Abstracts
Damian Castaldi - Making Connections
Making Connections is the title of this paper. Within sound art, sound design, music and audio production I will discuss my work as a musician and sound artist and current pedagogy at UTS. I will elaborate on areas of sound culture, radio/transmission art, acousmatic composition and gesture interface for sound installation and present/play short excerpts from a New media residency with the ABC, the Listening Room, recordings made from musical instruments of my own construction, an acousmatic piece commissioned by the ABC Earclip series and a musical track co produced with Solange Kershaw for an independent CD release. I will conclude with an online demonstration of an audio project I am currently working on in its developmental stages - A commercial project, which outlines the original concept for an interactive sound sculpture planned for installation in the Melbourne Telstra Concept Store in 2008.
Densil Cabrera - The Appeal of Acoustics
This presentation gives an overview of acoustics teaching based on the presenter's experience in the postgraduate audio and acoustics program at the University of Sydney. It addresses the questions of why students are interested in studying acoustics, possible content of acoustics courses, and the benefits acoustics education can bring. A notable aspect of the audio and acoustics program is that it attracts many students whose background is in audio production (as well as students working in professional audio and acoustics). Some study to make a career transition into professional acoustics or audio systems, and others are interested in using knowledge of acoustics to inform their work in audio production.
Kees Tazelaar - Electronic Tape Music Composition and Spatialization
When in the 1950's, one of the leading composers of the Cologne school of electronic music and later director of the Institute of Sonology Gottfried Michael Koenig was asked what a definition of electronic music could be, his answer was: "not instrumental music". The act of instrumental composition concentrates on a symbolic notation of known timbres coming from known musical instruments, but composing electronic music means composing the timbral flow itself. Timbres are not known on forehand but their flow is the result of composing its parameters, which expresses the musical form.
Although early electronic tape music still exhibited an instrumental character in the sense that timbres were produced first, then selected, and finally combined according to a pre-calculated score, Koenig would start a search for a compositional approach in which the compositional idea is integrated as much as possible in the production stage of the material itself. His composition "Terminus" from 1962 has been a point of departure for my own compositional work, because the classic compositional model of 'themes and variations' is replaced by 'sound material and sound transformations'. This compositional model has also proved to be a successful tool in the education of electronic music at Sonology.
Another topic to address in this lecture is electronic music spatialization. Just as in my view, timbres should not be distributed on a time line after they were produced, sound spatialization ideally should not be decided on at the very last moment of an electronic music production or worse, during its performance, but instead be taken in consideration during the production of the sound structures themselves. This however is usually much more difficult to achieve than the previous proposition for a number of reasons. A very ambitious project from the past will be presented as an example: the Philips pavilion of the Brussels World Fair of 1958. Furthermore, recent developments for sound spatialization such as Surround Sound Systems and Wave Field Synthesis will be discussed.