CEMEC

CEMEC 2017 @ UC San Diego

Apr 8, 5 PM

 Conrad Prebys Music Center - Experimental Theater

Facebook Event

Joe Cantrell - Blackbox Loops

This performance piece is an exploration of the sonic possibilities of obsolete, discarded and broken sound technology. Antiquated effects processors have their outputs sent via a small mixer into their inputs so that a feedback loop is established and can be manipulated. A stereo line is split out from this loop so that the effects are audible. The technological system becomes an active participant in the performance, at times reacting to the action of the performer, at other times taking control of the auditory environment.

Mint Park – Tangram

‘Tangram’ is a musical composition and interactive audio-visual system based on a Chinese descent puzzle game tangram. 

Using the geometric node combination and statistics of seven simple puzzle pieces from computer vision as control parameters of sound, Tangram explores the relationship between space and sound along with ever-growing configurations insinuating numerous possibilities of perspectives within a given space.

 Rodney DuPlessis - Surface Tension

‘Surface Tension’ is a study in granular synthesis with a single sound source: a 2- second sample of water drops impacting a liquid surface. Masses of liquid sound collide, cavitate, atomize, crystallize, vaporize, and ionize, moving fluidly from one state to the next. Familiar sounds transform through impossible phase transition and alchemy into foreign objects. A continuum between states is exposed.

Brendan Glasson - Everything is Ready

‘Everything is Ready’ combines reorganized text from language-learning audio recordings with found video to explore the mechanical nature of our social selves.

Intermission

Anastasia Clarke (music), Jen Gerry (dance) – Openings

Various pasts meet in one echo chamber. In this instant, all events are amplified together by the resonance in the chamber. The aggregate resonance yields a new event, a new thing to remember. Does your memory of events ever shift? When you look at the past, how does the story you tell yourself change or stay the same over seconds, minutes, weeks, years, decades? Memories reproduce amoebically. This story is adaptive to the formulation of sensation. 
‘Openings’ is a performance in light and sound created by Anastasia Clarke and Jennifer Gerry at Mills College. The duo creates areas of overlap where musicians and dancers are invited to perform similar or related tasks. These overlaps are facilitated by technology and visuality, and explored poetically through performative acts.

Nolan Lem - Neural Ordinance

'Neural Ordinance' is comprised of sounds that are a result of my computer being trained to produce industrial noises. In this type of deep learning, recurrent neural nets literally teach the computer how to produce sounds that are representative of field-recorded noise. As such, this piece focuses on a large corpus of real-world noise that includes audio related to industrial drones, server farms, consumer electronics, HVAC noise, etc. After processing these recordings, the computer dreams up sound based off of its own learned idea of what noise is. If we can treat the computer as a superlative machine, the neural network seeks to reify a sonic representation of what the computer itself thinks it sounds like. The result is a representation of the computer trying to listen to itself.

Nigel Deane - Finding

An experimental film accompanied by contemporary classical music. The video explores the behavior of light shone through translucent media and the digital manipulation of light. The audio uses samples of the sound of the translucent media used in the film (drinking glasses) put through generally minimal digital processing.

Anahita Abbasi- Sketch II (Niloufar Shiri: Kamancheh, Anahita Abbasi: Electronics)

‘Sketch II’ derives from a close artistic collaboration between me and Niloufar Shiri. The piece zooms in on a moment in our daily lives. Memories and emotions are passing by…

The tape (fixed media) is made of soundtrack fields & instrumental sounds and it co-exists with Kamancheh (live media), which is performing a written, composed part. The material of the Kamancheh came from improvisation & investigating of the sounds and, on top of that, hours of exchange of thoughts with the musician.

“Acting and reacting”, “Observing and commenting” and “listening” to the electronics and spatialization, while existing in an original shape as an individual are crucial aspects of the piece.

The California Electronic Music Exchange Concert (CEMEC) series is meant to strengthen the connections between the California institutions that have computer and electronic music programs. Each concert features electronic and electroacoustic music by student composers, performers, computer musicians and installation artists from across California. Institutions represented at UC San Diego's installment include Mills College, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, CalArts and UC San Diego.