Month: March 2022

Felisha Ledesma

Felisha Ledesma is a Berlin based sound artist and musician. Ledesma co-founded and directed S1, a project space that hosted experimental music, performance and visual art as well as being the headquarters for the Synth Library –  a lending library for electronic music equipment. 

 Most recently Felisha conceptualized a synthesizer, AMQR, together with instrument designer Ess Mattisson which was used on Ledesma’s releases for labels Ecstatic Recordings and Enmossed x Psychic Liberation. This collaboration led to the formation of Fors, a music technology project creating software instruments.

I have previously come across the Fors software instruments available for Ableton Live, and plan to get into creating my own in Max.

I like the idea of the Synth Library and think it serves well as an educational tool

Pamela Z

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real-time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Ethel, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), the Diözesanmuseum (Cologne), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, United States Artists, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Guggenheim, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honourable mention, and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

I recently got my hands on a Quest 2 VR headset and and find that the hand tracking techniques that Pamela Z uses could be used, as well a more flexible experience of interactable objects in a virtual, or augmented reality. I believe that the technology is more versatile than the controllers that Pamela uses due to the cameras ability to use gestures with individual finger tracking. 

Perhaps it is possible to assign a ‘track’/ instrument to each finger, what could then be selected by touching the said finger and thumb together.

I have the experience in Unity to experiment with this in terms of spacialisation, creating simple objects that emit sound and having the ability to move them around in a space.

I have recently been trying to learn Max MSP, and have come across a package that works with VR (created by Graham Wakefield). I will try to experiment with this.

Vivienne Griffin

Born in Dublin and living in London, Vivienne Griffin studied fine art at City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Griffin is a recent recipient of an Oram Award, named after legendary producer and electronic musician Daphne Oram, the award celebrates innovation in sound and music. Most recent exhibitions are Manchester International Festival 2021, the AGM in Somerset House at St Mary le Strand 2021, for Montez Press Radio in NYC, Griffin is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast at the Sonic Arts Research Center. They are represented by Bureau, NYC. They are currently working on a video game that functions as a music interface and writing poetry. Their upcoming album Music For Dead People (or requiems) will be out in 2022. 

I found Vivienne’s recent work in Unreal Engine somewhat frustrating and more like a gimmicky demo. It’s not that I don’t think of games as art, quite the opposite, I just don’t believe it’s very beneficial to apply the modern art mentality of ‘ready made’-ing everything. I think my background in games, and previous experience in games engines made me feel like the piece was an uninspiring collection of prefab assets and devalued the potential of the medium.

The game Proteus was the first game that explicitly me think about the game environment as a composition tool. You would walk around an environment and in-game assets would add to the music as instruments (such as walking past flowers.)

Proteus

I previously dabbled with changing the sounds of a platform game I was making. Jumping triggered a kick and landing a snare etc.

For a while, I was very interested in the idea of creating simulated environments in games, and continue to be in relation to sound. This stemmed from watching films by Chantel Ackerman, as well as reading about the One City Block game design concept, and playing the indie game It’s Winter.

I find something appealing about the mundane escapism.

Yan Jun

“I wish I was a piece of field recording.”

Yan Jun

Yan Jun is a musician and poet, born in Lanzhou in 1973 and currently based in Beijing. His work transcends the boundaries between improvised music, experimental music, field recording, performance, organising and writing. Alongside performing in venues, he also runs a project called Living Room Tour, where he goes to the audience’s homes to play with the environment and whatever else is available in the room.

He is a member of FEN, Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee, and founder of the guerrilla label Sub Jam.

Yan Jun’s work was accompanied by a sense of humour and focus on performance and subverting the social and performative expectations of certain environments. He talked briefly about Tan Ping, a current social movement/behaviour in china where the youth are choosing to reject the pressure of long hours of stressful work. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60353916)

He alluded to the humourous nature of his work taking this absurdist perspective, as opposed to the seriousness of making outright political statements. I found these two political angles interesting, they tackle the same issue with opposite approaches.

Lindsay Wright

Lindsay Wright is an award-winning British composer combining traditional practices with experimental techniques. She utilises her skills as a performer and her experience with music technology to create visceral, emotional and enigmatic scores for all genres of visual media. She recently scored the feature documentary Adventures of Joan Collins; the independent drama Things Unsaid; and the HBO/BBC documentary The Mystery of D.B. Cooper with Tim Atack. Her music for Mudlarks starring Mirren Mack (Sex Education) was recently nominated for Best Score at the British Short Film Awards. Her advertising work includes the British Airways ‘Take Off to the People and Places You Love’ campaign, Rightmove’s ‘The Renter’ and Hewlett Packard’s ‘Orchestra’, winning Bronze at the 2021 LIA Awards. She is currently working on a television drama series set to be broadcast next year; an upcoming documentary for the BBC; and her next EP of original material.

My opinion on the Digital

As I’ve previously mentioned, a lot of my perspective on the digital space is rooted in escapism. As a child, I would look out the window at the landscape and wonder what it would look like without human interference.

I think the internet is a great demonstration of mutual aid in terms of learning. I’ve taught myself many things this way.

NFTs

I do not like NTFs, to me they are their use is the antithesis of what makes the internet good. Ownership and digital scarcity. I personally don’t can’t think of what ‘value’ they have in society. Most of what I see about NTFs is driven by scarcity consumerism and economics. Kinda Crypto-Anarchism/ Ancap.

Fallout

As the threat of nuclear weaponry once again rises to the top of our collective worries, how about a more ‘lighthearted’ but topical tangent – the Fallout game series.

Oral tradition of handed down music as well as surviving media. The radio stations in the fallout game series create a stasis of culture, late 1940s popular music.