We invite the CIRMMT community to participate in a joint RA1/RA4 workshop on the role technology plays in all aspects of the creation and dissemination of music. This workshop will feature presentations from invited guests as well as lightning talks and a roundtable discussion.
Description
With invited guests Dafna Naphtali, Dr. Althea SullyCole, and Hans Tammen we will explore systems (electric, acoustic, compositional, or otherwise) around the creation and performance of music.
While we often discuss “music technology” as a single concept, the friction between the musician and the technologist is an area that requires more exploration. Do musicians embrace the capabilities technology grants them to formulate their artistic vision and convey their musical message? Does the technology adequately serve the music, or is it a solution looking for a problem? Are musicians open to working with experimental technologies they may not understand?
We ask that participants answer these questions with their own experiences, so that we may better communicate with each other.
Registration
We invite members of the community to register as an attendee by filling this MS form. The lightning round applications are now closed, however, registration will remain open for attendees until the morning of April 4, 2025.
We invite you to share this event on Facebook.
Roundtable event
The workshop will conclude with a round table discussion on the topic of technology’s role in the creation, performance, and capture of music. We invite CIRMMT members, collaborators, and the wider community to participate in this discussion.
Schedule
1:00pm: Welcome and introduction
1:05–1:35pm: Althea SullyCole – Investigating the buzz: Analyzing African instruments and their relationship to recording technologies over time
How have music production technologies and techniques impacted the practice, performance and reception of African music? Drawing on five years of organological research, this presentation will address this question by observing changes in musical instruments from the Mandé region of West Africa (present-day Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia) and the ways in which they have attended to changing uses of recording technologies in the production of African music over the past century. It will focus on two case studies in particular: the bala, a wooden xylophone, and several harps, such as donsó ngoni and the kora, from the region. In so doing, this presentation will explore important questions concerning the implications of recording technologies and techniques in the relationship between different kinds of listening, epistemologies, and ecologies across cultures.
1:35–2:35pm: Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen
As a performer and composer DAFNA NAPHTALI likes to try new things. Her work as a sound-artist, vocalist, electronic musician (and guitarist) has centered around experimental practices, contemporary classical, post-jazz improvised music She creates Max/MSP programming for all her projects including live sound-processing of voice and other instruments, music for robots, audio augmented-reality soundwalks and a series of works for multi-channel sound (“Audio Chandelier”.) Dafna has long been interested in how experimentation with emerging technologies can give rise to new ideas in music— ideas that later may evolve into widely used tools and practices, as well as how musicians adapt their practices as technology changes.
Hans Tammen performs with an instrument facilitated to allow interactive live sound processing of sonic, rhythmic and dynamic explorations of various sound sources. An interactive software analyzes the incoming sounds to control the electronic processing. Tammen makes a case that in order to truly improvise with electronics one has to program “uncertainties” into the machine. He uses weighted random functions, feedback strategies, and the fuzzy behavior of pitch tracking devices when presented with overtone-rich sounds, which so far came from string instruments, reeds, percussion, a tabla machine, guitars, an empty church, inside piano, poets/voices, tarot card decks, sound sculptures, sound-emitting lightbulbs, the ripping of paper, and a solo project using piezo-equipped suitcases.
2:35–2:45pm: Break
2:45–3:30pm: Lightning talks
2:45pm: James Clemens-Seely – Clarity & communication in recording sessions: Meeting the needs of the performer now and the audience tomorrow!
2:50pm: Christophe Lengelé – Creation and improvisation with open source technology
2:55pm: Darren Russell – Limiting potential: Defining possibility spaces with open source technology
3:00pm: Martha de Francisco – Observations of a record producer when introducing new technologies to recording artists - a case study
3:05pm: Ying-Ying Zhang – Introducing artists to virtual acoustics
3:30pm: Roundtable introduction by Martha de Francisco
3:35–4:30pm: Roundtable discussion
Biographies
Dafna Naphtali
Dafna Naphtali is an electronic-musician/singer/guitarist who composes/improvises/performs experimental, interactive electroacoustic music, drawing on a wide-ranging musical background in free jazz, noise, contemporary classical, rock and near-eastern music and using her custom Max/MSP programming, for live sound processing and multichannel sound. Dafna is a Visiting Professor at NYU Music Technology, teaching electronic music performance, and is part-time faculty at New School. She is working on a book “Live Sound Processing and Improvisation” for Taylor & Francis.
Dafna was a 2023 Guggenheim fellow in Music Composition, and has received generous past support from New York Foundation for the Arts (’22, ‘13, ‘01), Brooklyn Arts Council, New York Council on the Arts (’99, ’18), American Composers Forum and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others.
Althea SullyCole
Althea SullyCole is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and ethnomusicologist originally from New York City, but currently based in Montreal, QC, where she is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. Althea holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Althea studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed West African harp, under korists Yacouba Sissoko and Edou Manga. She spent 3 years studying the instrument in Dakar, Senegal. In addition to her solo work, she has worked with Billy Harper, Billy Bang, Fred Ho, Sahad Sarr, Daara J Family, LaFrae Sci, Lisette Santiago, Joseph Daley, Craig Harris and father Bill Cole (in his Untempered Ensemble), among others, and given performances at Royal Albert Hall in the U.K., Teatro Manzoni in Italy, and the Apollo Theatre and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the U.S., among over venues.
Hans Tammen
Hans Tammen is just another worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities. He likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. This flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).
Hans has received grants and commissions from NewMusicUSA, Chamber Music America, MAPFund, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, American Music Center, New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA), New York Foundation For The Arts (NYFA), American Composers Forum and Goethe Institute w/ Foreign Affairs Office, among others. He was deputy director at Harvesworks Digital Media Arts (2001-2014), and currently teaches as adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts, Hunter College and New York University.