Diemo Schwarz
Fine Sound Art since 1993CataRT Presentation–Concert at Music Tech Fest, Ircam, Paris
At the bustiling three-day Music Tech Fest in Paris, 21.–23.11.2014, there will be a CataRT showcase-cum-concert at 18:00, where Diemo Schwarz will be improvising with the sounds produced by the audience.
The CataRT software for interactive corpus-based synthesis builds up a database of live or prerecorded sound by segmenting and analysing it for a number of sound descriptors, which describe its sonic characteristics.
The performer then re-combines the sound events into new rhythmic and timbral structures, simultaneously proposing novel combinations and evolutions of the source material according to proximity to a target position in the descriptor space that he controls. The metaphor for composition is here an explorative navigation through the ever-changing sonic landscape of the corpus being built-up from live recording.
The player re-conquers expressivity by using gestural controllers such as a pressure-sensitive XY-pad, and piezo pickups on various surfaces that allow to hit, scratch, and strum the corpus of sound, exploiting all its nuances.
In its purest form, this kind of performance starts with no sound at all in the corpus, recording all sound live, breaking the tyranny of the instant and fragmenting the unity of time and place, by improvising with unpredictable live streams. It enlarges at the same time the temporal horizon, the loci of presence, and the sonic space, doubling it by the abstract space of transformed sounds.
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