Spring Sound Series

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Bocanegra’s visual work involves large-scale performance and installation, frequently translating two dimensional information, images and ideas from the past into three dimensional scenarios for staging, movement, ballet, and music. From an ancient Danish text fragment to Jan Bruegel the Elder’s 17th century renderings of flowers, manifold historical, creative, and material sources are employed “not just as templates for another static work of art, but as a script, a musical score, or an instruction for how to move, or how to behave.” Bocanegra’s visual art draws upon sound and movement as she coaxes new meanings from the intersections of these modalities.

 

Image: Suzanne Bocanegra, Little Dot performance at the Tang Museum, 2010. Credit: Peter Serling.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

David Sheppard is a sound designer. In its simplest form this might involve designing a sound system for Opera, or creating software for spatial sound-control in performance. But for David it is an ever evolving world of realizing visionary new artworks through live performance and cutting-edge technology. His work has taken him across the world and across genres, collaborating with many leading orchestras and ensembles as well as rock and pop musicians, visual artists, dance and film creatives.

 

Image: David Sheppard. Courtesy of the artist.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Eric Singer is the Founding Director of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR), a group of artists and technologists who create robotic musical instruments. These mechanized acoustic instruments — striking sculptural artifacts — are controlled by computers to perform music with and by humans. Responsive and naturalistic, Singer’s instruments together form a mechanical ensemble of acoustic sounds. They have been featured in concerts around the world in collaboration with renowned composers and performers such as They Might Be Giants, Jim Thirlwell (Foetus), Morton Subotnick, George Lewis, Ikue Mori, Todd Reynolds, Ben Neill and others.

 

Image: Eric Singer. Credit: Elizabeth Keating.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Victor Gama’s work addresses the relationship between instrument building and music composition, while using new technologies and the creative practices of Africa and the Diaspora. His work utilizes local knowledge and traditions to create futuristic new instruments and develop new music — using everything from ancient bows to instruments crafted digitally through CAD/CAM. As the founder of the cultural nonprofit PangeiArt — which produces cultural projects in Africa, South America and the Caribbean — Gama’s practice is rooted in processes of collaboration and exchange.

 

Image: Victor Gama, Acrux Installation, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Arnold Dreyblatt’s musical and artistic practice has ranged from large multi-day performances to permanent installations, digital projections, dynamic textual objects, and multi-layered lenticular text panels. His visual artworks create complex textual and spatial visualizations about memory, reflecting upon such themes as recollection and the archive. A member of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt continues to develop his work in composition and music performance, having invented a new set of original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. He has formed and led numerous ensembles under the title “The Orchestra of Excited Strings” for over thirty years.

Image: Arnold Dreyblatt. Courtesy of the Artist.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Christopher Janney began “painting with sound” in 1976, combining architecture and jazz at MIT’s Environmental Art program under artist Otto Piene. Janney’s thesis “Soundstair” initiated the “Urban Musical Instruments” series whose large-scale installations — often using interactive electronics, colored glass, and sound — are now found in subways, airports, and other spaces around the United States and Europe. Such site-specific works facilitate interactions between people and their environment, creating in the urban landscape a sense of spontaneity. These “performance sculptures” give physical form to sound and movement while simultaneously making architecture more responsive and “alive.”

 

Image: Christopher Janney. Courtesy of the artist.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

From ping pong balls to bottle caps, leather wedges to pieces of paper, Hauschka inserts alien objects between or upon piano strings, hammers and dampers. This technique, an extension of John Cage’s “prepared piano,” allows for the replication of entirely different sounds — whether that of the bass guitar, gamelan or the hi-hat cymbal of a drum kit — to usher in a whole new sonic world. Fueled by a love of rhythm, Hauschka’s classicist training, chamber music sensibilities and pop cultural interests all come together to create playful, unpredictable and inventive music.

Image: Hauschka performs live. Image courtesy of the artist.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Pamela Z, classically trained singer and performance artist, works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampling technology, and video. One of the pioneers of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers in her solo works that combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrete sounds. In her current performance work, she uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures.

 

Image: Pamela Z. Courtesy of the artist.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Tristan Perich’s work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code. 1-Bit Music, his 2004 release, was the first album ever released as a microchip, programmed in assembly language to synthesize his electronic composition live. Contained on this minuscule 8-KB chip was an entire 40-minute, five-movement symphony, inspired in part by the primitive sounds of early video games. In composing, he opens up the sound-making possibilities of the raw machinery itself, always “getting one step closer to the flow of electricity through the microchip.”

 

Image: Tristan Perich, 1 Bit Symphony, 2010. Credit: D Yee.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Trimpin’s computer-driven musical contraptions defy the constraints of traditional instruments. Combining digital technology with everyday salvaged materials, Trimpin has invented ways of playing everything from giant marimbas to a 60-foot stack of guitars using MIDI commands. Taking inspiration equally from the junkyard as the museum and the concert hall, Trimpin often creates these eccentric and interactive instruments from found materials, including saw blades, toy monkeys, duck calls, beer bottles, bunsen burners, slide projectors, turkey basters, and pottery wheels.

 

Image: Trimpin. Credit: Thomas Crenshaw via Creative Commons.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

Julia Ogrydziak’s work traverses the classical and the computational. It draws from architecture, art, video, electro-acoustic composition, electronic music, science, nature, generative art, and indie music to create experiential art works and performances. Her recent projects include collaborations with Capacitor Dance, representing Keith McMillen Instruments as a K-Bow Artist, and shows combining live performance and immersive visuals, such as Dark Blue Sky Dream which premiered at the Chabot Planetarium in Oakland.

 

Image: Julia Ogryzidiak, Okeanos, 2012. Credit: RJ Muna.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 / 12:00 pm
Killian Hall, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public

A graduate of MIT’s Media Lab, Andy Cavatorta has designed an array of robotic musical instruments including the BloBot and Whirly-Bot. Most recently, he created four unique Gravity Harps for Bjork’s nature-themed album Biophilia, which premiered at the Manchester International Festival. Each is a three-meter-long pendulum with a cylindrical harp on the end. Gravity is used to set and synchronize the musical rhythms while computers control the sequence of notes. Through the design of such complex and experimental instruments, Cavatorta explores the ways in which we create meaning through sound.

 

Image: Andy Cavatorta. Courtesy of the artist.

Friday, April 5, 2013 / 7:00 pm
Kresge Auditorium, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Featuring Hauschka, Pamela Z, Dewa Alit, Gamelan Galak Tika, Glass Lab Orchestra, Lamine Touré and Rambax.

The four-hour CAST spring concert, following up on 2011’s popular FAST Forward New Music Marathon, features renowned guest artists Hauschka, Pamela Z., and Dewa Alit performing solo works and with students in MIT’s own Gamelan Galak Tika, Glass Lab Orchestra, Lamine Touré and Rambax. Traversing the spectrum of contemporary musical practice, the marathon concludes with an unprecedented world fusion version of Terry Riley’s anthemic In Cfeaturing Senegalese drums, original glass instruments, electronics, and western instruments.

 

Image: Hauschka performs at the CAST Marathon Concert. Credit: L. Barry Hetherington.