Diemo Schwarz
Fine Sound Art since 1993Solo concert at Electric Spring festival, Huddersfield, UK
Solo performance by Diemo Schwarz Playing the Sound Space at Electric Spring, an annual festival of sonic exploration. The five-day programme of concerts, talks and workshops brings together some of today’s leading strands in label-defying electronic music.
Evening shared with Chris Mercer.
The piece is an exploration of different collections of sounds, navigating through them with the help of gestural controllers that let the performer reconquer the expressiveness that has been lost in many laptop-based performances. Stroking an XY-pad, scratching contact-mic equipped surfaces, shaking a tablet are all possible gestural interactions that bring back the immediacy of physical action and sonic outcome.
Diemo Schwarz thus re-combines sound events into new rhythmic and timbral structures, simultaneously proposing novel combinations and evolutions of the source material. The metaphor for composition is here an explorative navigation through the sonic landscape of the sound corpus. Despite the startling nature of some of these sounds, the use of corpus-based concatenative synthesis techniques in the performer’s CataRT system, where sound segments are laid out in a multi-dimensional space of sound characteristics obtained from automatic audio descriptor analysis, makes it possible to compose smooth evolutions and soothing combinations of timbres, thereby reflecting on the inner qualities of these sounds that are richer than they appear when we just let them float by.
free admission for all concerts
19:30 in Phipps Hall, Creative Arts Building,
The University of Huddersfield
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