ICMC
My summer didn’t quite wind down this year. During the last week in August, I had the opportunity to travel to Belfast, Northern Ireland to attend the International Computer Music Conference. Sound cool? While many of you might envision workshops on Ableton Live and other musical applications, I’ll report that the commercial applications we all know and love were nowhere in sight. ICMC is largely an academic conference that focuses on cutting edge research and applications. For me, it really was a great opportunity to connect with a wider community of musicians, composers, and scholars who were asking interesting questions and pushing the boundaries of art and science. I’ll be looking at some more specific topics in my next few blog entries, but for now, I’ll start with a brief introduction.
As with most academic conferences, the five days of ICMC were filled with paper and poster sessions, where researchers presented their findings, panel discussions, and of course, lots of music. In all, about 250 works were performed that spanned a broad range of styles and compositional strategies. Most of these fell into one of two categories: electro-acoustic or acousmatic.
Electro-acoustic performances are an extension of traditional concert settings, where acoustic instruments are either accompanied by or interact with multi-channel sound sources. At ICMC, these types of performances took place in a concert hall setting. For those of you new to modern concert music, there is a long, proud tradition of forward looking composers, anxious to integrate electronic sound with traditional acoustic instruments, hence the term “electro-acoustic” music. This dates back to the ground breaking work of Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950s.
Acousmatic performances are really listening experiences that use electronic sound exclusively. While this is essentially what goes on in a dance club, acousmatic music typically incorporates sound from both acoustic and electronic sources, set in a more abstract musical form that explores the nature of the sound rather than use more conventional musical elements of melody, and harmony. The exciting part of this really comes from the multi-channel playback of these pieces, commonly referred to as diffusion. While this can be done in the mix of a piece, a composer will often control the distribution of sound through speakers as part of the performance. The inspiration for this genre comes, once again, from the early days of electronic music and the work of Pierre Schaffer and Edgard Varese, who were among the first to create pieces from recorded sound sources.
SARC
The conference host, Queens University, Belfast, is home to the Sonic Arts Research Center, SARC. The performance space at SARC is a remarkable environment designed for 3D sound diffusion. Yes, I said 3D… While most of us are familiar with 5.1 surround sound at this point, SARC offers 48 channel playback from four levels. There are eight speakers at standing ear level, eight speakers suspended above, eight on the ceiling, and eight positioned below. Below? OK, the floor of SARC is a metal grid, with speakers pointing up from the “basement” below. Subwoofers are suspended above and positioned below. The best pieces we heard in this space were nothing short of amazing, providing a truly immersive experience that challenged all expectations of how we listen to sound. The research being done in this field is closely tied to psychoacoustics, and the result is an aesthetically satisfying merger of art, science, and technology.
While jet lag is usually a challenging part of returning from Europe, the hardest part of getting back home from this trip was listening. Listening in stereo. Call it SARC lag…
