Programme notes

Loss><Gain (John Best / David Shepperd)

Loss><Gain have created a fully immersive 360° audio installation in the form of a journey from the earliest murmurings of life back in the primordial ooze to a sublime imagined future, via here-and-now, the moon and all points in between.

Immersive Fields

The Tour de Moon Soundbath by Loss><Gain is a 3-hour deep-listening experience, featuring music and brand-new compositions from:

Oliver Coates, Jarvis Cocker, Lauren Doss, Jatinder Singh Durhailay & Suren Seneviratne, Tim Exile, Hannah Peel, Gaunt, Emily Hall, Lady Maisery, Anna Meredith, Gazelle Twin, Mesadorm, Roella Oloro feat. Shunaji and RJay, Samuel Organ, Osom, Daniel Pioro, Gruff Rhys, Rival Consoles, Cosmo Sheldrake, David Sheppard, Taylor Skye, Spell Songs, Kae Tempest, Vanishing Twin, Yelfris Valdès.

Benjamin Koziczinski

Ben Koziczinski is the dedign principal at KOST Design, an acoustic design studio from Berlin. The company specialises in immersive post-production studios, mainly room acoustics and design. With over 12 years of experience in the immersive field, the recent push in spatial music production has changed the way we approach projects for the public.

Aural Gallery

“Aural Gallery” is a project currently under construction in the center of Berlin. A fully “immersive” club, due to its geometry and the demands from the design brief, the project showcases the challenges of bringing spatial audio into public settings. As acousticians and designers, we ask ourselves what changes in the planning and design stages? How can clients be convinced of the approach? And what does the collaboration with content creators look like for such a project?

Stefanie Egedy

Stefanie Egedy is a sound worker that operates as an artist, whose practice evolves around sound. Her motto is Low Frequency Sound (sub-bass, bass & infrasound) subwoofers, and their capacity to reveal themselves as present in a space. Exploring human and architectural bodies, the interactions and potential for new creations are of greatest interest. Besieged by this scenario, Stefanie articulates the cross-over between sonorous and musical language to investigate communication between beings.

Works with field recordings, electronic and daily material sounds. Runs the label COISAS QUE MATAM (THINGS THAT KILL), researches the relations between light and sound with Camille Laurent, and is the Head of Operations and Artist Development Producer at MONOM, Berlin’s Center for Spatial Sound.

MONOM Presentation

Since 2020 Stefanie Egedy have produced multiple projects and events around spatial sound at MONOM, Berlin’s Center for Spatial Sound. She will share the main challenges and highlights of such activity as well the production process and the collective experience enabled throughout the medium.

Abigail Wincott

Dr Abigail Wincott has worked in factual radio and podcasting for twenty years, at the BBC and as a freelance producer. She is Associate Professor of Audio Journalism at Falmouth University. She teaches journalism and media production and researches the way the industry adapts to new technology and developments in creative industry policy.

Spatial Awareness: Helping Journalists to Work with Spatial Sound

Programme makers have been experimenting with spatial audio for a while now, but this presentation discusses research into ongoing challenges to communicate and develop knowledge and creativity with the technology in the sector. Training based on the research was intended to be piloted within the BBC, but in the end immersive kits were posted out to journalists at home, opening the initiative up to freelancers around the country. What was originally a COVID workaround might help initiatives like this reach way beyond the media giants and city centres, to foster spatial audio innovation even in rural areas.

Rachel Heavey

Rachel Heavey is an artist and PhD student at Trinity College Dublin. She holds a BCL in Law with Philosophy from University College Dublin, and an MMUS in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Spanning the Department of Film and the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering at TCD, and the School of Arts Education & Movement at Dublin City University; Heavey’s practice-based research exploring the potential of listening in creative, social, and educational exchange is supported by the Irish Research Council. She is an editor at Sonic Scope, a new audiovisual journal co-published by MIT Press and Goldsmiths Press and is a member of the Student Forum at The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Yoshiki Ichihara is a composer, improviser, and sound designer. He works within several genres such as electroacoustic, noise, ambient, sound art and rock. He studied composition under Jonathan F. Lee and Yuriko Kojima, Max/MSP under Takeyoshi Mori and won CCMC MOTUS prize in 2015.

(Re)Listening

In understanding the primary school classroom as an immersive, communicative, listening environment; my paper explores the potential of spatial audio practice in facilitating creative, social and educational exchange within this setting. In this discussion, I conceptualise listening as a sensory-inclusive (Ceraso, 2014), contingent process of thoughtful attention, whereby we listen with all perceptual faculties to all information streams. For Jean-Luc Nancy, to listen is “to be on the edge of meaning” and to be open to “the resonance of being, or to being as resonance” (Nancy, 2007). In resonating with Nancy, and with playfulness as its guiding principle – this paper examines reflexive, embodied (Marks, 2000), and experiential listening as an inclusive and expansive practice of creative, social, and educational engagement as explored through a spatial audio discussion.

Ichihara

Created across space and time, with traces of work made and shared between Dublin and Tokyo, reimagined sounds sampled from work Yoshiki Ichihara made by sampling sounds I had made. Sounds, so sampled and resampled, chaotic, and entangled, seemed to encourage spatial consideration to encounter them anew. In listening recently, I began to imagine the slow moan of mangled, wet metal twisting and warping – a scene I experienced one summer morning in New York when our ceiling caved in. I imagined too ‘The Poseidon Adventure’. It all seemed to me suggestive of disorienting movement. This is my attempt at listening to that suggestion.

Marcel Sagesser

Marcel Sagesser is an Assistant Professor at SUSTech (Shenzhen, China), holding a PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University. His work is located at the intersection of sonic materiality, the technologies of sound (re)production, digital rhythm machines, and popular culture. He has been awarded a number of grants and art prizes, and repeated artist residencies.

From Listening to Playing: An Idiosyncratic Spatial User Interface in Web Audio

“#otherbeats” [otherbeats.net] is an unconventional sound archive on the internet made with participatory recordings; it is made by the author under his artist moniker ‘Marcel Zaes.’ The users create their own mix by scrolling across a vast 2-D picture plane which acts as a spatial “crossfader.” This project lends itself to think about an alternative approach to spatial audio. The piece consists of solely a stereo feed rendered on the user’s browser in web audio. Immersion and spatiality are thus the result of the users’ playing and navigating of the archive, and of a sense of getting lost within the user interface

Kasey Pocius

Originally from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Kasey Pocius is a gender-fluid intermedia artist located in Montreal who grew up experimenting with multimedia software while also pursuing classical training in both viola and piano. Outside of fixed electronic works, they have also pursued mixed-media performances with live electronics, both as a soloist and in comprovisatory collaborative environments. They are particularly interested in multichannel spatialization, and how this can be used in group improvisatory experiences. They hold a BFA from Concordia in Electroacoustic Studies and are currently pursuing an MFA in Music Technology at McGill under the direction of Dr. Marcelo M. Wanderley.

Trends in Gestural Spatial Control

Piano Dreamscapes Ice-Flow Isolation is the third in an ongoing series of works focused on transformations of piano improvisations done by Kasey, as well as their collaborators Simon Henley (Leeds Beckett University) and Neusha Taherian (Columbia College). Composed in remote collaboration throughout late 2020 and early 2021 the piece explores concepts of isolation through spatialization, granular synthesis; and spectral transformations. Improvisations dance throughout a frozen landscape, slowly taking on each other’s characteristics, breaking and reforming but never quite touching or changing each other’s musicals trajectories. In the end, all that is left is a single pianist, playing alone in the dark…

Kate Valentine / Matteo Falco

Kate Valentine (Director)

Kate Valentine is passionate about enabling people to tell stories. Her directing career has combined working in theatre (including National Theatre, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough) and audio drama (BBC Radio Drama Producer). Kate is founder and director of Digital Drama, working with theatres, arts organisations, museums and community groups to connect people through creative projects. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Directing at the University of York, and INNovating is the creative practice aspect of her research focusing on community audio drama.

Matteo Falco (Sound Designer)

Matteo trained in music composition for film and TV and in sound post-production. He has worked as a recording engineer for solo artists and orchestras in Italy and the UK and as a sound designer for short films. Matteo is currently undertaking his Master’s in Sound Design for Film and TV at the University of York and INNovating is his first sound design for binaural audio drama and is part of his final dissertation.

INNovating: Community Drama as Site-Specific Immersive Soundscape

Inspired by the history of the City of York’s coaching inns, INNovating is a binaural audio drama that evokes the sounds and stories of these places of hospitality for weary travellers, resting on their journey along the Great North Road. INNovating is the PhD by Creative Practice output of director Kate Valentine, who has worked with communities to devise and record the drama and Matteo Falco who is completing his master’s in Sound Design at the University of York.

Iain Findlay-Walsh

Iain Findlay-Walsh is a sound artist and researcher who uses autoethnographic methods to explore personal listening, and considers music forms in terms of virtual environment. Commissioned work has featured at BBC Tectonics, ReWire, and Radiophrenia, with sound art releases available through Entr’acte and Outlet Archival, and writing published through Organised Sound, Journal of Sonic Studies and SoundEffects. Iain is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Glasgow, where he teaches sound art, experimental practice and composition, and co-directs the Immersive Experiences Lab on VR/AR research in the Arts.

On Aural Selfies

This series of short pieces extends the method of taking ‘aural selfies’ (Findlay-Walsh 2018) developed as part of a practice of sonic autoethnography. With each piece, experimental first-person field recording methods are used to capture the recordist’s proximity to the virtual space of headphones and headphone music. Through a layering and blurring of hyper-proximate field recordings and found music sources, listeners are placed ‘in the shoes’ of the recordist as they play on the boundary between their own listenership and the virtual spaces of digital music. These pieces build upon the author’s sound art practice and are presented for headphone listening/ binaural playback.

Tahera Aziz

Tahera Aziz has had a longstanding creative and socio-political interest in identity, migration, and racism, examining how contemporary historical events arising from migration impact on the individual to shape their identity and lived experience. Her work harnesses creative media technologies to develop novel storytelling techniques to engage audiences with social justice issues. With AHRC funding, she designed and produced the installation [re]locate, which explores the potential of immersive (multi-channel) audio to re-examine the Stephen Lawrence case and stimulate dialogue about racism.

Tahera Aziz is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Design in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University.

MICRO PRESENTATION: Transformative Encounters? Racism and the Sonic Representation of Stephen Lawrence’s Story

[re]locate revisits the tragic real-life story of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence near a bus stop in southeast London in 1993. The installation in its original form – a black box approx. 5 x 8 metres in dimension – exploits the unique qualities of immersive multi-channel audio to place the audience at the centre of events. On entering the darkened installation space, audience members take on the role of ‘pedestrians’ or ‘passers-by’ and encounter a reconstruction of events from different perspectives. The experimental mix presented here is a binaural representation of the six-speaker audio installation, approx. 18 minutes in duration.

Credits

Binaural mix by Rory Parker, BA (Hons) Music and Sound Design, London South Bank University.

Funders

Arts and Humanities Research Council (R&D) and Art Council of England (production and national tour of installation).

Nikki Sheth

Nikki Sheth is an internationally recognised sound artist and composer. Her practice involves field recording, multichannel soundscape composition, multimedia installations, sound mapping and soundwalking. She uses sound as a medium to bring a voice to the environment and encourage a wider awareness of the natural world. She was awarded a Sound and Music award, nominated for the Phonurgia Nova Awards, received an Honourable Mention for the Sound of the Year Awards and nominated for Ivor Novello Composer Award in 2021.

Mmabolela

From the palm-strewn banks of the Limpopo River to the dark depths of the Hippo Pool, Mmabolela transports the listener through the soundscapes of this remote location in South Africa. A series of interweaving ‘snap-shots’ and constructed realities based upon the many recording locations visited during the 2017 Sonic Mmabolela residency transport the listener to this hyperreal time and place. This work has been composed using ambisonic recordings and is the final piece in a series of three works resulting from the residency.

Gordon Brendan Delap

Gordon Delap comes from Donegal in Ireland. He studied composition at City University, London, and at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast. He has carried out residencies at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast; Nadine Arts Centre, Brussels; Technische Universitaet, Berlin; Edinburgh University; SCRIME, University of Bordeaux. He currently works at Maynooth University in Ireland. Recent compositions have explored spoken word, video, compositional applications of non-linear plate models, and 3-dimensional audio.

Proteus

The title, Proteus, comes from the name of the ancient prophetic sea god in Greek mythology. Proteus is a shape-shifter with the formless quality of water. He shape-shifts to avoid giving an account of the future, and will only render prophecies to those capable of capturing him. Alongside environmental sounds, the composition uses outcomes from physical modelling synthesis developed by NeSS at the University of Edinburgh. Proteus was developed for the 3D dome at SCRIME, Bordeaux. I’m grateful for assistance from Edinburgh and Bordeaux, and I’d like to particularly acknowledge Thibaud Keller and Stefan Bilbao for their advice and encouragement.

Zhao Jiajing

Zhao Jiajing is a musician, sound designer and interdisciplinary artist from Beijing, China. He is currently pursuing his studies at Royal College of Art in Information Experience Design, Sound Design Pathway.

His current works explore the uncertainty, spatiality, plurality, and interactivity of sound and music with practices across spatial composition, performance, video, and installation. His works mostly concern about surveillance, consumerism, human-machine symbiosis and polyrhythms. As a versatile composer and sound designer, he has collaborated with pioneering theatrical groups, performers and installation artists.

Back to the Ocean

Back to Ocean is a 16-channel spatial sound composition exploring the bodily and spiritual connection with the ocean.

The work is inspired by a near-death-experience (NDE) of drowning in the open water of Saipan. Upon crossing the borderline of losing consciousness, an ineffable sensation of belonging and boundaryless emerged to the artist as if going back to the mother’s womb.

The composition is structured based on the NDE to craft a sonic narrative in four stages: immersion, exploration, deconstruction, and reformation. Materials employed for the composition are predominately recordings of water and human body.

Christian Duka

Christian Duka is a sound artist/designer, immersive audio specialist and higher education lecturer. After a month-long residency at MONOM 4D Sound in Berlin, he curated UR: Human Presence, an artistic experience involving 3D sound, physical performance and passive audience participation. He has since been active as an immersive art curator and 3D sound artist/designer: In 2019 he founded AMOENUS, an immersive art organisation that supports the development of immersive audio in the arts. Using a custom 13.4 ambisonics sound system (currently installed at IKLECTIK in London), AMOENUS now organises R&Ds, curates events and delivers workshops in spatial audio.

Embodied Cinema

Embodied Cinema explores the heightening of interoception and proprioception, that is the awareness of the inner physical state of one’s own body; as well as, the ability for sonic experiences to produce dreamlike narratives, carrying strong personal meaning.

The composition uses the psychoacoustic illusion of beating, otoacoustic emissions (the ability of ear canals to respond with sound to particular frequencies, as if they were loudspeakers) and ASMR to entrain the human body through spatial sound.

This composition was the result of a feeling of urgency to get in touch with my own body in an age marked by a tendency towards disembodied virtuality.

Philip Reeder and Danielle Meunier

Philip’s background in spatial audio includes the GPS soundscaping of oral archives and music for Prototype’s groundbreaking binaural theatre work Whisper. Recently he has returned to recording, with an immersive album recorded on a fishing boat at sea with singer Johny Lamb (Guardian Folk Album of the Month). Philip’s work has been recognised by Prix Ars Electronica, Bourges/IMEB, and Computer Space, with funding from AHRC, ACE, RIS, Channel 4, Frieze Art Fair. He was a researcher with the AHRC funded Online Orchestra, and is Course Leader of the MSc in Music and Sound Production at University of Gloucestershire.

Danielle Meunier, singer and voice coach, has performed across Canada, UK, and Ireland, most recently working with composers Ben Bartlett and Isa Suarez. Recent live performances include: Dance in Devon ‘Watch this Space’, and Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Patalenica Shakespeare Festival (Bulgaria).

Returns EP

Over a four-year period,3 singer Danielle Meunier and producer Philip Reeder performed and recorded three folk songs, in sixteen locations across the British Isles. Above the coastal moorland of Zennor, Danielle performed Seal Song to a chorus of summer wildlife. Two years later, What A Voice resonated across the interior of a dilapidated engine house on the Botallack cliffs, insulated from the wider environment of birds and water. “A Stor Mo Chroi” was sewn together from recordings of Penrose Lake’s shoreline, Loe Bar beach, and a chilling Autumn rainstorm at Dodman Point.

Stuart Jones

Stuart Jones has over 30 years of experience as a studio engineer, mix engineer, musician and producer. Stu has worked with international artists whist living in Germany and the UK. His work can be heard on multiple releases and TV recordings. Stu is the Course Leader for the MSc Music Engineering and Production Course at the University of South Wales.

Təʊl – How the Sunken Bell of the Elan Valley Inspired Immersive Music Experience

Təʊl (Welsh Toll) is an R & D project exploring the significance of the sunken bell mythology and its links to the Elan Valley in mid Wales. Funded by the Arts Council of Wales, the project – led by award-winning Welsh composer John Rea – features performances by percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, which were inspired by the sound of the bell. Field recordings taken on location at the Elan valley and recordings of percussion instruments played by Dame Evelyn at her studio, made by Stuart Jones, have been mixed into John’s composition. The project was mixed using Dolby Atmos technology.

James Shannon

James was a Senior Sound Consultant at Dolby for 11 years, working on over 170 film and music releases internationally. He was involved in the Dolby Atmos roll out, co-wrote a patent, the Home Entertainment Studio technical guidelines and helped design immersive audio studios.

He has also worked at Pinewood studios, redesigning the 2 main dubbing theatres and working on many Marvel productions and Jurassic World: Dominion.

James now works at the University of Gloucestershire, teaching Sound for Film in the Film Production and Sound and Music Production courses, while also continuing to work as a freelancer professionally.

Q&A Dolby Atmos Workflows with James Shannon

An open opportunity to discuss Dolby Atmos workflows, studio installation and principles.

Tom Spice

Tom Spice is an audio-visual artist and post-graduate student at Bath Spa University. Specialising in immersive multi-media experience, Tom has been exploring the relationship between interactivity and sensorial immersion, and the fine line between what detracts and what intensifies the immersive live experience.

Distance

“Distance” is an exploration of the relationships between interaction, immersion, sound and vision. Built with low-cost, available material and technology, using open-source tools and knowledge – “Distance” asks us to consider whether proximity is still integral to community and connection. After years of keeping everyone at arm’s length, this installation brings the audience to the centre of the artwork and asks them, through their interaction with “The System” to consider distance, its impact on us and how we feel as it shrinks or grows.

Miles Warren

Miles Warren, is currently exploring the creation of installations, procedural audio, and interaction design and implementation. Most pieces leaving the workshop are created through the coding of creative software, often paired with unique hardware, housed in a form to be experienced as a site-specific procedural/interactive multi-modal work, being broadly referred to as “Systems Music”.

Co-founder of pyka – USW & UoG Alumnus – HE Course Leader at dBs Bristol – Fellow of the HEA

Based in Newport, South Wales.

Standing Sound

Standing Sound is an early iteration of a procedural audio installation work. This exploration uses multi-speaker systems to create a physical sonic-topology.

This sonic-topology induces constructive and destructive wave patterns, explorable by moving around the space it inhabits.

Each performance of this piece is unique; the code includes layers of randomisation, and the space and the people within it drastically change the topology.

This piece is created specifically for the medium, exacerbating traditional issues with multi-speaker arrays, and making that a feature to be enjoyed. Future works will seek to further adorn these sonic topologies.

Laura Selby / Yueshen Wu / Amy Cutler

Laura Selby

Laura is a London based sound artist and violinist, with a background working in sound and music design for film, TV, immersive platform and theatre.

Recent works include installation, MYcelium at the IRCAM forum (Pompidou), Birth Rites for the Designer in Residence Exhibition at the London Design Museum and film More Than Concrete for The Albany Open Source Collaborations. Laura is currently studying a MA in Sound Design at the Royal College of Art. Current research explores the sonification and connection of varying scales of communication, creating multi-sensory installation works, utilising extended field recording techniques, audio immersion and musical composition.

Yueshen Wu

Yueshen has a background of experience design, industrial design and product design. In his recent work he has incorporated field recording, audiovisuals and generative art, to explore the intersection between immersion and interactivity. His work interrogates ways audiences experience new forms of reality and existence, applying these investigations to create new forms of multi-sensory experience.

Amy Cutler

Dr Amy Cutler is a live cinema artist, geographer, and site-specific designer. She works on species, spaces, and climate, and often draws on traditions of social cinema. Her international touring ensemble show NATURE’S NICKELODEONS is a form of nature documentary “in the round”, and most recently took place at The Exploratorium, San Francisco. She is currently retraining in IED (Information Experience Design), specializing in new forms of audience design for the Anthropocene.

Shirley Dawn

Inspired by nature’s dawn chorus, Shirley Dawn plays between the juxtaposition of the natural and urban world, calling on the day. Made up of a field recording taken at the Addington Hill viewing platform at the end of Spring time May 2020. Nature’s morning song can be heard transitioning into a more complex sound environment as the urban elements grow in presence over time. Performed alongside audio reactive visuals and spatial torchwork, inspired by changing states of light and diurnal ritual.

We invite audiences to listen and view the city soundscape flow, grow, and expand as we transition between dream and present states. A key aspect of the ‘Everyday’ is this state of transition which is both intensely local and entirely global: a travelling encounter with the waking nonhuman chorus.

Adam Parkinson / Justin Randell

Dr Adam Parkinson is a sound artist and Senior Lecturer in Music & Sound Design at London South Bank University. Under the name Dane Law, he has released music on Opal Tapes, Quantum Natives and Astral Plane, and has performed at venues including Corsica Studios, the ICA and San Francisco’s Gray Area. As a performer, he has developed work for immersive and multichannel systems including Goldsmith’s SIML Space, BEK Bergen, and Uta Kögelsberger’s Orchestra of Rocks. He has published on sound art, computer music and human-computer interaction in music.

Justin Randell is course director of the Music & Sound Design degree at LSBU. Justin has worked in music production, sound design, and post-production. Recent projects include mixing an album for Ty (Jazz Refreshed), and post-production for feature films. Previously, he toured internationally with Aphex Twin producing audio-visual content as part of Weirdcore. He has also worked as a consultant on the design of several studio facilities, with recent projects including collaborations with Dolby on Dean Street Studios’ Atmos mix room and the Tate Modern Atmos Cinema.

The Lorenz Factor

Justin Randell and Adam Parkinson are electronic and computer musicians who improvise with algorithmic systems. This interactive, immersive performance extends algorithmic performance systems to control the spatialisation of the sound in dialogue with the audience.

For this piece, the performance system is extended to include the audience. Movement within the space will provide data points for a Lorenz Attractor – an equation that can be used to describe the chaotic movement of particles in physics. This will be used to control the spatialisation and modulation of sounds. The audience are invited to move freely round the space, investigating their own agency as they influence and shape the performance.

Julia Set (Lewis Wolstanholme / Francis Devine)

Julia Set is an audio-visual performance project curated by Lewis Wolstanholme and Francis Devine. Lewis Wolstanholme is a composer and creative coder based in London. Lewis is currently studying for his PhD in artificial intelligence and music at Queen Mary University of London, prior to which he received his BMus and MMus in composition from Goldsmiths, University of London. Francis Devine is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in London. Francis graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, where he specialised in contemporary piano performance and experimental composition.

Subjective Spatial Colour

Julia Set will be performing their latest work “setcell”, an artwork which explores spatial audio through the decomposition and resynthesis of sonic elements, the perceived impression of which is complemented by the employment of illusory visual elements. By splitting a complex sound into its harmonic partials, through the use of spectral decomposition and additive synthesis, and positioning the individual partials in unique locations throughout the space, it is possible to harness a number of psychoacoustic effects to transform the original timbral entity into a fluid and evolving spatial sonority. So as to compliment this timbral decomposition, the visual elements of this work also build upon the way in which colour is perceived in relation to a psychologically inferred impression of depth and space. In combination, the sonic and visual elements of this work serve to highlight a spectator’s individual experience of such an immersive artwork, by transforming the work’s situated environment into an architectural extension of its unfolding perceptual colours.

Ben Hamid

Hamid-al-Matiq was formed in 2022 as a production project exploring the sonic possibilities connecting acousmatic and club music, technology and performance.

System Check

“System Check” explores the opportunities offered by sound spatialisation to enhance the immersive and physical attributes of experimental club music. The integration of the Soundsystem into a specific space develops the idea that dance music is architectural, reinforcing the ability to create evolving landscapes for the body to inhabit.

Jake Mehew

Jake Mehew is a composer, performer, producer, DJ and radio presenter. Jake’s work combines free improvisation, with the technological considerations of the avant-garde. Jake uses a combination of acoustic instruments, synthesisers and samplers to create, meditative soundscapes that envelope audiences within immersive, quadraphonic speaker arrays. Having spent years studying the causation of flow, Jake endeavours to create the conditions for spontaneous composition in his live work, seemingly conjuring whole universes of sound from a self-induced act of trance. This process imbues Jake’s live music with a certain sense of danger, as if everything could go wrong at any given moment.

On Creating Performative Microcosms

Jake will be performing a preview of his work-in-progress audio visual installation, examining the microscopic world around us. Using 5.1 surround sound, field recordings, immersive sound design, and microscopic video footage, Jake hopes to create new landscapes, taking disparate stimuli and making it explicable and interconnected, contextualized within a holistic performance experience. Jake’s desire to work with visuals and examine things with great scrutiny has come from a recent realization he has needed glasses his entire life to fix his undiagnosed short-sightedness; having corrected his sight, Jake has become obsessed with the artistic potentiality of the world commonly un-observed.

Richard Pike

Deep Learning aka Richard Pike is a multi-disciplinary composer, sound artist, singer, mastering engineer and label curator. His practice lies at the intersections of experimental, ambient, techno, jazz and hybrid orchestral.

As Deep Learning he has released the albums “Soft Confidence” and “Dataverse” with his third and latest release “Evergreen” due in August 2022, on Oxtail Recordings.

An AACTA (Australia) award-nominated composer, he has scored over 20 hours of TV drama including Romper Stomper (Stan TV/BBC Three). With his band PVT (aka Pivot) he has released on Warp Records, and collaborated with Ital Tek and Modeselektor, and toured with Gary Numan and Sigur Ros. He has created sound design for installations for London’s United Visual Artists and writes music for psychedelic therapy with Wavepaths.

Under his own name he has released “How to Breathe” which features him as singer and synthiest, alongside drummer Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and engineered by Cherif Hashizume (Jon Hopkins) and Ben Hillier (Depeche Mode).

Evergreen

A textural organic approach to distinct digital material, “Evergreen” is concerned with microcosmic layered poly-rhythm, continuing the lineage of experimental pioneers of CD glitch Markus Popp and Yasunao Tone among others. Inspired by his newly discovered mystic environs of Epping Forest, UK, composer Richard Pike expands upon his restlessly curious processes, to make intuitive and personal sound inventions. He is presenting the new material in spatial audio.

Tania Rubio

Tania Rubio is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and field recordist. She studies animal communication and natural soundscapes through an interdisciplinary scope between art, science, and technology. Tania is currently pursuing a Ph.D. focused on “Biomusic” with Carola Bauckholt at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Austria. She is a graduate of the Master in Musical Creation, New Technologies, and Traditional Arts at the UNTREF; as well as, in Object Theater, Interactivity, and New Media at the UNA, Argentina, with the support of the FONCA-CONACYT Study Abroad program. She was recently awarded by “Jovenes Creadores 2021-2022” by National Fund for Culture and Arts, Mexico. She was also selected as “Composer in Residence 2021” by the Crespo Foundation at the Glenkeen Garden Residency Art/Nature, Ireland. She received the prize for an art, science, and technology project by “Ibermemoria Sonora y Audiovisual 2021” in collaboration with Biological Research Center, CIB-UAEM. Tania was awarded as “Composer in Residence 2019”, by the Archiv Frau und Musik in collaboration with Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany. Awarded by Arts, Science and Technology program ACT FONCA-UNAM 2019, for her project “Biomachines, Wind Animals”.

Sprachen der Natur

The piece is part of Tania’s artistic research on “Biomusic, from animal communication to music composition”. During the last 10 years, she has been recording different natural soundscapes, mainly in Latin America and central Europe. During her short lifetime, she has been listening and perceiving how the natural soundscapes are changing, getting noisier from the technophonic intrusion and quieter from the native species. With the current piece, Tania intends to transfer her listening and emotional experience of the transformation of the soundscapes through an imaginary aural world. The question that triggered the origin of the piece was: How do the anthropogenic effects in the natural ecosystems sound like? Tania wants the audience to travel to a poetic world where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a complex reality, in which every action produces an effect in naturecultures.

Leah Reid

Leah Reid is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator, whose works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music, to acousmatic, electroacoustic works, and interactive sound installations.

Winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Reid has also won the American Prize in Composition, first prize in the 8thKLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition, Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Oliveros Award, and prizes in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition and the International Destellos Competition.

Reid is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the University of Virginia.

Reverie

“Reverie” is an acousmatic composition that leads the listener through an immersive fantasy-centred journey around deconstructed music boxes. The work comprises eight sections that alternate between explorations of the music boxes’ gears and chimes. In the work, the music boxes’ sounds are pulled apart, exaggerated, expanded, and combined with other sounds whose timbres and textures are reminiscent of the original. As the piece unfolds, the timbres increase in spectral and textural density, and the associations become more and more fantastical. Gears are transformed into zippers, coins, chainsaws, motorcycles, and fireworks, and the chimes morph into rainstorms, all sizes of bells, pianos, and more.

Claudia Robles-Angel

Claudia Robles-Angel: composer, sound and new media artist. Her work and research cover different aspects of visual & sound art, which extend from audiovisual fixed-media compositions to performances/installations interacting with biomedical signals. She has been artist-in-residence in several outstanding institutions e.g. ZKM Karlsruhe (DE), ICST Institute for Computer Music & Sound Technologies ZHdK Zurich (CH), CMMAS Mexican Center for Music & Sound arts Morelia (MX). Her work is constantly featured in media/sound-based festivals/conferences, group/solo exhibitions around the globe e.g. ZKM Karlsruhe; KIBLA Maribor, Int. Symposium Electronic Art ISEA Istanbul, Manizales, Durban, Gwangju & Barcelona, 55th Venice Biennale Salon Suisse, Computer Music Conf. ICMC Copenhagen, Montréal & Utrecht; New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival; SIGGRAPH Asia Yokohama; NIME New Interfaces for Musical Expression; STEIM, MAC Museo Arte Contemporáneo Bogotá, Harvestworks Digital Arts NYC, Heroines of Sound Berlin, Audio Art Festival Cracow, MADATAC Madrid, Digitale Duesseldorf, the Athens Digital Art Festival ADAF, Beast FEaST Birmingham, and more recently at the AI Biennal Essen.

Glockenwelt / Wandering in Morelia

Glockenwelt. (World of Bells) 2019

An octophonic composition that invites audiences to immerse in an imaginary subtle space filled by multiple and diverse bell sounds. The piece is mixed creating a unique and ethereal feeling environment, whereby sounds have been treated with diverse DSP processes.

Wandering in Morelia (2019)

This octophonic acousmatic piece was composed and produced during an artist in residence at CMMAS (Mexican Center for the Music and the Soundarts in Morelia, Mexico) using sounds recorded in the city. Although the composition features the original recorded materials, there are moments however, during which the recordings are transformed via diverse DSP processes, with the purpose of inviting the audience to immerse themselves into the imaginary universe of the composer.

Teddy Hunter

Teddy Hunter is a Cardiff-based audio-visual artist and musician working in alternative music and immersive audio. Her practice takes root in sonic arts, exploring the environment through and sound and installation where the gentle immersive ambience are combined with song writing and traditional instrumentation.

Characterised by dreamy loops, gradual builds and synthesized melodies, her performances slowly unfurl fragmented strata of sounds collectively entwining with the ethereal humanity of layered vocals. Experimenting with field recordings, spatial sound and visuals to create soundscapes and ambient electronic immersive experiences, her work takes a focus around ecology and the interactions between humans and their surroundings.

Yr Ogof

Written in response to a Neolithic burial site in North Wales named Bryn Celli Ddu, Yr Ogof is an ethereal vocal sound works that uses movement and spatial ambience to create an otherworldly, canonic and hypnotic choral soundscape that reflects on vocal as ritual.

Yr Ogof, translated to The Cave in Welsh, is the name of the burial mound before its excavation in 1928.

Filip Regulski

Not available.

Deconstructing Club & Dance Music into an Immersive Format

Not available.

Johnathon Stevens

Jonathan Stevens has over ten years’ experience as a music producer, specialising in but not limited to electronic styles of music, 5 years’ experience as a mix engineer. His work has featured on some of the top Trance radio shows in the world, and his music has been featured on top labels like Pure Trance, JOOF Recordings, and Black Hole. Jonathan is currently a student at the University of South Wales as a MSc student on the Music Engineering and Production course and is working on multiple projects including creating music for a computer game and music for a scene in a film.

Another Time – the Application of Dolby Atmos Mixing Techniques on Trance Music

Not available. The project is based around the application of mixing ‘Trance’ music in spatial audio as the genre lends itself perfectly to the capabilities Atmos provides. There are many sub-genres within Trance so we could call this particular song ‘Progressive Trance’. Trance generally aims to immerse the listener and the ability to produce in this format increases the immersion the listener can experience.

Another Time was released by Pure Trance in February 2022, featured on the Pure Trance 9 compilation, and a LTD edition “Breaks” remix was sold Via the RCRDSHP (pronounced recordshop) NFT platform. This Atmos mix has been created for the Everyday is Spatial conference but it will be a larger part of Jonathan’s final major project for hus Masters’ studies.