MiSS Four - An improvisatory challenge from the Sonic Arts Research Centre :: February 21, 2009; 1:00 - 3:00 pm (free): Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast.

This event forms part of 24 Fragments - 24 hours of music, neuroscience and performance at 24 sites across the UK. SARC will be linked with all 24 UK sites, but will have a direct artistic exchange with Bristol’s watershed where poetry and voice works by Bristol based performers, led by Hewlett Packard South West fellow Ralph Hoyte will be presented.

Sound artist Paul Stapleton, violinist Gascia Ouzounian and improvisers Pedro Rebelo and Franziska Schroeder will be teaming up for a feast of sonic explorations during the 24 Fragments event, a 24-hour festival funded by The Wellcome Trust. The concert will take place in the unique Sonic Laboratory, a purpose-built, variable acoustic space, known for its experiments in sound diffusion and ground-breaking compositional and performance work. The four musicians are all academic staff at Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Music and Sonic Arts. What unites these four improvisers is their penchant for contemporary, intermedia, improvised, and electronic musics as well as their shared theoretical interest in networked music, virtual environments, social web technologies, the body in performance, performative research methods, and sound art.

The 24 sites of The Fragmented Orchestra are linked up by microphones that pick up sound at each site. All of the events during the 24-hour festival are designed to be relayed through the distributed ‘neuronal system’ of The Fragmented Orchestra and via its website. The Fragmented Orchestra is a huge distributed musical instrument, modelled on the firing of the human brain’s neurons. Made possible by a £50,000 prize awarded to Jane Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan, as the winning project for the PRS Foundation’s New Music Award 2008, it is installed at the FACT Gallery Liverpool and 23 other sites across the UK and runs from December 12th 2008 to 22nd February 2009. 24 Fragments will run at all of these sites for 24 hours, from 10am on Saturday 21 February. This sprawling collaborative work, spanning music, art and science, has evolved from a fascination by its creators of the inherent sonic rhythms and adaptive learning of spiking neurons – ie. the electrical impulses of the human brain.