“Glissando” – magazine for contemporary music, Poland
Fundacja 4.99

Born in 1982, finished musicology studies at Warsaw University, scholarships in Bonn, Regensburg and Basel, active critic in Poland and Germany, co-founder and editor-in-chief of “Glissando” magazine, co-founder of 4,99 Foundation for promotion of new music, member of Musica Electronica Nova festival board.

Center for New Music & Audio Technologies, University of California at Berkley

David Wessel began performing professionally as jazz drummer in high school.  He studied mathematics and experimental psychology at the University of Illinois and received a doctorate in mathematical psychology from Stanford in 1972. His work on the perception and compositional control of timbre in the early 70’s at Michigan State University led to a musical research position at IRCAM in Paris in 1976. In 1979 he began reshaping the Pedagogy Department to link the scientific and musical sectors of IRCAM. In 1985 he established a new IRCAM department devoted to the development of interactive musical software for personal computers. He joined the music faculty at the University of California Berkeley in 1988 and is co-director with Edmund Campion of the the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

He is particularly interested in live-performance computer music where improvisation plays an essential role. He has collaborated in performance with a variety of improvising composers including Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Ushio Torikai, Thomas Buckner, Vinko Globokar, Jin Hi Kim, Shafqat Ali Khan, and Laetitia Sonami has performed throughout the US and Europe.

In computer music performance Wessel favors the enactive approach, which is a performance practices designed from an enactive view of musical perception, cognition, and motor control are described. It emphasizes the role of sensory-motor engagement in musical experience.  The enabling elements required for the approach include, rich and precise gestural interfaces, connectivity devices, real-time gesture analysis and mapping software, richly controlled sound synthesis and processing, and the composition of musical worlds in the form of generative algorithms worthy of extensive exploration.  These practices in human-instrument symbiosis require a commitment on the part of musicians to develop both  refined motor skills and  engagement in the development and refinement of  real-time software.

http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/people/david_wessel

Helen Thorington is an award winning writer, sound composer and media artist. Her radio documentary, dramatic work, and sound/music compositions have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty-three years. Thorington is also the founder and co- director of the independent media organization, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., whose projects include the national weekly radio series, New American Radio (1987-98), Turbulence.org (1996-present), the networked_performance blog (2004-present), and networked_music_review (2007 –present) Thorington publishes and presents internationally on these projects.

CONFERENCE – BRIEF ABSTRACT:

Reflections on the networked_performance blog (2004-present) and networked_music-review (2007- present). The presentation will consider the relocation of network-based creative practice, and focusing on what is primarily installation work, discuss the characteristics of this “musical” work.

L.I.M. Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale, Università degli Studi di Milano

After majoring in Philosophy Dante Tanzi went on to study composition and electroacoustic music. Since 1985 he has been working at L.I.M., the Musical Informatics Laboratory of the University of Milan. Besides taking an active part in the cultural and artistic initiatives of the laboratory, he has participated in research projects on the development of s/w tools for musical and multimedia performance and pilot projects for the recuperation of musical heritages. This investigation has been influenced by a general reflection on the changes in the communicative processes brought about by digital technologies. He has published essays on CTheory, Leonardo Music Journal, Leonardo, Organised Sound, Cogito, Crossings, Organised Sound, Contemporary Music Review. Since 1988, Dante Tanzi’s compositions have been performed in Italy and abroad.

http://www.lim.dico.unimi.it/membri/tanzi/dantecurr.html

CONFERENCE – BRIEF ABSTRACT:

Networked environments and musical recognition

The placing of musical phenomena in the communicative space of the net produced a change in the conditions of appearance of musical events and of their ‘objectification’. In a networked environment multiple messages affect the contours of musical reception, and pose the problem of tracing the origin of points of view as well as of the perception of context changes over time. A linear, oriented temporality triggers expectation of recognition of musical structures, whereas a fluctuating temporality raises the question of the recognizability of musical processes each of which has open and numerous references. It is a question of indicating which new potentials can be attributed as much to the ‘listening subject’ as to any other individual placed in a network-situation where a non-oriented temporality precipitates musical meanings and designates musical codes, often outside any pre-defined rule.

Culture Lab

Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of interactive media and computer music. He worked at IRCAM, was Artistic Ambassador for Apple France, and was researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris. Atau holds a patent on musical control interfaces using physiological biosignals. He seeks to harness collective musical creativity in mobile environments, seeking out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms. His work has been funded by the AHRC, the French National Research Agency (ANR), and the Japanese Ministry of Telecommunications. His work has been presented at Ars Electronica, SFMOMA, Eyebeam, V2, ICC, and ZKM and has been mentor at NESTA (UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). He holds the Chair of Digital Media at Newcastle University and is Acting Director of Culture Lab.

Hungarian Computer Music Foundation

studied sound recording and electroacoustic music at Fr. Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. She worked as a music editor, sound engineer, musical producer for Hungaroton Recording Company and Hungarian Radio.She has worked at the Institute of Musicology as a member of the first computer music research project in Hungary.
In 1989 she was a Fulbright researcher in the USA. First she worked at Brooklyn College with Charles Dodge, later at Stanford University with John Chowning. After returning from the USA in 1990 she funded the Hungarian Computer Music Foundation to help to develop contemporary music life in Hungary.

From the beginning of ‘90-ies she has been the main organizer of the composition and computer music course of the International Bartók Festival, the Short Circuits contemporary music days and from 1998 the Making New Waves contemporary music festival.
Between 1993 and 1995 she developed the musical informatic course’s curriculum at Pécs University and the electronic music curriculum for the Liszt F. Academy of Music in Budapest. 1995 she started to teach musical informatics in the Pécs University and in 1996 electronic music at the Liszt F. Academy of Music in Budapest.
In 2001 she received two “Prix” of the a Bourges Electroacoustic Music Competition in multimedia and sounart categories.
Her creative and reserch work concentrate mainly on the role of the timbre in new music.

Adam Siska was born in Budapest on 18th December, 1983. He studies composition in the class of Zoltán Jeney at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest since 2002. As an attendee of several Hungarian and international seminars (like Ostrava Days 2007, the International Béla Bartók Seminar in 2005 & 2006, the Making New Waves Festival between 2005 & 2007 etc.) he has been taught (among many others) by musicians like Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, Péter Eötvös, Johannes Schöllhorn, Jasch (Jan Schacher) and Andrea Szigetvári. His piece Praeludium et fuga in a was awarded second prize at the competition of the Hungarian Clavicembalo Foundation in 2005, and his work Concerto won the audience’s award at the Third Contemporary Music Festival of Young Composers in 2006. In 2007 he became permanent member of the European Bridges Ensemble (founded and leaded by Georg Hajdu) and participated in several performances in many European countries.

Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen’s University Belfast

Franziska is a saxophonist, a theorist and improviser. She is a founder of the digital media collective l a u t and was awarded her PhD by the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh, UK in 2006. Her research interests include the intersection of philosophy and performance in technology-informed environments, in particular the role of the body in the age of technological change. Franziska has written for many international journals and in 2006 guest-edited a double issue on the body and performance for the Contemporary Music Review Journal (Routledge). In 2007 Franziska was awarded a three year Research Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. The research, carried out at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, investigated networked performance environments. In 2008 Franziska was the Artistic Director for the Roots Ensemble at the ICMC 2008 (International Computer Music Conference). With her trio FAINT, Franziska has released a double CD (CS088) of Improvised and Electroacoustic Music on the creative source recordings. Franziska has recently released her second CD on the same label. In December 2009 Franziska will take up a new post as Lecturer/Research Fellow at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast. She coaches 3rd year recitalist students.

http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~fschroeder/

http://www.alainrenaud.net

After several years working as a sound engineer, composer and music industry consultant, Alain Renaud embarked on a PhD. in network music performance at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queen’s University Belfast in 2005, completed in 2009. Alain was appointed as a lecturer at Bournemouth University in the southwest of England in November 2008.

His research focuses on the development of networked music performance systems with an emphasis on the creation of strategies to interact over a network musically and the notion of shared networked acoustic spaces. He performs regularly over the network with the NetVs.Net collective (www.netvsnet.com) and has performed and presented his research in various places, such as the Banff Centre for the Art, The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, where he was a visiting scholar in 2007 and various conferences, including New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and the Audio Engineering Society (AES). He is also involved as an advisor in the EU network performance project, CoMeDia (www.comedia.eu.org).

He is to co-direct the Sounding Out International conference at Bournemouth University in 2010. In his spare time, he has been producing music for the Montreux Jazz Festival (www.montreuxjazz.com) since 1997.

CONFERENCE – BREIF ABSTRACT:

The new generation of research high-speed networks is bringing the potential for developing an environment of communicating objects. This environment doesn’t use the network in a traditional fashion by interacting with it through a keyboard or a mouse but in a bi-directional way through seamless, transparent interfaces such as distributed musical instruments. The field of network music performance (NMP) in particular is at the forefront of this innovation as it allows performers and audiences to communicate, eavesdrop and travel across a combination of virtual spaces and physical remote environments. The presentation examines recent developments in NMP and associated initiatives, which potentially signal one of the first indications that the next web generation, Web 3.0, might consist of a set of interconnected modules allowing people to interact meaningfully and create content that is web-centric and couldn’t exist outside of a networked situation.