40.4 - Sonic Summit - 2023
The B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance is proud to host the second 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. Come learn about interfacing with the immersive audio array and ambisonics production workflows, enter into a playground of motion, sound, and light, listen deeply, join Natasha Barrett and Tarik Barri -- two internationally renowned artists -- to hear about their work, get fully immersed in sound and live audiovisual performances at the concerts.
All events are free and open to the public!
Summit Events
40.4: The Spatial Array
Intro and Overview
Join Sean Winters to learn about spatial audio and ambisonics, and hear demonstrations of the immense capabilities of B2's new immersive sound array. Both 3D sound art and ambisonically encoded field recordings will be used to demo the creative possibilities of this state-of-the-art facility.
Monday, March 6 9:30 am - 10:30 am
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: The Spatial Array
Spatial Audio Workflows with Ableton 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, March 6 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: The Spatial Array
Working with Reaper, IEM, ICST
Join Sean Winters to explore the outer limits of what B2's 44 channel high density loudspeaker array is capable of. Using a Digital Audio Workstation (Reaper) and VST Plug-Ins (IEM, ICST) is currently the only way to encode Higher Order Ambisonic soundfields. Applications of immersive soundfields in the context of Critical Media Making, XR, Game Engines, and Live Performances will also be explored.
Monday, March 6 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Touching Sound
Enter into a playground of Motion, Sound, and Light! 3d motion capture technology, ambisonic sound diffusion, and intelligent lighting will be combined to create a playful immersive experience in which your movements will trigger sound and light. The playground features three interactive modes: Rumpus Room, Timbre Moods, and the Spotlight Granulator. Each mode uses a different approach for generating sound and light cues based on your movements. All are invited to come explore this immersive space and learn about the technologies involved!
Tuesday, March 7 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Listen|Yin "Lights Out. Ears Open"
Join us for a lights-out listening session in the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio. Stereo tracks by (un?)renowned sonic artists, curated by Sean Winters, will be spatialized on the array.
Wednesday, March 8 9:30 am - 10:30 am
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Listen|Yang "Lights Out. Ears Open"
Join us for a lights-out listening session in the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio. Stereo tracks by (un?)renowned sonic artists, curated by Paulus Van Horne, will be spatialized on the array.
Wednesday, March 8 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Tarik Barri "AudioVisual Workflows"
Join Tarik Barri (Berlin, DE) for this hybrid/remote event as he talks about a few Immersive AudioVisual collaborations and discusses the various conceptual approaches and technical workflows for producing Immersive AudioVisual content. He will discuss the conceptual side, toolsets used, and lessons learned from previous projects, and also share some of the cutting edge possibilities of VideoSync -- an emerging toolset at the forefront of Live AudioVisual Performance. The session will be moderated by Mary Latera (Colorado, USA), an audiovisual artist who is working on the development side of the VideoSync project with Tarik. Check out Tarik's work here.
Thursday, March 9 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
An often recurring idea in his work is that of ""visual music"", not as opposed to ""regular"" music, but as an intrinsic part of it. He notes that music is a type of motion that's deeper than pure sound or visuals, it's a movement within our consciousness that can both be evoked by, and expressed through different senses and media. Sound is particularly powerful in this regard, but it's vital to also acknowledge and respond to the huge role that visual expressions can have in enhancing, altering or negating the musical experience.
His work takes on various forms like installations, videos and AV performances where he frequently collaborates with artists like Thom Yorke, Paul Jebanasam, Sote and Robert Henke."
Artist Talk: Natasha Barrett
Join Natasha Barrett (Oslo, NO) for this hybrid/remote event as she gives a rare glimpse into the compositional process behind two of her latest Higher Order Ambisonics acousmatic compositions. First we'll have an opportunity to listen to the work on the 40.4 speaker array, then Natasha will talk about how the pieces were created.
"My inspiration comes from the immediate sounding matter of the world around us, as well as the way it behaves, the way it is generated, and by systems and the traces that those systems reveal. These interests have lead my work into worlds of cutting-edge audio technologies, geoscience, sonification, motion tracking and some exciting collaborations leading into the unknown - involving solo performers and chamber ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for new music and the way it can touch the listener." -Natasha Barrett
Check out the artist's work here.
Friday, March 10 11:15 am - 12:05 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
40.4: Acousmatic & AudioVisual Concert
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.
Friday, March 10 7:30 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Visuals, dancer: Tarik Barri
Music: FAST DE"
Commissioned by the Heroines of Sound Festival, supported by the Norwegian Arts Council. "
The sound materials for this composition are mainly generated by means of analogue modular synthesis. The materials have then been processed through various multichannel convolution based techniques resulting in transformations of their spectral and spatial properties. These techniques are not so much focused on the movements of single sound sources but rather on envelopment by means of static placement of different spectral/timbral parts of sound materials over a spatial field. One of the properties of this technique is that when one alters the frequency spectrum (ie. by filtering) one creates a movement through said sound field."
R.A. Jones’s “Sahrazad” is the debut release on Random Walk, a multi channel record label founded by Visible Cloaks’ Ryan Carlile. Sahrazad is a prismatic journey through a mercurial landscape created by generative systems whorling wild streams of synthesized sound. Each track is a new world and an invitation to investigate how our ears listen and engage with music. The album comes in a 7.1 surround sound blu-ray format, bringing an autonomy and motile freedom for sounds to surface, hide and swirl around your body in an omnidirectional manner. “Sahrazad” is loosely based on “One Thousand and One Nights,” a collection of folk tales strung together by a narrator who begins a story without ending the preceding one in effort to avoid her death. Similarly, each of the nine tracks on Sahrazad are riddled with layers that blossom and surge into another world of object-noise abstractions. It is the album’s cyclical constitution that accepts birth and death as the same and allows the listener to explore the nonlinear matrices of it.
R.A. Jones is a New York-based composer, producer, and educator. Jones is a current member of electronic, avant-garde band P.E. and releases music as Jha Bones. He was previously involved with Eternal Tapestry, Jackie-O-Motherfucker, and Parquet Courts. He has been featured on albums released on labels such as Rough Trade, Mississippi Records, Blackest Ever Black, and Wharf Cat.
“Sahrazad” is mastered by Montreal-based sound engineer Dominique Bassal. The physical release is a blu-ray 7.1 surround sound disc with audio-only option. Digital streams are available in Dolby Atmos, a 360-degree spatialized audio format"
“Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life, but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction” (The Queer Art of Failure p.185)."
To understand our physical environment we must look at it closely. Look at it. closely. Look at it? The eyes can be helpful but, perhaps, we can breakthrough and further realize the true nature of our physical environment by listening to it closely. And not only by listening to exotic, hard to capture sounds, like sending microphones to the surface of mars. Maybe revelations can be found in simple everyday sounds, like trains. Furthermore, it’s possible that the materiality of sound is actually fragile and illusive. While the fruit is growing it is inedible, and as it decays it can become moldy and treacherous; conceivably there’s only a brief window of time in which a sound is actually ripe, and maybe only a brief instant in which it has achieved its absolute peak flavor. Perhaps thoroughly examining a sound through the process of granular synthesis can help us navigate – and reflect upon – the hundreds of thousands of discrete moments that represent a sound's life cycle, from pollination to disintegration. "
40.4: LIVE
Timothy Cleary, Eric Barry Drasin, Emilie Craig, and Sean Winters will each present live performances that utilize both the 40.4 spatial array and B2's immersive projection capabilities.
Saturday, March 11 7:30 pm
Location: Black Box Experimental Studio, Roser ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder
Timothy Cleary activates the 40.4 system with interview excerpts, semi-improvised score, and immersive video to mine the fragmented mythology around outlaw biker and record-setting parachutist, Robert “Norton” Thomas. Norton, Cleary’s maternal uncle, disappeared in 1982 after an engine failed on the aircraft he was copiloting over the Pacific Ocean. "
Eric Barry Drasin is a research-based artist exploring the relationship between art and systems of value. Eric’s work is rooted in media ecology and performance. Using experimental media techniques and custom software systems, his performances and installations have explored how media can transform relationship.
Eric founded a video art collective called the Fast Food Collective in 2012, and has been curating realtime media performances in NYC since 2013. He has worked as a curator through Culturehub/LaMama, Outpost Artists Resources, and other spaces in NYC. In 2016, he co-founded Moving Pictures Gallery, a platform for digital art. In 2017, he founded and produced the Confetti Machine Realtime Media Festival. He is currently developing programming at FEED, a new residency and exhibition space for media artists in Erie Pennsylvania. http://ericbarrydrasin.com
“Headgames” is a Diggers performance negotiating a relationship between the body, a head-mounted camera and projected screen. Through the use of networked media, aleatoric score, and performative feedback, Realtime media is contextualized as an interdependent and fluctuating psychic space; an extension bridging interior and exterior awareness. Using a series of specific choreographic arrangements, the performer initiates different states of balance in the signal.
The image is processed through a custom software system which is controlled by two handheld wireless sensors. The image is sonified, enabling the body to connect to the mediated image and initiate a dialogue.
Based on Paul Ryan’s notion of “threeing” the Headgames score represents divergent relational positions that one can take when mediating conflict. The form of these positions resembles a circuit, or a system of interrelated processes. Each position allows the performer to relate to the content of a message in nested arrangements of observation that allows for a behavioral feedback circuit to occur.
Through this feedback circuit, the signal is extended into the environment through light and sound; given form and sculpted through movement. Through this embodied choreography of signal, the internal psychic space of the performer becomes immediately externalized and the process of finding balance can be enhanced and made observable."
Dissolve is an audiovisual composition exploring nostalgia and loss through digital and analog technology."
As I prepared for a life-changing move across the world, Last Chance was quickly composed on the piano that I grew up playing, moments before leaving for the airport. As we gather, in-person, mask free, safe from war, and natural disaster -- to experience an outpouring of human creativity together -- it also feels appropriate to give over this work as a moment of rememberance for all of those who have passed away, during the pandemic and otherwise."