mgurevich

Ten singers begin reading a text at precisely the same moment, although for the majority of the piece the text is read silently in each performer’s head, at his or her own pace. Only occasionally does each switch from the voice in their head to the voice we can hear, according to dynamics and timings indicated on a score. At times, the singers overcome their internal voices by whistling unspecified pitches. Throughout, each performer ceaselessly tunes a radio, never stopping at a particular station or frequency. The content of any particular instantiation is therefore arbitrary, and the entirety of the piece – the text, the radio broadcasts, the internal voices – unknowable.

It took some time for it to become apparent that On Not Knowing is largely about Belfast. ‘About’ is an excessively reductive term here, as Belfast is by no means the subject of the text, nor is it reflected in the process by which the piece unfolds; it would be more accurate to say that the piece is indicative of one’s experience of being an outsider in Belfast. Although the extent to which any place can truly be known is always limited, one can always peel away the unknown, gradually revealing the known. However, no amount of excavation will uncover the unknowable; this is the difference between mysteries and secrets. More than other places, Belfast brings this contrast to the surface. History, geography, climate and trauma conspire to conceal a hidden city in its attics, back rooms and underground rivers. The intense warmth of its inhabitants etches a blind spot into your senses. On Not Knowing reflects the dilemma of Belfast onto the fundamental questions of existence and experience.

with Dónal Donohoe and Stéphanie Bertet

Conceived more as a participatory durational performance than an installation per se, in Whispering Places three rooms in different geographic locations are acoustically superimposed onto one another, creating a shared environment. Using high-order ambisonics and multichannel real-time streaming, a sound in one place appears in the same spatial location in all the other places at the same time. But are we really in the same place at the same time? It may be the middle of the night in Ireland when there is daylight in America; we are thousands of miles apart. Instead of sweeping them under the rug, Whispering Places plays with the contradictions and paradoxes of sharing a virtual space. Pulled by gravity, sounds from one place move in space toward the direction of the others, just as the packets that represent them travel along wires. Visitors have to whisper to make their voices heard – we don’t want to wake anyone who may be sleeping.

Whispering Places sends uncompressed, 3rd-order ambisonic-encoded audio streams between sites via JackTrip. Different sites can decode the streams according to their local speaker setup, allowing for flexible but accurate spatial rendering on any multi-channel speaker system with known geometry.

I will be running a workshop on Education in NIME at NIME 2011on May 29, 2011, along with my colleague Ben Knapp and Sergi Jorda from the Music Technology Group UPF in Barcelona. More information is available at: http://www.nime.org/2011/pre-nime/tutorials/index.html#A%20Workshop%20on%20NIME%20Education.

The Accordiatron is a music controller that I built in 2000-2001 with the product designer Stephan von Muehlen. The idea was to start at an unusual place for a design – a set of movements. We posed the question: what existing instrument has a particularly musical set of movements associated with it? We arrived at the accordion and concertina; the design then set out to capture those movements – squeezing, rotation of the hands and individual finger motions. The Accordiatron is therefore reminiscent of a concertina, but is not intended to be an electronic version of the acoustic instrument. It senses the distance between the performer’s hands and the rotation of the end panels around their axis, as well as the 5 buttons on either side. The movements are generic and can be mapped to any sound environment.

Alpheus (excerpt), for Accordiatron and computer (2006) from Michael Gurevich on Vimeo.