, and donations are gladly accepted!
DIFFUSION has commissioned two sound artists to make new work using “NuPG”. The folks premiering this work are Jessica Ekomane and Ian M Fraser. The talk will be by Marcin Pietruszewski.
First some paragraphs about this synthesis technique and then more information about the people presenting.
• • •
The New Pulsar Generator (nuPg) is an interactive program for sound synthesis. The nuPg program produces a form of synthesis called pulsar synthesis (PS). The technique of PS operationalizes the notion of rhythm with it’s multitemporal affordances as a system of interconnected patterns evolving on multiple timescales. The technique generates a complex hybrid of sounds across the perceptual time span between infrasonic pulsations and audio frequencies, giving rise to a broad family of musical structures: singular impulses, sequences, continuous tones, time-varying phrases, and beating textures.
• Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale Specifically, this is shorter than one tenth of a second and longer than 10 milliseconds, which includes part of the audio frequency range (20 Hz to 20 kHz) as well as part of the infrasonic frequency range (below 20 Hz, rhythm).[1]
• The nuPg’s underlying sound synthesis model extends the original design by Curtis Roads and Alberto de Campo as described in Microsound and Sound Composition with Pulsars.
• Marcin and his synth are important, interesting and exciting because this program lets other artists use Pulsar Synthesis. Roads had a version online a few years ago that ran on an older OS. Unless you were Roads or De Campo or a very heady programmer this type of Granular synthesis was hard to implement. With NuPG more people have access to this. I am sure other people have programmed similar Pulsar engines. But no one has made it their artistic focus to do so. Sunday Marcin Pietruszewski presents his own work using this technique.
Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.
Ms. Ekomane was one the six composers chosen as collaborators by Natascha Süder Happelman for her installation at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019. She’s also part of the SHAPE Platform roaster of artists for 2019. September 2019 will see the release of her first LP Multivocal via Important Records. Her work has been presented in various institutions worldwide such as CTM festival (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), Dommune (Tokyo) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha).
Ian M Fraser– Ian M Fraser (b. 1980) is a musician working in the field of computer music. His interests includes generative music, machine listening, non-linear synthesis, chaotic/stochastic methods, and artificial/alternative intelligence. For the past decade, he has worked with Reed Evan Rosenberg on the development of Keroaän, a musical AI designed to perform without any human intervention whatsoever. He lives in New York City with his wife and cat.
Marcin Pietruszewski (born 1984) a composer and researcher.
He is engaged in sound synthesis and composition with computers, exploring specific formal developments in the tradition of electroacoustic music and contemporary sound art, as well as extra-musical domains of auditory design, computational linguistics and psychoacoustics. He works across performance, multimedia installation and radio productions probing the dynamics between formalism of synthetic sound and its material realisation.
He has collaborated extensively with musicians and composers – e.g., Marcus Schmickler (performed and recorded Schmickler’s Demos for choir, chamber quintet and electronics), Tristan Clutterbuck (fancyyyyy), Jules Rawlinson and Lauren Sarah Hayes Recent projects include a collaboration with Florian Hecker and a graphic design company NORM from Zurich, a philosopher Chris Schambaugh (The New School, New York), choreographer and dancer Agnes Cebere (Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, New York), the Laboria Cubonics Collective (the authors of Xenofeminist Manifesto).
