About the Performance
The NESS project, standing for Next-Generation Sound Synthesis. Led by Stefan Bilbao, it was a grouping of 12 engineers and numerical simulation specialists split between the Acoustics and Audio Group and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh. The most general aim of this research was to create the most fine-grained and complex “physical models” of acoustic musical instruments, using the most powerful computers available to-date, resulting in highly realistic “virtual” instruments. A number of multichannel pieces have now been created using NESS’ research, and have been performed on more than 50 occasions. In this program, we are presenting 3 compositions by NESS’ collaborators worldwide, all of which utilized NESS’ cutting-edge research. Vienna-based composer Alexey Retinsky and local composer Chan Ming-Chi will complement the evening with the Asian premiere of Madrigal to be Here and the world premiere of Jian Liu Yun.
Program :
Alexey Retinsky: Madrigal to be Here (2015)
Chan Ming Chi: Jian Liu Yun 劍流雲 (2018)
Gadi Sassoon (NESS Group): Collision Suite (2013)
Gordon Delap (NESS Group): Ashes to Ashes (2013)
Trrevor Wishart (NESS Group): Dithyramb – Kepler 62e (2014)

Originally from Sapporo, Japanese electroacoustic sound artist Chiharu Mukaiyama aka Chiharu MK had been featured at major international venues including the International Festival of Bourges, the CCMC at l’Institut Franco-japonais in Tokyo, and Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Chiharu MK will conclude the festival with the world premiere of Paramnesia 3.0 hk – a 3D audio composition that explores notions of memorial errors and delusions, in a special live performance that features the composer herself as the soloist.
Program:
Chiharu MK: Paramnesia 3.0 hk

Betsey Biggs is a composer and studio artist. Her work connects the dots between music, sound, visual art, place, storytelling, and technology, and has been described by The New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” Biggs is currently a professor in critical media art practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ton Yam I deconstructs Beach Boys’ classic God Only Knows. Fragments of the song gently morphs into a sea of floating harmonies, feedback, and glitch, resulting in a shimmering and meditative soundscape.
Program :
Betsey Biggs: Ton Yam I (2009)

This program focuses on multichannel soundscape compositions. Composer Hildegard Westerkamp focuses on listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology. At the beginning of her career she worked with R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, is a founding and board member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and was long-time editor of its journal Soundscape. Westerkamp’s Into the Labyrinth is a sonic journey into India’s sonic culture. Soundscape pioneer Barry Truax is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication (and formerly the School for the Contemporary Arts) at Simon Fraser University. His Earth and Steel takes the listener back to a time a century ago, when large steel ships were built in enclosed slips, and rich metallic resonances rang out, and is based on recordings from the World Soundscape Project Tape Collection recorded at a shipyard in Caraquet, New Brunswick in 1973. American composer Seth Cluett’s work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, and Ars Electronica. Doleros is an audio tour into the bell-like “Ringing Rocks” in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Program :
Barry Truax: Earth and Steel (2013)
Hildegard Westerkamp: Into the Labyrinth (2000)
Seth Cluett: Doleros (2008, revised 2018)

Evidence is a collaboration between sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood. Since 2001, they have developed a distinctive language of deeply layered sound, using field recordings of natural and industrial sounds as a primary source of inspiration and sonic material. They have presented their works world-wide, Balance-Unbalance Conference in Manizales, Colombia, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Conference in Brisbane, Australia, and at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in New York. The duo returns to Hong Kong with a program of generative multi-channel compositions centered around Visuals — a never-repeating sound work first presented at the Studio 10 Gallery in Brooklyn in 2013. The full program is presented in a new iteration every 30 minutes.
Program :
Evidence: Visuals (2013)
Scott Smallwood: Cosimo’s Stars (2011)
Stephan Moore: A Grid Against the Sky (2017)

Program:
Marko Ciciliani: Pop Wall Alphabet (2011 – 2015)

Marko Ciciliani is Professor for Computer-Music Composition at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, and in 2014 and 2016 he was an instructor at the acclaimed International Summer Courses for Contemporary Music in Darmstadt. Pop Wall Alphabet consists of 26 parts that comprise more than 4.5 hours of sound compositions, 26 algorithmically generated texts and 26 images. Each of the 26 sections deals with one particular album from pop history from the past almost 50 years. The first letter of the name of the band or singer stands for a letter in the alphabet, together the 26 sections are forming the entire English alphabet: Abba for letter A, Beastie Boys for the letter B, Chemical Brothers for the letter C and so on.

MSHR is the art collective of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy. Their work meshes digital sculpture, analog circuitry and ceremonial performance. The duo constructs and performs cybernetic compositions using analog synthesizers of their own design. MSHR’s sculptural, musical and electronic work inform each other deeply, creating the meta-form that is their collaborative practice. MSHR emerged from the art collective Oregon Painting Society in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA. They were artists-in-residence at Sonoscopia, 2014、 Eyebeam, 2014、 Pioneer Works, 2016、 Signal Culture, 2016. In this performance, MSHR engages with a series of generative systems via sculptural interfaces. The systems are composed of MSHR’s hand-made analog synthesizers, in feedback with light, movement and sound. The duo inserts themselves into the system, shifting the feedback patterns to explore the hyperscapes of a transhumanist ceremony.

Program:
Lee Cheng and iLOrk: Canonic (2018)
Remy Siu and Russell Wallace: Qanimts (2014)
Paul Lansky: In the Moment (2002); Pattern’s Pattern (2001); Ride (2000)
Vanissa Law: Exhaled Rhyme (2014)

American composer Paul Lansky is a pioneer in the use of computers in music synthesis and analysis. His earliest work dates back to the mid 1960’s. Many of his works involve the use of speech and the reprocessing of the sounds of everyday life. In 2000 he was the subject of a documentary film made for European television, My Cinema for the Ears. He is Professor of Music Emeritus at Princeton University. Pattern’s Patterns first appeared in a 2-channel version on the Bridge CD Alphabet Book. In this multi-channel version, short segments of speech, letters and numbers are randomly distributed within a rigid rhythmic framework. Remy Siu and Russell Wallace’s Qanimts is a “Salish Beatbox” that uses Salish consonants as its dominant sound material. Vocalist and composer Vanissa Law’s Exhale rounds out an evening that focuses on the fragmentation of human speech. The iLOrk “laptop orchestra” led by composer Lee Cheng will improvise to a set of animated graphical score, enveloping the audience in an electronic spatial canon.

Esteemed British singer and soundscape artist Vivienne Corringham creates music, radio works, installations and soundwalks. She has received two Composer Fellowships from McKnight Foundation, through American Composers Forum. Cathy Lane uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationships with each other and the multiverse. She is the author of a number of sound-related publications including The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (2008), In the Field (2013), and On Listening (2013). To mark the opening of the festival, the duo will present a program that focuses on storytelling and the human voice. In Shattered Song, Shadow City, the singing voice interweaves through fragmented stories and soundscapes from five countries. Recordings used in this installation were made over the course of a year, on walks with inhabitants of many European cities and their accounts of what these places meant to them – their stories spoke of home, disruption, escape, community and often hope. A moving account of notions of dislocation.

Singaporean sound artists Hoh Chung Shih and Mlum’s Victi-ry of Will, the Deafthetics of Bias is an experiment in deconstructed sonic cinema. By appropriating rare audio footages of all that which remains of the film Sieg des Willens (Berlin Circa 1944/45), the work comments on the life of deaf German baritone Fritz Schaetzler. Kirschner’s date-specific composition is a gradually evolving spiral that slowly rotates around the listener as different segments of the composition are introduced. Shuen’s sinetone-based new commission will round out the program.