ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe :: Giga-Hertz-Award 2008 -The 2nd Giga-Hertz-Award for electronic music is open for entries until April 19, 2008. The Giga-Hertz-Award addresses composers working in the areas of electronic and acousmatic music. Four Special Prizes are awarded once a year. Candidates are judged on the basis of a composition not more than five years old and a proposal for a projected work.

The Special Prize consists of a project realization grant to the amount of 8.000 Euro with which the prize winners realize their submitted proposal either at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe or at the SWR-EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO in Freiburg. Continue reading

Presented by Sonic Arts Network and RadioReverb 97.2FM, in association with Earshot and Arika - Expo Brighton :: July 4-6, 2008 :: Call for Submissions and Commission Proposals.

Expo is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound art scene in the UK and beyond. Free and open, the event mobilises a national network of artists and engages with communities from all backgrounds – placing sonic art and the people who make it in direct contact with the public. Expo steps out from traditional venues and into spaces that lie at the heart of the community - inspiring practitioners and the public to reconsider their environments. Continue reading

Microclimates III-VI is a sound installation and concert. The installation plays in almost complete blackout so that the ears focus on the tiny details in the sound. A 3-D sound-space is created using 3rd-order ambisonics spatialisation projected over 16 loudspeakers. The playing duration and arrangement is designed for each exhibition context. The concert version combines spatialisation performance with pre-programmed spatial information.

Natasha Barrett uses a recording technique following the acousmatic composition heritage. Here composing begins at the sound recording stage, improvising with less conventional recording techniques and capturing a spatial and spectral microphone ‘performance’. Continue reading

The VIDA 10.0 AWARDS were announced recently. Francisco López (Spain) won an award for Sonic Alter Ego in the Incentives for Ibero-American Production category that helps finance art projects exploring Artificial Life (and related disciplines) that still have not been produced. Applicants must be from South America, Spain or Portugal.

The hybrid forms of the artistic proposals submitted to VIDA and the transformation of the discipline of A-Life itself have prompted the jury to consider new issues, such as the rising importance of simulation in both social life (for example, in the concept of virtual personality) and organic life (evident in the concept of “neo-organisms”). Continue reading

“In the late 1940s, radio engineer-turned-composer Pierre Schaeffer celebrated a defining property of audio recording and radio transmission: the ability to separate sounds from their visible sources. This affirmation cut against the grain of modern thought, for no lesser cultural critics than Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer had assailed these technologies for dulling our auditory sensibility. Schaeffer, however, argued that records and radio triumphantly subvert the hegemony of vision to make possible the experience of “sound as such.” In doing so, Schaeffer continued, they revive a neglected form of listening he termed “acousmatic,” in deference to the ancient akousmatikoi, disciples of Pythagoras who were made to listen to their master’s voice while he was hidden behind a curtain…” Continue reading Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse of Synaesthesia by Christoph Cox, Artforum, October 2005.

60×365 (sixty by three-sixty-five) is an experimental new music podcast by composer David Morneau. Every day for a year, Morneau will compose a new sixty-second composition and post it online at 60×365.com. This project commenced on July 1, 2007, and will conclude June 30, 2008, resulting in just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments.

For this project, Morneau is exploring a wide variety of musical styles and techniques, including musique concrète, sine wave synthesis, digital sampling, 8-bit constructions, process music, acousmatic composition, and post-techno beat manipulations. Each daily post brings something new and different, a constant variety. The daily deadline means the works sometimes lose their preciousness as they become explorations in process and method for Morneau—with his form or his audience—as much as they are works of art. Continue reading

Living Electronic Music by Simon Emmerson - Drawing on recent ideas that explore new environments and the changing situations of composition and performance, Simon Emmerson provides a significant contribution to the study of contemporary music, bridging history, aesthetics and the ideas behind evolving performance practices. Whether created in a studio or performed on stage, how does electronic music reflect what is live and living? What is it to perform ‘live’ in the age of the laptop?

Many performer-composers draw upon a ‘library’ of materials, some created beforehand in a studio, some coded ‘on the fly’, others ‘plundered’ from the widest possible range of sources. But others refuse to abandon traditionally ‘created and structured’ electroacoustic work. Continue reading

New Adventures in Sound Art 2007 :: Call for Submissions on the theme A Sonic Portrait :: Deadline: September 30, 2007.

New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) invites artists of all ages and nationalities to submit works on the theme A Sonic Portrait for consideration in 2008 programming for the annual Deep Wireless, Sound Travels, and SOUNDplay festivals, produced by New Adventures in Sound Art in Toronto, Canada. Artists may submit works in one or all of the following four categories: 1) Radio Art, 2) Electroacoustic Music, 3) Videomusic and 4) Installation Art (Note: please send separate submission forms for each entry). Continue reading

In 2003, John Wynne undertook a research and recording trip to the Kalahari Desert which has provided materials for a body of work consisting of several components… Hearing Voices, an award-winning half-hour ‘composed documentary’ commissioned by BBC Radio 3, presents “a capricious sound world where aural objects shift and surprise” (Resonance Magazine). An 8-channel photographic sound installation, also entitled Hearing Voices, has been exhibited at The National Art Gallery of Namibia, The Botswana National Museum and the Brunei Gallery at SOAS in London. The catalogue for this exhibition is an interactive CD-ROM with a Foreword by David Toop and featuring John’s field recordings of endangered Khoi and San ‘click-languages’ made with linguist Dr Andy Chebanne of the University of Botswana. Continue reading

Vibro was a sonic object, at the crossroads of an art multiple an a specialised magazine. Vibro intended to render experiments in the fields of electroacoustics and Lo-Fi more ‘audible’. It also tried to illustrate the growing presence of sound in the fine art practice. Published only three times in a digibox format, vibro included an audio compilation and a series of cards that catalogue the artists and tracks.

Vibro #1: The Inside Out Issue: A common phenomenon when listening to sound art, is that our ears ‘close down’ and filter out the so called ‘non-musical’ or ‘non-informative’ sounds. Continue reading