26 Composers and a Wave Field Synthesis System at A+E Lab
In September, we installed a Wave Field Synthesis System (WFS) built by The Game of Life for our upcoming AΦE company’s new creation.
But AΦE’s plans never ends in one single shot! Via an Open Call or by reaching out directly to them, we approached various composers from different genres, who would be interested to discover, learn and compose with this system. Which led to a positive responses!
Six main projects has taken place:
- AΦE new creation with composers Echo Collective (Neil , Meg, Fabien) and Casper Schipper (The Game of Life).
- Michal Jacakzeck to work with Esteban’s new solo work (AΦE company)
- 7 composers for the Sonic Cartography conference event in partnership with major AHRC project A Sonic Palimpsest: Revisiting Chatham Historic Dockyards by University of Kent and University of Greenwich
- 9 composers through the A+E Lab Open call
- WFS Kids workshops delivered by The Game of Life (early 2023)
- 3 days Intensive WFS Workshops at A+E Lab, delivered by The Game of Life
- Online WFSCollider Workshop, delivered by The Game of Life
- 4 concerts and few private events in which 150 audiences discovered the work of those inspiring Artists!
But…WHAT’S THE WFS?!
Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is a sound production technique designed specifically for spatial audio rendering. The WFS system from The Game of Life consists of 192 speakers, arranged in a square formation of 10x10 metres. Within this formation sounds can be composed to move inside or outside of this square space.
Check out The Game of Life foundation here: http://www.gameoflife.nl
Composers who has composed on the WFS at the A+E Lab:
Artists:
Michael Jacaszek (PL)
Composer, producer and sound artist. Creates electroacoustic music combining electronically prepared sounds with acoustic instruments (several solo albums). He also works with other artists, in a variety of media including video, visual art, choreography and photography. Composes movie scores for FILM and live theatre music. Member of Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music. Member Of Polish Film Academy. Lives in Gdansk, Poland.
Echo Collective (BE)
Founded by Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermant, Echo Collective is a diverse group of classically trained musicians based in Brussels, Belgium. In addition to its own projects, the group collaborates with modern composers and bands on concerts, tours, film scores, recording sessions, and original compositions. Past and ongoing collaborations include A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Johann Johannsson, Joep Beving, Stars of the Lid, Erasure, Daniel O’Sullivan, Adam Wiltzie, Dustin O’Halloran, Christina Vantzou, MAPS, Michel Bisceglia, and James Heather.
Suitman Jungle (UK)
Suitman Jungle is a creation of percussionist Marc Pell. It’s a survival manual for those who live in a capitalist society, delivered via a jungle and drum & bass aesthetic, utilising live drums, voice and electronics. Begun on the streets of L.A.’s Hollywood Boulevard busking next to Captain America, the show received Arts Council England funding to create theatre shows at The Roundhouse and Canada Water Theatre (produced by nabokov, directed by Sam Bailey). It went-on to tour Croatia’s Hospitality On The Beach (Hospital Records), Germany’s Off The Radar and France’s Albi festivals, as well as UK dates supporting Goat Girl (Rough Trade). Suitman Jungle’s album ‘Liquid Lunch’ (Tape Club Records) was released in 2019 but the project has dropped many other remixes, singles and EPs since, primarily via Bandcamp and Slow Dance Records. Suitman Jungle hosted a 24-hour livestream fundraiser at the height of the UK’s first lockdown to raise just under £1,000 for London venue The Windmill, to which he and so many bands cut their teeth at. Suitman Jungle’s second album will be released in 2022, alongside a soundtrack to Half A String’s upcoming theatre show ‘Breathe’.
WFS project title: ‘Survivorship Bias’
This project brings together 40 sounds created by 40 individuals from Suitman Jungle’s musical community, and places them within the performance space according to a corresponding point on a graph submitted by those individuals. Suitman Jungle then absorbs these data points, analyses the geographical and sonic space between, and creates a response via a jungle and drum & bass aesthetic.
Newtoy (UK)
Sound designer and composer for stage and screen. His internationally acclaimed project Wet Sounds sonifies swimming pools immersing audiences in unique listening experiences. His Destructivist Art project Scrapclub has been pitting the public armed with sledgehammers against machines. Over the pandemic he launched We’re All Bats, a Listening Arts Channel, providing hours of online workshops and activities.
WFS project title: ‘The PlutonOvarian’
A lovely piece of music, following a terrible accident, has been disfigured and split open revealing interiors that are sometimes too horrific to observe! Thankfully audiologists have put it back together, albeit rather wrongly.
Mark Eaglen (UK)
Mark Eaglen is a multi disciplinary artist exploring relationships of Art, Science, Technology and Nature. An active engagement with experimentation informs evolving works that often employ traditional processes alongside developments in technology and scientific discovery. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally with key developments kindly supported and enabled by the Arts Council of Wales through residencies, solo and group exhibitions. This has resulted in works longlisted and shown in the International Emerging Artist Award in Dubai, the Lumen Art Prize, Ars Electronica and the Aesthetica Art Prize, with work published within the Future Now 100 artists anthology selected from over 3500 entries. He is cofounder of studioMADE with Angela Davies, a cross disciplinary studio and gallery space. Alongside his artistic practice, he has maintained an active role within Arts education for over fifteen years, lecturing on a range of undergraduate courses.
www.markeaglen.com
WFS project title: ‘Warp and Weft’
During the residency at A+E lab, ‘Warp and Weft’ has unwoven the fabric of SpaceTime, hitching a ride with homing pigeons across gravitational wave data, archival fragments of speech and wider cosmic sources within the WFS system
Kindly supported by A-N bursary.
Jane Balfus (USA)
Jane Balfus is an American artist. Her multi-media installations focus on storytelling, using surveillance, consecration and found objects as a means to exalt and preserve the ordinary. Her pieces memorialize isolated or splintered moments — mundane, naive, or exceptional, and always in the presence of quiet beauty.
WFS project title: ‘Bishop71936’
Bishop71936 is a score based upon the ‘Drunken Bishop’ algorithm. The algorithm uses an SSH visualization process — a network protocol that allows computers to communicate with each other. The parable is as follows:
Bishop Peter finds himself in the middle of an ambient atrium. There is no exit in the four surrounding walls. The floor is paved with black and white tiles — he is standing on a chessboard. His head aching from too much wine, he begins to wander the confined space. Peter only moves diagonally — as if he were a bishop on a chess board. When Peter reaches a wall, he moves toward the opposite side, changing his path from the black tiles to the white tiles (and vice versa). After each move, he places a coin on the floor, to remember that he has been there before. After 64 steps, when no coins are left, Peter wakes from his strange dream.
My score will follow Peter’s traversing paths. The tonal field will reference the chessboard: audio hits trace his diagonal routes. Sounds burst when Peter’s trajectory rebounds off a limiting surface. Each of the 64 tonal hits swells and releases, building and decaying progressively, leaving behind echoing tones — memory coins. As Peter reaches his final step, his ‘waking’ sounds resolve to deliverance and harmony. The orchestration will include sampled choral music, synthesizers, and binaural recordings of whispered and generative poetry.
Seth Scott (UK)
Seth is a Rochester based sound designer and composer, often both, and occasionally neither. Most of his work touches in some way on the politics of sound in space, often in an urban, architectural context. He use a variety of media including interactive and locative technologies to uncover and reconfigure the aural environment. He work regularly with visual and mixed media artists, producing sound and music for films and installations. He studied Electronic Music at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama followed by Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Manchester.
WFS project title: ‘Here, in this flowerless pit?’ — An Immersive Audio Demonstration
When stereo records first hit the shelves in the early 1960s, record companies and Hi-Fi manufacturers produced elaborate publicity campaigns to convince the record-buying public of their latest technology. Central to such campaigns were Stereo Demonstration Discs, which assisted the listener in setting up and tuning their system, and sought to demonstrate the superiority of stereo recordings over their mono predecessors. In one particularly ubiquitous format, the listener is taken on a guided tour where they hear a dizzying array of sound effects and musical performances, accompanied by an affable narrator-cum-salesperson. I have taken this form as a starting point, refashioning it to explore some of the aesthetics and politics of modern immersive audio technologies.
William Wong & Vanissa Law (HK)
Vanissa Law is currently working as a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast on a project funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Classically trained in her early years, Law steered her focus towards electroacoustic music composition. Her doctoral research was on the use of gestures in electroacoustic music, in particular everyday gestures used by musicians and non-musicians alike, which Law manages to incorporate in some of her works by translating gestures into sound and images.
William Wong is a creative coder, new media artist and creative technologist with over 10 years’ experience in interactive industry. He works on projects with technologies includes AR / VR / XR, Volumetric Capture and Motion Tracking, Artificial Intelligence, Tangible Computing, Generative Graphics etc. He has started his own studio, i for interactive Ltd., in 2013, providing professional service to other artists, creative agents, academic organizations and commercial firms on visual artworks, exhibitions and events, media research projects etc. He is also a part-time teaching and research staff at Hong Kong Polytechnics, Hong Kong Academy of Performing Art and Hong Kong Baptist University on subjects relates to interactive design, game design and computing.
WFS project title: ‘Eat. Live. Life.’
William and Vanissa saw this quote from Kahlil Gibran, and they tried to investigate their thoughts and philosophies towards the consumption of food.
“Surely the fruit cannot say to the root:
‘Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.’
For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship.”
C. Lavender (USA)
C. Lavender (Lavender Suarez) is an interdisciplinary sound artist, sound healing practitioner, and educator. Her work spans through live performance, recording, installations, compositions, videos and workshops. She creates immersive aural landscapes for listeners; experiences which are intensely physical, emotional, and ultimately cathartic. She is the author of the book Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives (Anthology Editions, 2020), which delves into how listening can be a powerful source of inspiration. C. Lavender has performed, lectured and hosted workshops at MoMA, The Whitney, The Guggenheim, Hirshhorn Museum, The Rubin Museum, The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Museum of the Moving Image, Fridman Gallery, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute among other venues. She has albums and recordings featured on the labels Editions Mego, Ecstatic Peace! and RVNG Intl. C. Lavender has been artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, Harvestworks, and Wave Farm.
WFS project title: ‘Oneness’
C. Lavender presentes an intensely hypnotic meditative work for wave field synthesis based on foundations of brainwave entrainment and biophilic sounds. “Oneness in Waves” propels the listener through a space of deep inner exploration with pulsing rhythms and uplifting synthesizer swells contrasted by nature field recordings created in New York and England.
Aki Pasoulas (UK)
Dr Aki Pasoulas is a composer and a Reader in Music at the University of Kent. He is the Director of MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre), Chief Examiner and the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘A Sonic Palimpsest: Revisiting Chatham Historic Dockyards’. He has served as Director of Education, Director of Music Programmes, deputy Director of Research and Senior Tutor. He holds a PhD on timescale perception in electroacoustic music (supervised by Denis Smalley, AHRB-funded), and he taught at universities in London including City, Middlesex, and the University of the Arts. His research interests include acousmatic music, time and timescale perception, psychoacoustics and sound perception, spatial sound, acoustic communication, and soundscape ecology especially in relation to listening psychology. In addition to electroacoustic music, he has written for instruments, found objects, voice and mixed works with live electronics, he composed music for the theatre and for short films, and organised and performed with many ensembles. Aki received honourable mentions at international competitions; his scholarly and music works have been published through KPM/EMI, ICMA, Sonos Localia, Stolen Mirror, Gruenrekorder, HELMCA, Pinpoint Scotland, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, and his compositions have been performed worldwide.
WFS project title: ‘Beneath the Surface’
‘Beneath the Surface’ is an immersive sound composition for the Wave Field Synthesis system using material recorded with hydrophones in a creek at Hamshill Fleet, Isle of Grain. All sounds are produced by water beetles, waterside plants, gas bubbles and distant industrial activity. Water beetles make sound by rubbing parts of their bodies together. Aquatic plants produce bubbles of oxygen through photosynthesis and also by hitting and rubbing their submerged stalks with each other as they shift in the wind. Industrial activity is part of the original soundscape and is manifested in the low frequency rumbling. All these performers jointly create an extraordinary underwater orchestra.
Material of these recordings has been reworked in two group installations with the Liminal Spaces interdisciplinary research group, funded by Creative Estuary.
The Acoustic heritage Collective (ES)
The Acoustic heritage Collective is a multidisciplinary team based in Barcelona and Berlin with extensive experience in acoustics, sound and its social, political and creative implications. They are interested in sound appreciation strategies in a context of visual hegemony.
WFS project title: ‘Journey to the center of the sound (WFS version)’
Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, we decided to take our portable recorders to go to Snaefellsjökul, the famous Icelandic volcano that takes the protagonists of this story to the depths of the earth. What we got was extremely different from what we are used to, as Iceland’s unique nature, adverse weather and geological phenomena took us on a sonic journey with its own unique imprint. This is our starting point to create an immersive sound piece called “Journey to the Center of Sound” where sounds, soundscapes, acoustic reverbs, music from our band Hoarfrost were mixed with lights, responsive video and fog to create a unique composition based on this experience. This sound journey, beyond aesthetics, seeks to relate space with the past, present and future by offering a wider and fresh focus of sound cartography and acoustic ecology.
https://patrimoniacustic.cat/journey/home.html
John Young and Simon Perril
John Young is Professor of Composition in the Institute for Sonic Creativity at De Montfort University, Leicester, having previously been Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios of Victoria University of Wellington. His output includes multi-channel electroacoustic pieces, radiophonic work, and music combining instruments and electroacoustic sounds. His music focuses on the use computer technology to transform and combine sounds in innovative ways to create sonic drama and musical development. As a sound artist he composes largely with his own field recordings, using these as windows on experience — creating imaginative worlds by embedding them in networks of digitally realised sound design.
Simon Perril is a poet and collagist. His poetry publications include The Slip (Shearsman, 2020), In the Final Year of my 40s (Shearsman, 2018), Beneath (Shearsman, 2015), Archilochus on the Moon (Shearsman, 2013), Newton’s Splinter (Open House, 2012), Nitrate (Salt, 2010), A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher, 2009), and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing (Salt, 2004). As a critic he has written widely on contemporary poetry, editing The Salt Companion to John James, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling. He is Professor of Poetic Practice at De Montfort University, in Leicester.
WFS project title: ‘Sun Deck Set Cogitation (2022)’
This work is an acousmatic installation setting of Perril’s Sun Deck Set Cogitation which is derived from two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: a detailed notebook description of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil and a 1941 voyage on which he escaped occupied France. The collaboration condenses into a spatialised palimpsest found-text and found-sound, re-mapped into a unique meditation on experience in-the-moment.
Louise Rossiter (UK)
Louise Rossiter (1986) is an award winning Electroacoustic composer and sound artist based in Leicester, UK. Her research interests include expectation in acousmatic music, silence and music, acoustic ecology, multi-channel composition and spatialisation.
Her current research explores ways in which interactions of sound, silence, and timbral blending might evoke implications, expectations and questions. She is currently composing a series of pieces which explore the work of Fritz Kahn. Dr Kahn’s work revolutionised the area of infographics by producing images representing the human anatomy as complex pieces of machinery. Louise’s works aim to provide a highly immersive sonic experience which are in some way, unpredictable. Previous projects have focused on silence, contrasting real and imaginary places and enigmatic sound.
Louise has had works awarded in several international competitions. In 2012, she was awarded first prize in the prestigious L’espace du son international spatialisation competition. In 2021, Louise was awarded Prix Russolo for her composition Synapse — the first female electroacoustic composer to be awarded Prix Russolo since its inception in 1979. Louise’s work is available on the Xylem record label, and the Industriepalast suite will be published in late 2022/2023 on the Oscillations/Non-classical label.
WFS project title: ‘Old Original’
Old Original was inspired by the significant and rich history of Everards Brewery and its impact on Leicestershire. Named after one of Everards main brews, the piece also looks forward to the future. For example, the development of Everards Meadows and the new state of the art brewery, alongside the transition into the sixth generation of the Everards family tradition. Lastly, Old Original celebrates the community spirit for which Everards are well recognised for. With special thanks to Julian Everard (chairman) and Jon Elks(head brewer) for providing context and narration to the work.
Nikki Sheth (UK)
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.
WFS project title: ‘Amphibian Vocalisations’
Frog calls are used as mating calls, to advertise location and to designate territory. This piece explores these vocalisations, territorial boundaries and the use of space with the Wave Field Synthesis system.
Ryan Woods (UK)
Ryan Woods is currently a PhD student at the University of Manchester. He studies electroacoustic composition at NOVARS research centre focusing on soundscape composition as a way of exploring acoustic and cultural ecologies. He is specifically interested in representation and uses anthropological methodologies to explore this within composition.
WFS project title: ‘If We Could Hear’
We listen to the land, as we breath into it, and feel it breath into us — Sue Fox
Over the summer of 2022, a handful of people came together to explore listening, recording and compositional practices in green spaces in Manchester. They took part in workshops in deep listening, field recording and soundscape composition at The Fallowfield Secret Garden, Ryebank Fields and Highfield Country Park. They created a collective library of recordings and individual compositional responses to their experiences of these places. This work makes use of these field recordings and perspectives to paint a picture of the acoustic and cultural ecologies that make up these spaces. It touches on the more-than-human-world, place and identity, land access, and wellbeing to shine a light on the acoustemologies of these places.
Collaborators: Adam Harrison, Elania, Gili Armson, Heather Greenbank, Jaqueline Vigilanti, Laura, Monica Madecka, Sue Fox, Swen and Wendy Smith
About Wave Field Synthesis by Game of Life
Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) is a sound production technique designed specifically for spatial audio rendering. The WFS system from The Game of Life consists of 192 speakers, arranged in a square formation of 10x10 metres. Within this formation sounds can be composed to move inside or outside of this square space.
About A+E Lab
A+E Lab is a home to AΦE, a UK-based dance company renowned internationally for their innovative use of technology. Since 2022, as the Associate Artist of the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry (iCCi) — University of Kent, AΦE is based in the Historic Dockyard Chatham where they have launched the new A+E Lab with a vision to engage with the local community in a way that is both accessible and sustainable. A+E Lab is a space where unique artistic experiences using art and new technologies can be thought through, developed and created together by artists, researchers and experts in their fields.
More about how to get to A+E Lab: https://www.aoiesteban.com/contact
Events at A+E Lab: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/ae-lab-48571737693
Contact for questions: A+E Lab aecreativeworkshops@gmail.com
WFS System is generously supported by Game of Life Foundation
A+E Lab is supported by Arts Council England, The Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries (ICCI) — University of Kent and Visual Elements
