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MusicAcoustica Beijing and its environments.” A separate also occurred during the festival. A concert focused on noted Belgian concert was held for each of four The MusicAcoustica Beijing festival composer Annette Vande Gorne’s Tao categories, showcasing pieces that of electroacoustic and computer mu- cycle, presenting three of the cycle’s had reached the final round, and with sic took place 24–29 October 2017 five pieces: Bois, Metal,andTerre. a winner selected from each. The in Beijing, China, featuring nine con- One concert featured works for saxo- winners of each category were Peixin certs, a series of invited lectures, phone and electronics performed by Liu, winning the fixed media works panel discussions, and a composition Pedro Bittencourt, including Panayi- category; Bihe Wen, winning the cate- competition. The festival’s opening otis Kokoras’s Rhino I, utilizing gory for works incorporating acoustic concert included Chi Wang’s Peony a custom synthetic reed designed instrumentation with electronics; Garden (see Figure 1), performed with by the composer, and Horacio Vag- Lifei Cai, winning in the multimedia suspended inertial-sensing game con- gione’s Shifting Mirrors, constituting works group; and Yu Zhang, winning trollers and inspired by a traditional a detailed interplay between short first prize in the MIDI-based works Chinese opera, and Jeffrey Stolet’s prerecorded saxophone sounds and category. Fantasies of the Mind, an interactive the live saxophone performer. Web: musicacoustica.cn/en2017 composition for piano and real-time MusicAcoustica’s guest speakers audio processing. A concert of recent included Miller Puckette, who in works by Belgian composers featured separate lectures discussed the design Legacies of Pauline Oliveros Elizabeth Anderson’s L’Heure Bleue: of electronic music instruments and Renaıtreˆ du Silence the role of scores in electronic mu- , which, in the On 3–4 November 2017, the Conser- sic; Jeff Kaiser, discussing generative composer’s words, “addresses the vatory of Music of Brooklyn College and interactive software; and An- reawakening of the human being hosted the Legacies of Pauline Oliv- nette Vande Gorne, covering sound eros symposium in Brooklyn, New and space in acousmatic music. The York. The symposium honored the MusicAcoustica Beijing Electro- first anniversary of Oliveros’s death doi:10.1162/COMJ e 00447 acoustic Composition Competition by celebrating her pioneering prac- tice and considering the composer and performer’s place in the context of contemporary experimental mu- sic. The symposium included two concerts, scholarly presentations, a workshop, and a panel discussion. The two concerts focused on works composed by or inspired by Oliveros, including Oliveros’s The Witness,per- formed by Seth Cluett, and an excerpt of Daniel Weintraub’s documentary film, Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros. Douglas Cohen led a group performance of Oliveros’s Bonn Feier across the Brooklyn Col- lege campus. Topics of the lectures at the symposium included an ex- amination of the roots of Oliveros’s notion of deep listening in her early works, from before deep listening had been formally developed or described, and the influences between Oliv- eros and the queer community and identity. A panel discussion among Figure 1. Chi Wang performs her piece Peony Garden at MusicAcoustica Ione (Oliveros’s partner and collabo- Beijing. (Photo: Jeff Kaiser.) rator), composer Tania Leon,´ Morton

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj_e_00447 by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 2. The panel discussion during the Legacies of Pauline Oliveros symposium. From left, Tomie Hahn, Tania Leon,´ Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, and Ione. (Photo: Gabriela Baez.)

hosted a symposium on the practice of unmaking—through a series of talks, the symposium positioned the taking apart of technology as a form of social resistance and a path for reaching new cultural, historical, and technical understanding. Web: algomech.com/2017

Images Sonores

The Images Sonores festival took place in October–December 2017 across several venues in Liege` and Brussels, Belgium. Organized by Liege-based` Centre Henri Pousseur, the festival consisted of seven con- certs, primarily of music incorporat- ing electronics and acoustic instru- mentation, over six days. The first segment of the festival, on 7–8 Oc- Subotnick, multimedia artist Tony and T. C. McCormack’s Playing tober 2017 in Liege,` formed a tribute Martin, and moderator Tomie Hahn the ends against the middle, which to Karlheinz Stockhausen, perform- reflected on the composer’s life and overlaid multiple projected displays ing his Kontakte (1960) on the first work (see Figure 2). mounted on tracks. The festival evening and Mikrophonie I (1964) and Web: www.brooklyn.cuny.edu showcased the premiere of Decom- Signale zur Invasion (1992) on the sec- /web/academics/centers/ccm position Theory, a new algorithmic ond. The initial concert also included /projects/oliveros2017.php work by Sheffield-based experimen- a performance of Franc¸ois Couvreur’s tal rock band 65daysofstatic, with Al Fine (2015), winner of the Province both an evening concert version of Liege’s` 2017 C¸ a Balance Classique AlgoMech Festival and a daytime installation format. composition contest. The second Another concert included perfor- series of concerts, on 9–10 November The AlgoMech Festival, a festival of mances by Leafcutter John, utilizing also in Liege,` featured works of Luc algorithmic and mechanical move- a mechanical sequencer, and Naomi Ferrari and Henri Pousseur and pre- ment, occurred 8–12 November 2017 Kashiwagi, whose Fever (Variations miered compositions by students of in Sheffield, UK. The festival in- for Gramophone and Turntables) the Royal Conservatory of Liege.` The cluded concerts, talks, workshops, saw her manipulating a gramophone final component of the festival in- and installations. The festival’s main and modern turntables that were cluded a 9 December concert in Liege` exhibition included a number of playing Peggy Lee’s Fever,andthen and two concerts on 17 December in ongoing works tying computer al- processing the resulting sounds elec- Brussels. The first of these included gorithms and mechanical processes, tronically. The festival also featured a performance of Passacaglia (2005) such as Julian Rohrhuber and Dave an “algorave” concert, in which pop- by Pierre Bartholomee,´ co-founder of Griffiths’s Inca Telefax: Listening ular dance music was livecoded by the Centre Henri Pousseur. The final to Pre-Columbian Administration laptop-based performers. Workshops two concerts featured the Lithuanian without Understanding a Word, covered how to create dance mu- Ensemble Network, which performed an audiovisual installation inspired sic using computer programming, a variety of electroacoustic works by knotted threads used during the building electromechanical drum primarily by composers Lithuanian in Inca civilization to record adminis- machines, and working with fabrics origin. trative data, and Darren Chouings as electrical sensors. The festival also Web: images-sonores.be

8 Computer Music Journal

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj_e_00447 by guest on 01 October 2021 Music and Hacking Humanising Algorithmic second workshop, from 1 June–31 Listening May 2017 in Belfast, explored the theme of distributed agency between Hosted by the Institut de Recherche listening algorithms and humans. et Coordination Acoustique/Musique The Humanising Algorithmic Listen- Talks at this workshop covered using (IRCAM), the Music and Hacking ing project held a series of workshops machine transcription of existing conference occurred 8–10 Novem- in 2017 at the University of Sus- songs as a source for composing new ber 2017 in Paris, France. Through sex in Brighton, UK, and at Queen’s songs to be performed by human talks and roundtable discussions, the University Belfast in Belfast, UK. musicians and expanded techniques conference examined the practices The objectives of Humanising Al- for time-domain audio analysis. An of musicians and technologists that gorithmic Listening are to explore evening concert included perfor- might be seen explicitly or implicitly opportunities and issues around the mances by the Feedback Cell duo, as musical hacking. The confer- use of machine listening algorithms who performed with augmented cel- ence organizers describe hacking in arts and humanities, to develop los configured with electroacoustic as emphasizing re-appropriation of cross-disciplinary understandings of feedback loops, and Theo Burt, who mass-produced technical products the applications and implications of played a selection of dance music and with a focus on freely accessible machine listening algorithms, and tracks remixed and resynthesized communal know-how, ultimately to investigate the unique affordances using machine listening. The third embodying a type of social protest. A of machine listening compared to workshop in the series focused on keynote lecture was given by noted human listening. future implications and applications musician, artist, and hacker Nicolas The first workshop, held 27– of algorithmic listening, taking place Collins. The conference talks cov- 28 April 2017 in Brighton, sought 14–15 September 2017 in Brighton. ered topics such as the historical to bring together interdisciplinary Talks at this final workshop recon- context and legacy of the Roland perspectives on machine listening. nected with and synthesized ideas TR-808 drum machine; the Locus Speakers at the workshop discussed from the first, including an exami- Stream Open Microphone Project, a analysis of the sounds of speech before nation of how algorithms shape the global network of publically broad- the advent of audio recording technol- structure and practice of experimen- casted microphones for streaming ogy, modern approaches to archiving tal music, the design and performance local soundscapes; and the role of and accessing sound recordings, and of improvisatory systems for human technical limitations in shaping the interpretation of oral histories using and computer-based musicians, and musical aesthetics of so-called chip- audio feature extraction and analy- concatenative synthesis across a large tune music. A roundtable discussion sis. The workshop also included a corpus of segmented sounds organized surveyed contemporary practices of roundtable and other group activities by audio feature analysis. hacking. for developing and expanding ideas Web: www.algorithmiclistening Web: hacking2017.ircam.fr related to the workshop’s topic. The .org

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