SPLICE Festival V 2023 Lectures
Friday November 3, 2023
2:00pm EDT
Loft, Berklee College of Music
921 Boylston Street, 3rd floor, Boston, MA 02115
Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel and Bryan Jacobs
Women's Labor: Rheostat Rotary Rack
A feminist-activist project, Women’s Labor repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments using embedded technologies, featured in interactive installations, commissioned compositions, and performances. Rheostat Rotary Rack, the second instrument in Women’s Labor that won the 2021 IAWM Ruth Anderson Prize, is based on a mid-20th century umbrella-style rotary dryer, performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand and by wind using potentiometers and rotary encoder. The design of the gestural-sound mappings using potentiometers, rotary encoder, and a six-sided speaker box augment the affordances of the rotary rack dryer and revalues housework as participatory performance, where the public is invited to hang clothes. The lecture presentation will discuss the intersection between the technical, design, feminist-activist aspects and performance capabilities of the instrument, including a demonstration of the Rack.
Ted Moore and Dana Jessen
DJII: Modular Instrument Design for Expressive Improvisation Accompaniment
The DJII presentation (presented by DJII coder Ted Moore) outlines the process of collaborating with bassoonist Dana Jessen to create DJII, a software designed to be used by an improvising performer as live electronics accompaniment. The collaborative process began with open discussions about what a performance with DJII would sound like to an audience and feel like to a performer, and how one might develop an ongoing performance practice with the software. These goals guided the design which uses modular signal processing, matrix routing, software-wide state-saving, and time-based parameter transitions between states. This presentation will include an explication of the technical design of the software, but will focus on the performance-practiced-based design choices.
Nolan Hildebrand
NIMB+: Acoustic Instruments as Controllers for No-Input Mixing Board
This lecture recital will consist of a presentation on the use of external acoustic instruments as controllers for no-input mixing board (NIMB). No-input mixing is a technique where one routes a mixer's inputs back into its own outputs to create feedback loops. When a signal from an acoustic instrument's microphone is routed into a no-input mixer, the performer’s amplitude and gestures can control the behavior of the feedback loops. Manipulating the dials and faders of the no-input mixer results in an exciting interaction that creates unpredictable and noisy sounds. The author has dubbed this live electroacoustic set up the NIMB+. The sound output from the NIMB+ setup then has the ability to bridge the gap between acoustic and electronic instruments in live performance.
Caroline Miller
Designing ‘songwriting’ as an inclusive, student-led course
A presentation on my approach to creating an inclusive, student-led environment in my songwriting class, extrapolatable to many kinds of creative/projects oriented courses. In designing the course I drew upon queer theory and texts by Bell Hooks, including Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom.
Bios
Jocelyn Ho’s artistic practice involves exploring the relationship between sound, bodily gesture, and culture, as well as rethinking the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity, and audience interactivity. She directs inter-disciplinary, collaborative performance projects, including the sold-out music-art-tech concert project Synaesthesia Playground in which she performed works created by fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers in an interactive, multimedia piano recital. Her latest project Women’s Labor has won the IAWM Ruth Anderson Prize, Hellman Fellowship, Harvestwork residency, and UCLA Hugo Davise Fund for Contemporary Music, and has been featured at Governors Island, New Music Gathering, Design Museum of Chicago, ISEA, NIME, Alliance of Women in Media Arts and Technology Conference, CCRMA at Stanford, and UCLA Art|Sci Gallery. Ho is a Steinway Artist and an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA.back to program
With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. She has a diverse creative output with works spanning the interactive multimedia opera The King Listens, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments or custom controllers with interactive audio and video processing. She is internationally recognized for the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media and won the 2019 Pamela Z Innovation Award. Her solo CD, Signal through the Flames, will be released by Parma Records in2020. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle and Geoffrey Wright and improvisation with George Lewis and Mark Applebaum. Schedel is a joint author of Cambridge University Press's Electronic Music and recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on using electroacoustic terminology to describe pre-electric sound. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para laMúsica y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Ictus, reACT, Yarn|Wire and the Unheard-of//Ensemble. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data; she co-authored a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroscience on using familiar music to sonify the gaits of people with Parkinson's Disease. She serves as a regional editor for Organised Sound and is an editor for the open access journal Cogent Arts and Humanities. From 2009-2014 she helped run Devotion, a gallery in New York City focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she taught SUNY’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for Coursera, and formerly served as the director of the Consortium for Digital Arts Culture and Technology. Schedel currently serves as the co-director of computer music and leads the Making Sense of Data Workgroup at the Institute of Advanced Computational Science. She also teaches composition for new media at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. In her spare time, she curates exhibitions focusing on the intersection of art, science, new media, and sound while running www.arts.codes, a platform and artist collective celebrating art with computational underpinnings.
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Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments, and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-build electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoutic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.
His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and defunensemble. His music has been featured at many music festivals in Europe and the US. He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. He has performed his own compositions for guitar and electronics at the Stone (NYC), Miller Theater (NYC), and the Wulf (LA). In addition to his artistic endeavors, Jacobs is a member of the performer/composer collective, Ensemble Pamplemousse.
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Ted Moore (he / him) is a composer, improviser, and intermedia artist whose work fuses sonic, visual, physical, and acoustic elements, often incorporating technology to create immersive, multidimensional experiences.
Ted’s music has been presented by leading cultural institutions such as MassMoCA, South by Southwest, The Walker Art Center, and National Sawdust and presented by ensembles such as Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, the [Switch~ Ensemble], and the JACK Quartet.
Ranging from concert stages to dirty basements, Ted is a frequent improviser on electronics and has appeared with dozens of instrumental collaborators across Europe and North America. Described as “frankly unsafe” by icareifyoulisten.com, performances on his custom, large-scale software instrument for live sound processing and synthesis, enables an improvisational voice rooted in free jazz, noise music, and musique concrète.
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Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe. More at: www.danajessen.com
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Nolan Hildebrand is a composer, improviser, researcher, and noise artist based in Toronto, Canada. Nolan’s musical practices and aesthetics are centered around noise and maximalism, stemming from a background in drumkit, metal music, and noise music. Through noise, Nolan explores conceptual and physical extremities to create intense and engaging music. His compositional output spans classical ensembles, electroacoustic music, and improvised music. Nolan also performs, records, and releases music under his experimental solo noise project, BLACK GALAXIE.
Nolan has had opportunities to work with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, ECM+ Ensemble, XelmYa Ensemble, TORQ Percussion, Jonny Axelsson, Nick Photinos and has attended masterclasses with Donnacha Dennehy, Ana Sokolovic, and Luca Cori. He has presented his music and research at the Anestis Logothetis Centenary Symposium (Athens, Greece), the CeReNeM Composers’ Colloquia (Huddersfield, UK), and the Korean Electro Acoustic Music Society’s Annual Conference (Seoul, Korea).
He is currently pursuing a DMA at the University of Toronto.
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Caroline Louise Miller is a US composer based in Portland, Oregon. Their work broadly explores affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, and digital materiality, often addressing contemporary issues within dreamlike musical spaces that thread field recordings, shimmering textures, and romantic melodic lines through harsh noise and clattering dissonance. She has received grants, fellowships, and commissions through Sonic Matter OpenLAB, Alarm Will Sound, SPLICE Ensemble & Chamber Music America, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, and Ensemble Adapter. In 2018 she won the ISB/David Walter Composition Competition for Hydra Nightingale, created with improvisor and bassist Kyle Motl. Other projects include whistle-session hijacker, a collection of acousmatic/instrumental hip-hop crossover tracks. C.L.M.'s music appears across the U.S. and internationally. Caroline is Assistant Professor of Music in Sonic Arts at Portland State University, and holds a Ph.D in Music from UC San Diego.
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