On 2 and 3 June 2023, Ji Youn Kang will present her annual Wave Field Synthesis Festival in Sonology’s New Music Lab and Wave Field Synthesis Studio (6.74) in collaboration with The Game of Life. The festival will have works by Ana Amaral da Silva, Jemin Choi, Jacob Eckhardt, Gaia Heichal, Kerim Kali, Liza Kuzyakova, Lawrence Mc Guire, Roc Montoriol Torrent, Lenny Sprenger, Giorgio Zangarini, Casimir Geelhoed, Nicolas Kliwadenko, Anton Kondratov, Leila Masharipova, Julien Palluel, Virág Anna Virág, Shawn Wong, Otis Thomet, Nina Uzelac, Agita Reke, Orfeas Manolidis, Lennart Sailer, Amit Dagim, Ida Hirsenfelder, Farzaneh Nouri and Leslee Smucker.
As part of the 2023 International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Utrecht, the Institute of Sonology will host a satellite event for multichannel performances and live coding. There will be 8 performances exploring the 12-channel Amadeus loudspeaker system in Sonology’s New Music Lab on Tuesday 18 April 2023 from 17:00–19:00.
The New Music Lab is on the sixth floor of the Amare building in The Hague. There is space for 75 people to attend the concert. Admission is free and based on a first-come, first-served basis.
10 years after the festival Composing Spaces: Spatial Music from Gabrieli to the 21st Century, the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire presents Composing Spaces 2: Space as Music’s Medium of Transformation. From 12 to 14 April 2023 there are three concerts, six lectures and a sound installation in the Conservatoriumzaal, the Concertzaal, and the New Music Lab in Amare, Spuiplein 150, 2511 DG Den Haag. The entrance for concerts and lectures is free. Registration for the concert on 13 April through this link is recommended.
12 April 2023, 15:30–17:30, New Music Lab
Lecture by Raviv Ganchrow: Archeoacoustics: Hearing Spaces from the Past
12 April 2023, 19:30, Conservatoriumzaal
Daryna Mamaisur and Anna Khvyl: A Steppe with Rabbits and Pheasants Running Around, and Where Some Even Saw Foxes (audiovisual fixed media, 8-channel sound)
Hilde Wollenstein: Please Stop Yelling At Me, I Don’t Know What I Want (multichannel fixed media)
Cathy van Eck: Wings (three performers and live electronics) performed by Cathy van Eck, Ioannis Michos and Danya Pilchen
Giulia Francavilla: Flow States #3 (16-channel fixed media)
Teresa Carrasco: FLYSCH (violin, baritone sax, accordion, percussion, live electronics) performed by Leslee Smucker, Alejandro Fenollosa, Kaat Vanhaverbeke, Rubén Castillo del Pozo and Teresa Carrasco
Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble improvised music in a spatial setting
13 April 2023, 13:00–14:00, Conservatoriumzaal
PhD presentation by Siamak Anvari: Materialisation of fixed media music
13 April 2023, 20:00, Concertzaal Amare
Orchestra of the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague conducted by Gregory Charette
Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question
Luigi Nono: No hay caminos, hay que caminar… Andrei Tarkovskij
Charles Ives: Central Park in the Dark
Edgard Varèse: Amériques
14 April 2023, 13:00–17:00, New Music Lab
Lecture by Margherita Brillada: Webcasting: Musing on radio spaces
Lecture by Stefan Weinzierl: Binaural synthesis as a tool for computer music and sound art
Lecture by Teresa Carrasco: Shaping timbre in space
Lecture by Veniero Rizzardi: “Nostalgia for the future”. Form, sound, space in Luigi Nono’s late works
14 April 2023, 19:30, Conservatoriumzaal
Iannis Xenakis: Pléïades (percussion ensemble) 45’ Mélanges—Claviers—Métaux—Peaux performed by João Brito, Porter Ellerman, Gonçalo Martins, Boldizsár Szöllősi, Te-Ping Teng and Kalina Vladovska
Luigi Nono: La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (violin, 8-channel tape and 8–10 music stands) 60’ performed by Leslee Smucker (violin) and Veniero Rizzardi (sound projection)
12–14 April 2023, Club 4 and 6th Floor in Amare
Sound installation (Re)Sounding the Spui composed by Danya Pilchen, Otso Aho, Ida Hirsenfelder, Gaia Heichal, Je Min Choi and Nursinem Aslan.
Bjarni Gunnarsson’s article “Balancing Behaviours” was published on 17 February 2023 as part of the Orpheus Institute’s ECHO journal and the New Mimesis edition curated by Jonathan Impett. The article presents ideas relating to the creation of computer music using emergent systems based on rules and local interactions. It involves a reflection on algorithms, interaction, and the behaviour of sound processes. It questions the scope and potential boundaries of computational systems through the space relating compositional practice with the development of generative environments. Three open-source software systems are also introduced, including Wildfires, which can be used to generate WFSCollider scores.
A few weeks earlier, Bjarni Gunnarsson’s latest album UPICS was released on the American label Flag Day Recordings. The pieces on the album are the outcome of his research into database-driven reconstructions based on sound analysis. All the source material has been created with Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC system: a graphical computer system where users draw shapes, waveforms, and modulations on ‘pages’ which form a composition or composed sound. The material was recorded between September 2006 and March 2007 at the CCMIX institute in Paris. None of those recordings ever made it to a completed work until now, through the use of a newly developed system, SNDArchive (github.com/bjarnig/SNDArchive), which allows to recompose and combine sound parts based on different dimensions discovered through offline analysis processes. The idea was to create methods for engaging with sound archives in novel ways, to review them from a different angle, or to reveal previously unknown aspects of material already loaded with meaning.
Starting in October 2023, the University of Music (HfM) Trossingen (Germany) will offer a master’s degree program that is unique in Europe and aims to train a new generation of artistically and technically competent composers, sound artists, and music designers, especially by critically exploring the creative possibilities of AI-based technologies.
This program (Master of Music in Composition) builds on the music technology teaching foundations of the HfM Trossingen and takes place in close cooperation with Furtwangen University. The students are taught by an internationally renowned team of researchers and experienced artistic practitioners, first and foremost Prof. Dr. Luc Döbereiner and Prof. Dr. Joachim Goßmann. In addition, this course is being developed within the framework of a cross-university project funded by the BMBF (KISS – Artificial Intelligence Service and Systems), whose long-term goal is to establish a center of excellence for the sustainable development of AI. As part of the master’s program, interested students with prior musical and/or technical experience at bachelor’s level can choose one of three concentrations: Music Design, Instrumental Composition, or Electroacoustic Composition. Available modules of study range from Digital Lutherie, Experimental Sound Synthesis, and Interface Design to Sound Ecology and Digital Ethics. In addition, a new space for the conception, experimentation and realisation of artistic projects (“Latent Space” – Space for Artistic Research and Design in Music and AI) is being created.
Jaap Vink in the Bilthoven electronic music studio around 1962
Jaap Vink (Den Helder, 12 February 1930 – Appingedam, 30 January 2023) studied engineering at first, but then became interested in electronic music. He attended courses in electroacoustics at Delft University of Technology and installed a pedagogical studio for electronic music in 1961 at the Gaudeamus Foundation in Bilthoven with the help of the Nederlandse Radio Unie (NRU). He was a staff member at the Institute of Sonology as a teacher in analogue studio techniques from 1967 until his retirement in 1993, where he taught and assisted an enormous number of students and composers from all over the world.
Jaap Vink always tried to break out of the periodicity of the sounds so abundantly available in the electronic studio. Although his music was entirely produced with purely electronic sound material, its textures resemble the richness of orchestral sounds, or large natural sound-complexes, as a result of recursive processes. The density of their sound material increases and decreases by careful control of feedback networks with configurations of analogue tape recorders (delay lines), filters and modulators.
It should come as no surprise that his work is being rediscovered at a time when a new generation of musicians has conquered the stage with modular synthesizer setups and ‘no-input mixers’, in which feedback of audio and control signals plays an important role. And although Jaap Vink’s music wasn’t performed live but produced and recorded on magnetic tape in the studio, it is exactly the human interaction with feedback processes that connects his work with the current generation of live electronic music performers. To some extent Jaap Vink’s pieces are indeed recorded live improvisations, and extending his patches and ‘rehearsing’ with them was an ongoing process. To see Jaap Vink at work in the studio was to hear the studio coming to life.
On 28 January 2023, the Royal Conservatoire organises its annual Open Day. The Institute of Sonology will have performances and demonstrations in all its studios on the sixth floor of Amare from 12:00 until 17:00. At 18:30 there will be a performance by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble.
The Open Day is for anyone who is interested in our educational programmes or who just wants to see and hear our studios and know more about the Institute of Sonology.
New Music Lab 12:00–17:00: information about Sonology’s educational programmes 13:00: live performance by Francesco Corvi (10 minutes, followed by Q&A) 14:00: multichannel fixed media composition by Elif Soguksu (20 minutes, followed by Q&A) 15:00: video by Anna Khvyl (15 minutes, followed by Q&A) 16:00: live performance by Farzaneh Nouri and Hugo Ariëns (10 minutes, followed by Q&A) 18:30: live performance by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble
Computer Music Studio 1 (6.69) 12:00–17:00: demonstrations and info by Bjarni Gunnarsson and students
Computer Music Studio 2 (6.68) 12:00–17:00: Dynamic Binaural Synthesis demonstrations and info by Peter Pabon
Wave Field Synthesis Studio (6.74) 12:00–17:00: demonstrations and info by Ji Youn Kang and students
Live Electronic Music Studio (6.75) 12:00–17:00: demonstrations and info by Johan van Kreij and students
Voltage Control Studio (6.76) 12:00–17:00: demonstrations and info by Yannis Patoukas and students
As part of the 2023 International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Utrecht, the Institute of Sonology is issuing a special call for multichannel performances and live coding. Proposals are invited that explore the 12-channel Amadeus loudspeaker system in Sonology’s New Music Lab for a satellite event that takes place on Tuesday 18 April 2023. The New Music Lab is on the sixth floor of the Amare building in The Hague and has a high-quality video projector.
The Institute of Sonology’s New Music Lab on the sixth floor in Amare.
Proposals should include:
Abstract: a description of your work/performance Programme notes: max 150 words Short biography: max 150 words for each contributor Tech rider: description of your setup and any technical needs.
On 30 December 2022 it was one year ago since Gottfried Michael Koenig died at the age of 95. The concert that was held at the Royal Conservatoire on his 95th birthday can still be watched here:
Jammed is released as a limited edition with music composed, recorded and mixed at the Institute of Sonology (Royal Conservatoire, The Hague) between January and June 2022.
Several recorded takes of the homonymous score for improvising musicians (which was composed for the occasion) become raw material and are used as a basis to create five new fixed media compositions which comprise the album. The music is a result of Patoukas’ ongoing exploration of the common ground which is shared between experimental rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the field of electroacoustic music, with regard to studio practices / production techniques and their creative possibilities.
Jammed was initially conceived as a score for improvising musicians, to work as the very first step of a compositional process rather than being part of the final stages of realising a musical result. The score was organised in such a way to create a framework for the musicians and conductor to… “jam” (hence the title), by using a number of restrictions/rules which resulted in a “controllable” improvisation of spontaneously performed sonic events.
On 20 March 2022, three takes of the score were performed and recorded in the New Music Lab at the Institute of Sonology (Royal Conservatoire, The Hague). The ensemble was “conducted” using visual cues projected on two screens in front of the players. With this setup, Yannis was able to shape the performance in real time, with very little influence over the sound material being generated. Subsequently, these multitrack recordings were used as the principal material for creating the fixed-media compositions which make up this album.
These consist of a mixture of (slightly and heavily) processed material derived from the recorded performances, as well as electronic sounds which are sonically and structurally informed by those same recordings through the use of voltage-control techniques. Most of the sounds were manipulated using analogue devices, methods and workflows exclusively, while others were processed using softwares for granulation/randomisation and digital effects.
Jammed is supported by the Performing Arts Fund NL (Fonds Podiumkunsten).
