sense-aware

I would like to say a huge thanks to all the people who helped us launch the Situated Media Installation Exhibition at FraserStudios on 6th October, and also to the first-year students whose works are on display, heroically completed on time(!): the culmination of collaboration between the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Design Architecture & Building at the University of Technology, Sydney. The students from the Bachelor of Design in Photography and Situated Media, and Bachelor of Sound and Music Design have developed multimodal interdisciplinary projects exploring the neighbourhood/precinct using light objects, augmented reality, locative experiences and interactive digital situated media. Some works are conceptual and physical, installed in the gallery, while others take you on an experiential journey (audiovisual walk) to investigate situated media outside in the precinct, starting from the gallery.

Special thanks to: the other teaching and tutoring staff involved - Chris Caines, Alex Davies, Jai McKenzie,Vedad Famourzadeh, Aengus Martin and Justin Harvey; and to the School of Design in DAB and Professor Lawrence Wallen; FASS MediaLab & Brendan Lloyd & Equipment Store; DAB Fabrication Lab; Sense-Aware Lab; David Burns (Head, PSM); and Kym Lenoble of QueenStreetStudios/FraserStudios. Congratulations and thanks for an exciting collaboration!

Ros Dunlop (bass clarinet, clarinet) & Jon Drummond (composer, sound artist, programmer)

Prism by Kirsty Beilharz
(bass clarinet, electroacoustic)

Breath Resonance by Jon Drummond
(bass clarinet & interactive electroacoustics)

Mare Vaporum by Jon Drummond
(electroacoustic multichannel sound diffusion)

Papua Merdeka by Martin Wesley-Smith
(clarinet, audio-visual, electroacoustic)

Season launch by Prof. Theo van Leeuwen
(Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and
Assoc. Prof. Paula Hamilton
(Director of the Centre for Creative Practice and Cultural Economy research strength)

Ros Dunlop is one of Australia’s leading clarinetists/bass clarinetists. She has been a strong advocate of new music for the clarinet & bass clarinet all her professional life. She has commissioned many Australian composers and premiered many new compositions by composers worldwide. Ros has given solo concerts throughout Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, East Timor and the USA. Collaborations with composer Martin Wesley-Smith took her to many of the places mentioned above on several concert tours as well. She has performed in many festivals, including The Sydney Festival, Totally Huge New Music Festival, several International Clarinet Festivals. Her CDs have received International acclaim. After the concert tour to East Timor in 2002, she began a project to recover the traditional music of East Timor through audio-visual recordings for future generations: the traditional music of East Timor is a deeply hidden culture. She is currently undertaking a Ph.D at Newcastle University on the topic of music of East Timor. Ros is a founding member of the clarinet trio Charisma, with whom she has commissioned and premiered many new works including many multimedia premieres. This ensemble explores the extensive repertoire for clarinet trio from 1900 to the present day. Ros is on staff at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, teaching clarinet.

Dr. Jon Drummond (b. 1969) is a Sydney based composer, sound artist, academic and programmer. His creative work spans the fields of instrumental music, electroacoustic, interactive, sound and new media arts. His electronic and ensemble compositions have been performed at numerous Australian and international festivals and galleries including the Adelaide Festival, the International Computer Music Conferences and the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. He is currently a researcher at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Australia where his research interests include human-computer interaction design, new interfaces for musical expression, gesture analysis, improvisation, sound spatialisation and data sonification.

As a composer, Martin Wesley-Smith’s main interests are computer music, audio-visual works and choral music, although he also composes chamber music, orchestral music, children’s songs, music theatre, and music for film, revue etc. He’s an eclectic composer at home in a diverse range of idioms. Two main themes dominate his music: the life, work and ideas of Lewis Carroll (e.g. Snark-Hunting, Songs for Snark-Hunters, and the full-length choral music theatre piece Boojum!) and the plight of the people of East Timor (e.g. Kdadalak (For the Children of Timor), VENCEREMOS!, and Welcome to the Hotel Turismo). A radiophonic version of the “audio-visual music theatre” piece Quito - about schizophrenia and East Timor - 1997 and for which he was awarded the Paul Lowin Song Cycle Composition Award, Quito has been released on CD by Tall Poppies Records. One of his pieces - For Marimba & Tape - is the most-performed piece of Australian so-called “serious art-music” (it exists in versions for other instruments, too, including For Clarinet & Tape), while several of his children’s songs (e.g. I’m Walking in the City) have become classics on such television programs as Play School. Wesley-Smith was born in 1945 in Adelaide (South Australia). He studied at the Universities of Adelaide and York (England) before taking up a position lecturing in composition and electronic music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In 1988 he was the Australia Council’s Don Banks Fellow; in 1997 and 1998 he held an Australia Council Fellowship. In 1998, Martin Wesley-Smith was admitted as a Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia for services “to music, as a composer, scriptwriter, children’s songwriter, lecturer, presenter of multi-media concerts and a member of various Australia Council boards and committees. After 26 years’ teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and finding himself increasingly disenchanted with the direction in which it was heading, Wesley-Smith left in July 2000. He is now living in Kangaroo Valley, New South Wales, attempting to supplement his meager income from composition by growing vegetables and raising ducks (both, alas, fairly futile activities, what with the predations of snails, slugs, bower birds, foxes etc. and the absence of a green thumb ...).

Kirsty Beilharz is an internationally recognised composer whose music has been performed by ensembles including Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmanian and Western Australian Symphony Orchestras, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne Montreal, Ensemble Recherche Freiburg, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Seymour Group, and AustraLYSIS. Her music has been performed at the Gaudeamus World Music Days Amsterdam, Paris Rostrum, and Hannover Biennale. Beilharz was selected for the IRCAM Electronic Music Course, Matsumae International Science Research Fellowship (AI Lab Tokyo), an Asialink Arts Residency, Young Australian of the Year Finalist, Churchill Fellowship, Sir Charles Mackerras Prize of the British Council, and has won composition prizes in the Jean Bogan Piano Composition Award, the World Bass Clarinet Composition Competition, & Angoulême Colloque International du Basson. She completed her Ph.D in music at the University of Sydney (1996) and post-doctoral studies at the University of York. Kirsty Beilharz is Professor of Music, Sonification and Interaction Design, conjointly in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and the Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building at the University of Technology, Sydney, and course director of the Bachelor of Sound and Music Design degree. Beilharz’s research integrates music and generative processes applied to sound, real time audio-visual interaction and data sonification exploring gestural interaction using multimodality, physical computing, wearable technologies, hyper-instruments, and aesthetics and interactivity in sonification, with a special interest in the representation of bio-data and eco-data. She played violin for 25 years and is currently a practitioner of the Japanese shakuhachi (bamboo flute).

Programme

Kirsty Beilharz: Prism for Bass Clarinet and stereo electroacoustic spatial diffusion.
(NSW premiere)

This piece was composed for Ros Dunlop, in Sydney, 2011. The title, Prism, refers to diffusion, diffraction, refraction, spectrum, and the revealing of the inner world of the bass clarinet. Recorded bass clarinet sounds played by the performer were used in the generation and interpolation of the electroacoustic spatial diffusion. Prism widens the image of the acoustic bass clarinet physically (through the spatial image), spectrally by broadening the gamut of audible sounds, timbre and frequency range, achieved through time-stretch and transposition treatments, and synthetic processing of the recorded bass clarinet. Thus, we hear bass clarinet sounds that were previously hidden. The spatial treatment serves to augment the performer in ways not humanly possible, creating at times, through sampled clarinet at the polar extremes of the stereo image, antiphony and polyphony between the live performer and the mirrors/refractions of her sound. The live performer is the focal point, scrutinised by the musical microscope, but also burst open. The non-clarinet sounds utilise two spatio-musical approaches to gesture: locality – static, directional sounds identified by a distinct point in space; and movement – heard in the sweeping motion of sounds that dynamically move through the space. Spatial location and movement are seen as extensions of the performer’s gestural vectors. Thus, mirrors or multiples (untreated clarinet sounds) are fixed at “points” in space, like other personalities, while sounds characterised by distinctive timbre and register move and morph around the performer. The optional use of grand piano with depressed sostenuto pedal to create analogue reverb is an homage to Pierre Boulez and his ground-breaking electroacoustic works like Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985, dedicated to Luciano Berio) and Domaines (1961-8, with a flexible structure) that remain cornerstones of electroacoustic clarinet repertoire today. Other inspirations include Swiss composer, Michael Jarrell’s Assonance III for bass clarinet, cello and piano (1989) and Assonance II for solo bass clarinet, and Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro Sostenuto (1986-8) for clarinet trio that explores the amplified inner world of timbral nuance, extended techniques and sound envelopes. Multiphonic (chord) notations in the bass clarinet part refer to Phillip Rehfeldt’s New Directions for Clarinet (New Instrumentation) (1994: revised edition, Scarecrow Press).

Jon Drummond: Breath Resonance for Bass Clarinet and interactive electroacoustics.

(Premiere performance)

The interactive electroacoustics used in Breath Resonance are created through the use of an underlying virtual model of a reed instrument. This “hybrid” virtual instrument is controlled by modifying virtual physical parameters such as tube length, tube width and breath pressure. During the performance the “real” acoustic bass clarinet sounds are analysed with respect to tone colour, volume envelopes, frequency and spectral content. These sonic gestures are then interpreted by the computer to performance parameters for sonification by the “virtual clarinet”. Of course the virtual instrument doesn’t have to conform to the physical constraints of the “real-world”.

Jon Drummond: Mare Vaporum for electroacoustic multichannel sound diffusion.

(Premiere performance)

This is a newly composed electroacoustic work intended for live diffusion over multichannel speaker array. To create the work I have drawn on a small set of samples (a few minutes worth) I created in the early 1990s using a UNIX mini mainframe computer (VME-bus) that was housed in the Sydney University Experimental Sound Studio beneath the Seymour centre theatres. The music software running on this computer was developed by Ian Fredericks with contributions by Tony Furse (Qasar M8 synthesiser and Fairlight CMI) and Bruce Ellis. Ian’s software system (Iansmuse) was a text based language for synthesis and multichannel spatialisation. Typically your sound programme would be typed up and left to run over night. The few minutes of sound generated could then be listened to the next day (if you were lucky) and the process repeated, such a contrast to working with sound some 20 years later! Although restraining myself to this small set of source material I have transformed them liberally in creating this new work. I am happy to make the original samples available if of interest.

Martin Wesley Smith: Papua Merdeka for clarinet, electroacoustics and visual media.

The 1969 UN-sanctioned “Act of Free Choice” that handed the Dutch colony West Papua to Indonesia was a sham, an act of no choice for the West Papuan people. Since then, Indonesia has treated the territory as it did East Timor, with rampant human rights abuse as well as exploitation, in collusion with America and others, of West Papua’s rich natural resources. This piece is about the West Papuan people and their thirst for freedom. Almost all the sources I’ve used in creating it were begged, borrowed or stolen from others. They include Agence France Presse, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2JJJ, Penny Beaumont, Sheila Draper, Don Bennetts, Gerry Errante, Steven Feld, Lynne Hamilton (of Prowling Tiger Press in Melbourne, who published “West Papua: Follow the Morning Star” by Ben Bohane, Jim Elmslie and Liz Thompson, an inspiring book of superb texts and photographs), David Kirkland, Jonny Lewis, Robert Lowry (“Shall We Gather at the River?”), Jonathon Mustard, SBS News, Edward Smith and Alice Wesley-Smith - my thanks to all these plus to all those whose names I don’t know or contact addresses I can’t find. Apologies to those whose names have been inadvertently omitted. Thanks, too, to David Bridie, Louise Byrne, Andrew Kilvert and Rob Wesley-Smith. Two other books provided valuable information: Jim Elmslie’s “Irian Jaya Under the Gun” (Crawford House Publishing (Australia) Pty Ltd) and Peter King’s “West Papua Since Suharto” (University of New South Wales Press). I used the beautiful West Papuan anthem Hai Tanah Ku Papua. Flags, used with permission, came from http://www.theodora.com/flags. Most of the bird of paradise paintings were by Rowan Ellis (1848-1922). Finally, thanks to Ros Dunlop for commissioning the piece. And, for funding assistance, to the Music Board of the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body, to which many thanks.

Special thanks to performers Ros Dunlop & Jon Drummond for their generous participation, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Paula Hamilton & the Centre for Creative Practices and Cultural Economy & Catherine Baird, Theo van Leeuwen – Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the FASS MediaLab staff – especially James Hurley, William Lawlor and Justin Harvey, the Centre for Contemporary Design Practice, Sense-Aware Lab, student volunteers from the Bachelor of Sound and Music Design degree, FASS doctoral students, Jos Mulder - lecturer in Live Sound, and Kawai pianos.