Nocturne 33: The Choreography of Sound

Ramón González-Arroyo: De l'infinito universo et mondi (8 channels; 1996)
The coexistence of different languages in one musical flow may prompt a mode of listening that opens to the construction of varied perspectives throughout the music. This idea, at the origin of the conception of this piece, developed into the composition of a plurality of »musical worlds« with different sound qualities, spaces and developments in time, rich in themselves and yet allowing for a certain transparency. The title of the piece comes from a book of Giordano Bruno, and though there is no direct relationship between the music and the contents of the book, the indifference of the gods, the plurality of worlds and the search for an infinity in the limits of perception, served me as a pretext to choose this title. The piece was commissioned by the spanish C.D.M.C., and produced and realized at the Institute for Music and Acoustics of the Z.K.M. Karlsruhe.


Ramón González-Arroyo: Toiles en l'Air (15 channels; 2008)
A multi-channel speaker setup. Atomic colour and weaving cohesive laws building up sound & texture. Discontinuous streams, in different time domains, flowing in parallel and suggesting a continuous flux of sound matter.
Space is revealed through sound, and sound becomes an object in space.Fluids, masses, bodies; movement and lightness. Coloured-matter knitted with varied textures and pigments. A 3-dimensional canvas.

David Pirrò: Faltung (15 channels tape; 2010)
Sound is an entity that belongs to space and to time. But also, it defines space and time. By appearing, pulsating, moving, and vanishing, sound deforms the texture of the space-time in which it unfolds, transforming it as well as bringing it to light.
A sound scene is composed into a model, which is subject to a continuous transformation, a »faltung«, of its space-time, raised by the presences and the movements in it. The same scene appears from
different perspectives and in altered spaces, evolving coherently from one to the next, letting sound itself compose space and time.

Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab, David Pirrò: Rebody (2010)
Rebody is a video installation in which the captured motion of a dancer is transformed into a dynamic drawing that informs a musical composition. The installation shows sets of experimental variations
that explore the dance movements, the drawing algorithms and the musical structures in an attempt to create aesthetic resonances and convergences. The work investigates how structured creative processes can transpose rather than represent the dancer's movements.  Currently there exist two versions of Rebody - the installation and the performance version. The version of Rebody presented tonight is a new multi-channel edition of the performance version.

The artists
Ramón González-Arroyo was born in Madrid, city in which he started his musical studies, subsequently followed at Utrecht, Den Haag and Paris. Amongst his masters: L. de Pablo, C. Bernaola, W. Kaegi,
G. M. Koenig and H. Vaggione.
In parallel with his creative work he has kept a strong interest in the domain of musical research, starting or collaborating in various projects at different european institutions. FOO, a model of environment for the composition of music with sound synthesis, designed at the ZKM of Karlsruhe, or LISTEN, an european research project aiming at the creation of a tool to design and compose "immersive audio augented environments", are some of his most beloved projects. At the present moment he starts a new project, The Choreography of Sound, in collaboration with G. Eckel at the Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik of Graz, exploring the relationships between the spatial and sound matter.
His music includes electroacoustic pieces (Streams Extremes & Dreams, A Media Luna, Light Matters), mixed (De la Distance, Charybdis’ Muse & Scylla’s Bloom, Philia-Neikos) and instrumental (Clockwork, Nocturno, ‘Twixt tinged twining threads). Attracted by the universe of installations, he has lately produced purely sound pieces (L'isla des Neumas) or, in collaboration with other artists, multi-disciplinary pieces (Rain-Taps, Raumfaltung).

David Pirrò, born 1978 in Udine (Italy), began his musical education at an early age studying piano at the Conservatory J. Tomadini and then jazz piano with Mo. Glauco Venier. Studying at the University of
Triest he obtained the Master degree in Theoretical Physics. Advancing in his musical education at the Conservatory G. Tartini he obtained a Master degree in Computer Music audio-visual composition branch. He worked also at the Center of Computational Sonology in Padua and collaborated in various electroacoustic and audio-visual projects with Prof. Paolo Pachini. Currently he is working at the IEM in Graz and he is PhD student with tutor Prof. Gerhard Eckel.

Gerhard Eckel (* 1962) is a composer and sound artist who takes both an artistic and scientific interest in matters of sound and music. His work includes more traditional forms such as compositions and
improvisations as well as more interdisciplinary approaches including sound and media installations using virtual and augmented environment technologies. In his research work he creates and explores new means of artistic expression such as Immersive Audio-Augmented Environments or what he calls an Embodied Generative Music. His next project (together with composer Ramón González-Arroyo) will deal with the Choreography of Sound.

Michael Schwab is an artist and artistic researcher who interrogates post-conceptual uses of technology in a variety of media including photography, drawing, printmaking and installation art. He is tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, research associate at the Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland, and research fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. He received his PhD in Photography ('Image Automation: Post-Conceptual Post-Photography and the Deconstruction of the Photographic Image') from the Royal College of Art in London in 2008, his MA in Photography from the London College of Printing in 2000 and his M.A. in Philosophy ('Nietzsche and Heidegger: Metaphysics as
Problem') from the University of Hamburg in 1996. Since 2003 his exhibitions and associated events have increasingly focused on artistic research. He lives and works in London (UK) and Ketsch (D). He is
co-initiator of JAR, the Journal for Artistic Research.