40.4 Festival
The B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance is proud to host the third annual 40.4 Festival, an audio-forward intermedia sonic summit! The festival features a lineup of events focused around the B2's state-of-the-art spatial audio array.
This festival is made possible through the generous support of many partners including:
- ATLAS Institute & ATLAS B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance
- Department of Critical Media Practices
- Cycling '74
- Anton Bruckner Private University
- Ars Electronica
- LEAF (Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival)
Summit Events
40.4: The Spatial Array
Intro & Overview of ATLAS B2's 44 Channel HDLA
Join Sean Winters to learn about spatial audio and ambisonics, and hear demonstrations of the immense capabilities of B2's high density loudspeaker array. Both 3D sound art and ambisonically encoded field recordings will be used to explore the creative possibilities of this state-of-the-art facility.
Monday, April 15th 9:30 am - 10:30 am
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: The Spatial Array
Immersive Audio Workflows with Ableton and Max for Live
Join Sean Winters to learn how to interface with B2's 44 channel high density loudspeaker array using Ableton and Max for Live. Various creative approaches will be explored including sending sounds straight-to-speaker, and also encoding/decoding with ambisonics and other sound diffusion algorithms.
Monday, April 15th 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: Jeff Merkel (Meow Wolf)
Comparing Spatial Audio Algorithms: HOA, VBAP, KNN, etc
Controlling the localization of sound sources in 3D auditory spaces using high density loudspeaker arrays isn't the simplest endeavor. Determining the correct algorithm -- or multiple algorithms -- is one of the more nuanced elements of the process. Jeff Merkel (the designer of B2's 40.4 speaker array!!) will join us to step through some of the considerations that inform the use of the different algos depending on the creative context in which they're being deployed: Immersive Art Experiences, Acousmatic Sound Compositions, Theme Parks, etc.
Monday, April 15th 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: Hacker Zone
The goal of this workshop is to 3D print and assemble a set of DIY ultralight open headphones. Enrique Mendoza will be in Boulder for this year's festival (visiting from Linz, Austria!) presenting his research on Hybrid Audio Diffusion Systems for which open headphones are required. Once printed and assembled in the BTU Lab, a comparison of different open headphone models will take place using binaural audio works.
Monday, April 15th 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Location: BTU Lab, Roser ATLAS Institue, CU Boulder
40.4: Enrique Mendoza (Anton Bruckner Private University)
"Hybrid Audio Diffusion Systems - Lecture & Performance"
The HADS lecture will focus on presenting participants with multiple frames of reference in an immersive 3D Audio experience. HADS is a monitoring system design that combines open headphones and speaker arrays to create augmented immersive sound fields. With recently developed digital technologies, it is possible to create and perceive immersive audio experiences where 3D sound fields can be reproduced in several audio systems through binaural and ambisonics techniques. The HADS offers the possibility of defining the location relationships between the listener, the sound sources, and the perceived space in multiple ways and layering. Combining the egocentric frame of reference fixed to the head (with headphones) and the allocentric frame of reference fixed to the room (with ATLAS B2's 40.4 speaker array).
Wednesday, April 17th 9:30 am - 10:30 am
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: Enrique Mendoza (Anton Bruckner Private University)
"Hybrid Audio Diffusion Systems - Performance"
The HADS performance will present participants with an immersive 3D Audio experience.
Wednesday, April 17th 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: Enrique Mendoza (Anton Bruckner Private University)
Hybrid Audio Diffusion Systems - Lecture & Performance
The HADS is a monitoring system design that combines open headphones and speaker arrays to create augmented immersive sound fields. With recently developed digital technologies, it is possible to create and perceive immersive audio experiences where 3D sound fields can be reproduced in several audio systems through binaural and ambisonics techniques. The HADS offers the possibility of defining the location relationships between the listener, the sound sources, and the perceived space in multiple ways and layering. Combining the egocentric frame of reference fixed to the head (with headphones) and the allocentric frame of reference fixed to the room (with ATLAS B2's 40.4 speaker array), the workshop will focus on presenting participants with multiple frames of reference in an immersive 3D Audio experience.
Wednesday, April 17th 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: David Zicarelli (Cycling '74)
"Stick Your Head Inside a Piano"
A piano has a few hundred strings and a big resonant soundboard. When you sit in front of a piano to play it, you have an experience of sound in the room that requires no mixing, spatializing, or speakers. The instrument does it all. Then when we record a piano, we use a couple of microphones and mix it down to stereo (at best). But what if we got out of the habit of mixing altogether and treated our multi-channel systems more like pianos where the speakers play individual components of instruments and the mixing happens in the room (and your head)? I’ll present a few experiments along these lines.
Wednesday, April 17th 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4 x LEAF
Brian Kane's "Static Dynamics"
LEAF is the Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival. It is a showcase of electronic and new media arts that bridges the classical music and traditional art worlds with contemporary electronic and emerging new media, including sonic and visual elements combined in new and novel ways. LEAF 2024 is happening April 17 - May 4.
Static Dynamics is new “data ’n chill” interactive installation using three game controllers and a massive subwoofer to create unique soundscapes combined with abstract video that's gamed by the viewers.
The sound and video elements were created by Brian Kane and David Fodel in 2008 at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, and have never been shown before.
Brian Kane is an artist who currently lives in Loveland, Colorado. His work has been featured on Discovery Channel, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show, and more, and exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide since 1988.
David Fodel, the director of the Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival, is an artist living in Lafayette, Colorado. He and Brian have collaborated on works for 25 years.
Wednesday & Thursday, April 17 & 18, 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Location: B2's Studio Lab 3, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: Acousmatic & AudioVisual
Artists from around the world present immersive acousmatic and audiovisual compositions. All of the works are Colorado premieres, most are USA premieres, and some are world premieres. None of the pieces have ever been played publicly on B2's 40.4 spatial array.
Wednesday, April 17th 7:30 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
2023 | 11:30 | Acousmatic
Umbrae (Shadows) is a personal reflection on fragmentation and distortion of human memory - a particular subjective distortion of reality, unique to each individual human being. I’ve played a perilous game of moving a magnifying glass through my personal latent sound-space. I found it filled with glitches of corroded memories, inaccessible to another human being. A half-forgotten poem escaping translation from the language of my childhood; a disembodied scrap of a musical phrase erroneously preserved by my violinist muscle memory.
The original impulse for this piece was sparked by a glitch of personal memory, seeded by a 1920 poem by Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian titled “Departure”. The poem itself evokes feelings of grief associated with leaving something precious behind, irreparable loss, and the realization of the inevitable final departure. The fragmented memories of the poem, which I memorized in my early teenage years, returned to me in shattered pieces, yet the feeling evoked by the poem not only remained, but seemed amplified.
Should one never abandon anything forever? - asks the poet.
Is this loss? - a random response generated by AI seemed to be a mockery at first, yet the question felt strikingly real.
The composition process and the structure of this piece reflects the nature of this experience. Fragmented scraps of various recording sessions were brought together in unexpected and paradoxical ways. Each of these recordings brought memories of a specific moment in time and space, a timestamp of an experience, unique and non- replicable. Structurally, the composition is based on processes breaking, semi-musical phrases being interrupted halfway through their development, as if human memory suddenly fails, and the listener’s attention is distracted in response to a new, unexpected stimulus. At once surprising, the new disruptive material quickly becomes familiar and accepted as perfectly belonging to the new transformed state, until it also becomes interrupted and fragmented again.
The piece was realized in 3rd order Ambisonics with the use of the Ambisonic Toolkit (ATK) so\ware package and mixed at the University of Washington Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) sound studios.
It was premiered during the 2023 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, as part of their Medium Sonorum concert.
2023 | 17:00 | AudioVisual
RUINS is an audiovisual work commissioned by Henie Onstad Art Centre and premiered at NEW VISIONS - TRIENNIAL FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND NEW MEDIA 2023.
Having witnessed the 2008 war in Georgia, I was deeply moved by the ongoing war in Ukraine. The haunting images of the destroyed cities have awakened in me the desire to highlight the contrast between creation and destruction through a work of art. With RUINS, I want to show how slowly we build our world, yet how swiftly it can be torn down by war. Supported by the Norwegian Arts Council.
2019 | 5:42 | Acousmatic
Emanate from proximity is a work for bowed guitar, and electrostatic sensors exploring the proxemics of sonic possibilities mingling around and through the liminal space between the electronic world created by humans and the naturally occurring transmissions of the planet’s magnetic field as they intertwine, collide, and diverge along an individual path.
aloft in the atmosphere, currents of communication pull at a present location signaling an unheard voice hidden just beyond perception.
2011 / 2023 | 11:05 | Acousmatic
It is a double homage to John Cage's "Constructions" and to the debuts of my learning in Concrete Music in the early 80s. John Cage wrote three pieces for percussionists under this title, and the first (Construction 1 in metal) had quite an impact on me when I discovered it on record in my youth, as contrasting with the few contemporary musics that I knew then, both simpler rhythmically and richer sonically. The structure and rhythm of my piece are not as rigorous as those used by Cage in these compositions (4.3.2.3.4 of 16 measures for the first), and the spatial distribution of the "virtual percussionists" is much more overlapping than that of instrumentalists, but there still seems to me to be a certain kinship…
This construction proceeds, both in time and in space, by stacking and nesting blocks, which clearly appears on the sonogram of the original 80 points volumetric space. The majority of sounds come from recordings mainly made between the years 1986 and 1998, on tape recorder and on DAT (notably in the percussion class of the Lyon Conservatory). Apart from a little reverberation here and there, there is no transformation on the sounds. The work resides exclusively in the editing and spatial placement, as one would erect a building stone by stone, while preserving what makes the particularities and qualities of each.
2024 | 6:24 | AudioVisual
Realtime performance capture using custom plug-ins and commercial tools. 4-channels of oscilloscope-looking graphics are driven by discrete channels of sinewave harmonics and paired soft-synth sounds. Rhythmic elements drive gradations and positions of randomized Bongard problem graphics via MIDI. A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Soviet computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard, probably in the mid-1960s. They were published in his 1967 book on pattern recognition. The problems were popularized by their occurrence in the 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, himself a composer of Bongard problems. According to Hofstadter, "the skill of solving Bongard problems lies very close to the core of 'pure' intelligence, if there is such a thing".
2024 | 6:53 | Acousmatic
Petra Anamnetic presents a stratophonic acoustic mapping of the Petra world heritage archaeological site, located in southern Jordan. This is a locale that has traditionally belonged to the Bedouin B’doul tribe, a clan that continues to play an eminent role within the tourist industry that has become of central importance to the area. The piece has been recorded and is intended to be disseminated using ambisonic spatialization – the soundscape head-tracks (audio changes depending on which direction one is facing/pointed towards), replicating the immersive and interactive experience of audition in a ‘real’ space.
Petra Anamnetic juxtaposes two main elements: 1) a conversation between two B’doul shepherd children tending their goats in one of the many caves that are characteristic of the area and 2) the sound of the evening call to prayer recorded from a hotel rooftop patio in nearby Wadi Musa, the main access point for most of the many tourists visiting Petra. Via the juxtaposition and creative manipulation of these two recordings, Petra Anamnetic aims to foreground the complex strata embedded within a geographically contiguous yet socially, politically and historically heterogeneous territory, sonically delineating sublimated tensions manifested between those who are native to the area and the transient foreigners who come to marvel at their legacy.
2022 | 15:55 | Acousmatic
“The Airborne Library” is a multichannel sound installation that uses Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) to explore the persistence of transmitted sound in the media. Babbage, an eccentric mathematician whose “difference engine” was a precursor to the first computers, posits that sounds, once uttered, are permanently inscribed in our atmosphere, he writes: “The momentary waves raised by the passing breeze, apparently born but to die on the spot which saw their birth, leave behind them an endless progeny, which, reviving with diminished energy in other seas, visiting a thousand shores...will pursue their ceaseless course till ocean be itself annihilated."
Despite Babbage’s imperfect understanding of the physics of sound, his suggestion that our words endlessly circle the globe, provides a powerful metaphor for the transmission of sound. It is a harbinger of our current mediascape in which the inscription of fleeting events becomes permanently etched into the public record.
2024 | 9:45 | Acousmatic
If you make things and put them down on a table or a shelf in your studio, or if you take a cup from the cupboard and make yourself coffee and then wash it up and stack it on the draining-board by the sink, you are on the edges of still life.
- Edmund de Waal
In my piece "Natura Morta" I was inspired by the works of Giorgio Morandi to create an electro-acoustic composition for multi-channel playback. This creative process was characterised by an exploration of my personal impressions of Morandi's paintings, although I consciously chose not to translate them directly into music. Instead, I focused on highlighting Morandi's focus on seemingly banal, everyday objects such as bottles and small boxes. These objects, which were commonplace in his time and now have a nostalgic character, are transformed by Morandi into something artistic. His ability to abstract the perception of these objects and the light that surrounds them and translate it into art reveals an inner perception that goes far beyond the real.
To me there is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality.
- Giorgio Morandi
Technical information:
I began to make my own microphone recordings in my kitchen, attaching a special microphone to my helmet to capture the sounds of cooking from my perspective. The choice of the kitchen as the location for these recordings reflects the connection with everyday objects in Morandi's paintings. My aim was not simply to reproduce the recorded sounds, but to extract and intensify the sounds and musical qualities hidden within them. This process becomes clearer as the piece progresses, eventually leading to a visible abstraction, particularly audible in the amplification of the sounds of kitchen utensils and the static, quiet atmosphere I see in Morandi's work.
The static nature of Morandi's paintings, often associated with a certain melancholy and serenity, is musically realised by freezing individual sounds over time. The development of the piece from objective reality to complete musical abstraction is achieved through the increasing alienation and musical treatment of the sounds, culminating in a surprising piano part at the end.
Background noises from my courtyard, recorded on an autumn afternoon in Bologna, complement the composition, creating a contrast between the outside world and the abstracted inner world of the kitchen. This also reflects Morandi's reclusive life. The use of 3D audio and ambisonics allows the sounds of the courtyard to be spatially positioned, creating a separation between the outside and inside worlds.
In conclusion, Natura Morta is a deeply personal exploration of Morandi's art that goes far beyond direct translation. It is an invitation to discover the hidden musical dimensions of everyday sounds, and reflects my search for a new musical language that draws from silence and the subtle beauties of the everyday.
2024 | 6:45 | Acousmatic
Disseminating the Circumference is an exploration inspired by the form and prosody of an Emily Dickinson poem (The Poets light but Lamps — 930), as if recited by a woman. The human voice is replaced by precisely tailored, at the level of vowels and emotional intonation, old upright piano sounds. Subjected to transformative treatments, including synthetic instrumentation and time stretching, the piano becomes a replacement for spoken language. This composition unfolds in a three-dimensional sonic space, enveloping listeners in a soundscape that mirrors the rhythmic ebb and flow of Dickinson's verses. The tonal palette, influenced by unique characteristics of and old, partly damaged and prepared piano sound, embraces both resonant harmonies and intentional dissonances, echoing the contrast found in the poet's work. Dedicated to the enduring legacy of Dickinson's poetry, Disseminating the Circumference invites audiences to reflect on the connections between language, time, and the transformative power of sound.
The piece is designed to be played on a dome of speakers surrounding the listeners, and was realized in 6th order ambisonics.
2024 | 5:48 | Acousmatic
This track was recorded in “The Tank” in Rangely Colorado in June of 2024 during a solo artist residency. This was my first visit to the Tank so I was not quite sure what to expect - I had about 20 different wind instruments and more whistles, percussion as well as looping through Ableton Live. The sound inside is rich and deep and out of your control! The funnest thing were the pops, hums, wind, and vibration from passing planes and trucks that let you know that the tank and it’s surroundings are the one calling the shots. On this track I’m playing….well…the Mbira, chimes, a bird whistle, an Alto and C flute, and looping.
2024 | 2:28 | AudioVisual
The media assets used to create ""Pulseless V-Tach"" were originally captured for a VR experience currently being produced by Reality Garage for a client in the healthcare industry. It was therefore possible to obtain 8k imagery and ambisonic sound fields from a location that would typically be completely off-limits to cameras and sound recorders. For this work, the audiovisual assets have been heavily reworked and remixed to transition from binaural decoding on a VR headset to high-order ambisonic playback using an HDLA and large format projection capabilities. The intention is to give people an opportunity to be immersed collectively in an experience that usually has to be dealt with under uncomfortable and dis-orienting circumstances, usually somewhat alone and mentally alienated. It's the artist's hope that giving audiences an opportunity to participate in this immersive experience collectively, in a relaxed and controlled setting, will hopefully be a way to create a safe space for them to carefully revisit and reflect on possible moments of intense personal trauma.
40.4: LIVE
Mary Letera, Sean Winters, and Enrique Mendoza will each present live performances that utilize the advanced intermedia technologies at B2's Black Box Experimental Studio including the high density loudspeaker array, large format projection, and smart lighting capabilities.
Thursday, April 18th 7:30 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Enrique has performed his hybrid live spatialisation sets in loudspeaker arrays at Vienna Acousmonium (AT), Lisboa Incomum (PT), Corfu Acousmonium (Gr), SonicLab (AT), Koper Dodekaotto (SL), KlangTheater (AT), Ottosonics (AT), B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance (US), among many others. In 2020, he was invited as Artist-in-Residence at the MuseumsQuartier to compose a multi-channel piece for Tonspur Kunstverein Wien.
His compositions have been presented at forums and festivals such as Musikverein Wien (AT), Imersivo Festival (PT), Ars Electronica (AT), NYCEMF (US), MOOZAK Live-multichannel (AT), IZIS Festival (SL), Ottosonics Festival (AT), 40. 4 - Sonic Summit (US), IGNM Strommusik (AT), Festival Cervantino (MX), Ny Musik Festival (DK), Xarkis Festival (CY), International Conference on Computer Music (ICMC/SMC 2014) (GR), KlangFest (AT), Echoes Around Me (AT), Tromp Percussion (NL), Unsafe+Sound (AT), 3rd International Forum for Young Composers Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble (PT), Miradas de Música Contemporánea (ES), Visiones Sonoras XV (MX), and others. He represented Mexico at the International Tribune of Composers No. 51 in Paris and the TIC No. 59 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Mendoza has received commissions, awards and grants from institutions and ensembles in Europe, the USA, Asia, South America and Mexico. Since 2019, he has been a professor at the National School of Cinematographic Arts, UNAM, MX. Enrique holds a Master's degree from the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He is pursuing a Doctor of Arts degree at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, Austria, where he lectures in Digital Music Techniques. His research focuses on electroacoustic music composition for hybrid audio diffusion systems (HADS).
This spatial performance is realized through improvisations with two analog synthesizers, digital spectral processes, and live multichannel spatialization to create sound masses in space. The spatialization is created live with two techniques. On the one hand, I use the channel-based spatialization through a surface controller with the volume of each of speaker on each fader (Acousmonium style). On the other hand, I use an Ambisonics encoder to move the sound straight with the digital interface. With these two techniques, I plan to contrast static sound zones with dynamical spatial movements to create an immersive dark, loud, and contemplative sonic experience.
This performance was inspired by Mary's many hours guiding public meditations, choosing the right lighting, sounds, and symbols to hold space for strangers to come together in one room and be at peace. Here you are invited to sit, stand, or lay down as you are bathed in ambient melodic synth sounds and colorful top-down projection washes over the room. The generative and responsive nature of both the music and the visuals encourages a deeply felt sense of the present moment for performer and viewers alike.
Sean Winters is a spatial audio composer and sound-designer, multi-instrumentalist, music producer, audiovisual artist, and hacker/technologist. Over the years, he's worked and collaborated on projects involving film/television, virtual reality, projection mapping, acoustic music ensembles, stereoscopic video, audio-reactive sculptures, circuit bending, interactive sound-art installations, and live spatial audio performances. Currently working for Reality Garage, an XR production studio, he's also a lecturer for the Department of Critical Media Practices (Sound for XR, Sonic Arts), the College of Music (Composing at the Computer, Making Electronic Music), and the ATLAS Institute (Immersive Audio & Ambisonics, B2 Scholar in Residence) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He holds a DMA in Composition & Emergent Technologies in Media Art Practices from CU Boulder, an MM in Composing for Film from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and a BFA in Integrative Music Studies from Concordia University in Montréal. Equally interested in creating content for high density loud speaker arrays, head-mounted displays & AR tech, and live intermedia performances, Sean's creative practice and research center around exploring both the creative and therapeutic applications of spatial audio in XR contexts, specifically within the live events and healthcare/wellness sectors.
40.4: Sonic Saturday (presented by Anton Bruckner Private University and Ars Electronica)
Freshly made spatial music presented in the past two editions of the Sonic Saturday at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in cooperation with the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.
1) Amias Hanley / SUNKLAND / 2021 / 10:40
2) Chin Ting Chan / Mirror Sculpture / 2023 / 09:10
3) Tolga Yayalar / Impulse Impromptu II / 2023 / 07:47
4) Asahi Yamanoshita / Interweaved Vertex / 2022 / 6:08
5) Jakob Gille / Neo Ornithologie / 2022 / 14:00
6) Panayiotis Kokoras / Qualia / 2017 / 9:40
7) Patrick Hartono / Spectral Chaos / 2022 / 12:25
8) Tuce Alba (Tuǧçe Albayrak) / Ouroboros / 2021 / 12:25
9) Hugo Paquete / Pulsar / 2022 / 12:48"
Saturday, April 20th 2:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder