Listening Room 1
Fixed Media | Program Overview
Seething Field: Imprint
Sam Wells
Contours of Anxiety
Zihan Wang and Wenxin Zhou
Dreams of the Jailed Refugee
Robert Sazdov
flusso_sonoro_1
Sebastiano Naturali
Galactic Railroad
Yunze Mu
Ideale Landschaft Nr. 6
Clemens von Reusner
Incarnations
Youngjae Cho
Information Body Horror
Primrose Ohling
Jardín de Luz
Iván Ferrer-Orozco
Non è un atlante di traiettorie algo-siderali
Andrea Laudante, Paolo Montella and Giuseppe Pisano
Nor’wester
Teerath Majumder
Ocean Reflection
Yu Qin
rain contained, rain contains…
Wei Yang
SAW
Gabriel Araújo
Wild Fruits: Epilogue
James Harley
Inside the metal plate
Raul Masu and Francesco Ardan Dal Ri
About the pieces & artists
Sam Wells: Seething Field: Imprint
Seething Field: Imprint is a turbulent interplay of memory and resonance, written for seventh-order ambisonics fixed media. The work unfolds through the filtering, modulation, distortion, and reverberation of a time-stretched recording of Jack Kerouac. Using ambisonic impulse responses for the Chapel of the Four Chaplains, located in the basement of Temple Performing Arts Center, Seething Field: Imprint harnesses the Chapel’s reverberant and sonic characteristics, a space dedicated to four chaplains who sacrificed their lives on the USS Dorchester—a ship Kerouac once served on but was recalled from before its tragic sinking. The source material for Seething Field is a brief recording of Kerouac speaking “The Ocean,” time-stretched 512 times from about 1.5 seconds to over 10 minutes. This slow unfolding of speech provides the formal and harmonic structure of the work. The stretched recording was then recursively recorded through the Chapel’s reverb, a process akin to Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, revealing and reinforcing the shared resonant frequencies of Kerouac’s voice and the Chapel dedicated to the Four Chaplains. The title draws from the closing lines of Kerouac’s The Sea is My Brother, where ‘the sea stretched a seething field which grew darker as it merged with the lowering sky.’ Seething Field mirrors this seascape, embodying the darkness, expansiveness, and tension of turbulent times, past and present.
About the artist
Sam Wells (Philadelphia) is a musician and artist whose work explores breath, space, and embodiment across acoustic, electronic, and multimedia forms. As trumpeter and improviser, he has performed internationally with ensembles including Aeroidio, Miller/Vidiksis/Wells Trio, and SPLICE Ensemble. His compositions have been performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Wells is a Cycling ’74 Max Certified Trainer and an Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Composition at Temple University.
Zihan Wang and Wenxin Zhou: Contours of Anxiety
This work draws inspiration from my own experience and understanding of anxiety, attempting to express it through immersive sonic work. I perceive this emotional state as an ever-shifting form: evoked, diffused, released, and finally calmed. It should be clarified that this is not designed according to rigorous psychological science but rather leans towards an expression of my personal emotional experience. Throughout the piece, characteristics of this psychological journey: suppression, constraint, and release are mapped onto frequency density, timbre, texture, and the spatial tension between acoustic elements. From a compositional perspective, timbre spatialisation functions as the primary technical and expressive strategy. This involves decomposing sound according to its spectral characteristics and distributing these components across distinct spatial locations (Normandeau, 2009). Within this framework, ambisonics operates as the spatialisation method, whereby its manipulable parameters generate distinctive timbral and spatial effects. These elements collectively construct the work’s internal emotional narrative, integrating spatial parameters as essential compositional materials rather than superimposed effects.
About the artists
Zihan Wang (07/12/2000) is an electroacoustic music composer, film composer, and sonic artist. He is currently a post graduate research student at Monash University,Melbourne, Australia, where his work investigates compositional strategies for ambisonics-based environments. His research engages with Robert Normandeau’s concept of timbre spatialisation and Denis Smalley’s theory of spectromorphology, with a particular emphasis on timbre, spatial articulation, and electroacoustic composition. His creative practice includes fixed-media electroacoustic works, sound installations, animated score composition, and film scoring. His work has been presented at venues and conferences including TENOR 2025 and the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). Wenxin Zhou is a composer specializing in electroacoustic and interactive media music. She holds a Bachelor of Composition and Music Production from the Australian Institute of Music and graduated with a Distinction in the Master of Composition for Electroacoustic and Interactive Music from the University of Manchester. Her creative practice focuses on exploring the transformation and fusion between real-world sounds and electronic soundscapes.
Wenxin Zhou
Robert Sazdov: Dreams of the Jailed Refugee
‘Dreams of the Jailed Refugee’ (2023-25) is the final work of the ‘Dreams of the Jailed’ trilogy. This final instalment extends the trilogy’s engagement with statelessness and incarceration, attending to the psycho-emotional toll borne by refugees subjected to carceral regimes — both literal and systemic — under global structures of war, famine, and economic precarity. Composed for fixed media, the work utilises the acousmatic form to foreground disembodied sonic presences, suggesting the persistence of memory and agency even under conditions of profound erasure. The absence of visual referents invites the listener into a mediated interiority — a sound world shaped by fragmented dreams, longing, and dislocation. Dreams of the Jailed Refugee proposes a mode of listening that is politically charged and ethically attuned. It seeks to destabilise hegemonic narratives of migration by offering a counter-sonic space in which refugee subjectivities are not merely represented, but sonically enacted. In doing so, the work aligns with broader decolonial and posthumanist currents in contemporary sonic arts practice, where listening becomes an act of recognition and resistance.
About the artist
Robert Sazdov is a composer, music producer, and academic. He is currently Associate Professor at the University of Technology of Sydney (UTS) in Music and Sound Design, where he also served as Head of Music and Sound Design (2018-2024). Sazdov’s compositions and productions have received notable prizes and awards from various organizations and institutions, including: Daegu International Computer Music Festival, International Composition Competition Città di Udine, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’ Competition, Musica Nova Competition, Sonic Arts Awards, Bourges International Competition, Just Plain Folks Music Awards, and the Audio Engineering Society. Sazdov’s music has been released by Capstone Records, Vox Novus, Accademia Musicale Pescarese, Society for Electroacoustic Music, Australasian Computer Music Association, Sonic Arts Awards and SoundLab Channel. He has undertaken residencies at the Erich-Thienhaus-Institue, Detmold University (2012), The Sonic Lab, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen Mary University (2007), and at SPIRAL – University of Huddersfield (2023). He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratory – University of Huddersfield (2023), Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics – Graz (2023), and The Sonic Lab, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen Mary University (2023).
Sebastiano Naturali: flusso_sonoro_1
flusso_sonoro_1 is a fixed-media electroacoustic composition that explores sound as a fluid, continuously transforming entity, oscillating between density and transparency. The work invites the listener to perceive sound both as an uninterrupted flow and as a succession of interruptions, turbulences, and suspensions that shape its trajectory. The piece reflects on temporal perception and memory through the interaction between microsonic detail and large-scale form. Recorded and synthetic sound materials are intertwined and progressively transformed, emphasizing the tension between natural sound qualities and electronic abstraction. Rhythmic structures derived from iterative transformations and masking processes generate evolving layers that gradually increase in complexity and density. A central section focuses on sustained textures in the mid–low frequency range, combining stretched vocal layers and processed high-frequency elements to create a suspended sonic environment. In the final section, earlier rhythmic materials re-emerge and are subjected to global processing techniques, including digital silence and spectral degradation. The work was composed using Ableton Live and Max for Live tools. It is presented as a stereo fixed-media piece, with a quadraphonic version also available.
About the artists
Sebastiano Naturali (born 15 February 2006) is an Italian composer and guitarist working in the field of electroacoustic and electronic music. He is currently pursuing undergraduate studies in Electronic Music and Classical Guitar at the Conservatory of Potenza. His work focuses on sound transformation, spatial audio, and practice-based artistic research using digital music systems.
Yunze Mu: Galactic Railroad
“Merry meet, merry part.” At the end of a 4-year relationship, I started to think about why people meet if we’ll eventually separate and what the true happiness or the final destination of everyone is. I found no answer. However, this piece is somehow the record of my thinking during that period. This piece was inspired by the book “Night on the Galactic Railroad” by Japanese author Kenji Miyazawa. In my imagination, the Milky Way is full of steam trains. They meet, run together, and separate eventually. None of them knows where the destination is, they just keep running toward somewhere, restlessly. Does it matter if you know where the destination is? Maybe not. Are all the experiences more valuable than the end? Maybe so. The only thing I know is, I’ll always keep running just like those steam trains, no matter what.
About the artist
Yunze Mu is a composer, sound artist and music programmer based in Louisville, Kentucky. He currently teaching at University of Louisville, School of Music as Assistant Professor. He received a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) in Composition at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, where he studies computer music with Mara Helmuth, teaches introductory courses in electronic music, and works on his web-based music application, Web RTcmix. Mu holds a bachelor’s degree in music composition from Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China. His music, papers, and VR installations have been shown and performed at numerous events and conferences, such as NIME, ICMC, SEAMUS, NYC Electronic Music Festival, and venues in China, Poland, France, United States, and Korea.
Clemens von Reusner: Ideale Landschaft Nr. 6
The manifold real (sound)-landscapes have been themes in the arts again and again over the course of time. Special approaches can be found in so-called “ideal landscapes”, namely in European landscape painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. The 8-channel electroacoustic composition “Ideal Landscape No. 6” is inspired by these constructed, calm but non-real landscapes of European landscape painting as well as by an etching by the German artist N.N. It is the 6th sheet of his cycle “Variations in G”, which has no title of its own. Although the composition is not about the “setting to music” of a graphic model, there are structural similarities between the two works. The sound material is abstract sounds produced with synthesisers and as well calculated with Csound, a programming language for sound synthesis, which were created through additive and subtractive sound synthesis.
About the artist
Clemens von Reusner is a composer based in Germany. His works of electroacoustic music and radiophonic audio pieces focus equally on purely electronically generated sounds as well as sounds found in special places and processed in the studio. He is a member of the “Academy of German Music Authors” and he has received national and international awards for his compositions. They are performed worldwide at renowned international festivals of contemporary music.
Youngjae Cho: Incarnations
This work is the first piece in a series that employs higher-order Ambisonics, focusing on the creation of an immersive environment through 3D audio. The composition is based on field recordings captured using Ambisonic microphones of various orders, which serve as the primary material for spatial composition. The work explores the relationship between recorded soundscapes and temporal contexts by constructing a narrative structure that connects imagined past events, present bodily experiences, and speculative future occurrences. Through this approach, spatial sound is treated not only as an acoustic phenomenon but also as a medium for linking time, memory, and place within an immersive listening environment.
About the artist
Youngjae Cho (1990) is a composer based in Bremen, Germany, and Korea. His work includes solo and chamber music, electroacoustic music, and live electronics, focusing on immersive spatial sound through multichannel audio systems. Presented at international festivals such as DEGEM, ZKM, ICMC, and ORF Musikprotokoll, his music received the Gold Award at the IEM & VDT Student 3D Audio Production Competition, and he was an Artist in Residence at ICST Zurich.
Primrose Ohling: Information Body Horror
Privileging patterns of information over its instantiation is a promise first conceived of within the field of cybernetics and popularized through science fiction. Is disembodiment truly liberatory? Information Body Horror (IBH) was written to leverage the experience of having a body that is abstracted, debated, and legislated. Lived experience is twisted to force rhetoric and justify legislation, displacing and endangering individuals and communities. IBH started with a claim of self-expression and agency through an improvised recording on modular resulting in ‘lived material’. The artist finds that improvisation with any instrument is an embodying experience where their expression is in its purest form. How much can you alter recordings before they lose their original meaning? Should you alter them to begin with? The artist not only manipulates recordings but forces a layer of digital alterations. The use of sampling obscures source material in the meso timescale and a form of algorithmic micro-sampling through pitch shifting results in violent granular fractalizations. The act of sound design and composition becomes a reenactment of how external discourse overwrites lived reality. The stems are then mixed to 8 channels in Max/MSP reflecting the propagation of external discourse through institutional channels. The creative decisions in mixing are to ensure the abstracted material is engineered to outperform and silence the lived material. This stage is where IBH is codified and written to memory. Finally, abstractions are instantiated through 8 speakers, a setup largely reserved for professional environments, hindering public engagement. However, those who can listen will have differing experiences depending on where they are in the listening environment. The setup surrounds listeners, it sonically reaches out and presses on them, observing them. To call disembodiment in this case liberatory dismisses the lived and emboldens the abstracted material. I have found through this process that a separate disembodiment, of self by self, is impossible. It has only spoken to the complexity of selfhood. In the first section let the dense textures sink in as they swirl and oscillate in space. Secondly, synthesized voices will call out to you from their digital void. In the final section, sounds reflect ocean waves and wind, natural patterns reclaiming space through digital noise. The textures eventually ease and lighten but this is not peace. It is endurance. The tides cycle. The winds change. They continue regardless.
About the artist
Primrose Ohling b. 2002 is a musician, multimedia artist, and coder. She is drawn to rhythms, textures, and the dichotomy between improvisation and the precision of digital electronics. Her foundation is in jazz saxophone and improvisation. She continues to explore that side of her artistry, letting it influence her work. She finds inspiration in reconstituting familiar sounds, creating immersive and evolving soundscapes. Her music explores transformation, inviting listeners into a fluid auditory experience. Recently, her focus has been on modular synthesis, where she utilizes digital modules and custom DSP algorithms, adding further depth to her distinctive style. As a trans artist, her work often engages with themes of embodiment, bodily autonomy, and the violence of abstraction.
Iván Ferrer-Orozco: Jardín de Luz
Jardín de Luz (2021) is based exclusively on the Debris Project sound database, comprising over 2,000 samples. An algorithm using musical descriptors selects materials that are further developed through sampling and synthesis, generating a new category of sounds termed hybrids. Conceived as a form of sonic gardening, the work organises these materials within the acoustic space. Light operates as a metaphor for the listener’s disposition to listen, and the garden as a heterotopic sonic space.
About the artist
Iván Ferrer-Orozco (Mexico City, 1976) is a composer, electronic media performer and computer music designer. His music has been performed extensively in festivals and by ensembles from Mexico, Spain, Canada, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, South Korea, France, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Japan, USA, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Cyprus. He has been artist in residence at: Akademie der Künste Berlin, Schleswig-Holsteinisches Künstlerhaus, Residencia de Estudiantes, Camargo Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, CMMAS, Hooyong Performing Arts Centre, ARTos Foundation, Ibermusicas, I-Portonus, Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec, among others. As electronic media performer he performs as soloist and as sideman with artists and ensembles from Spain and abroad. In 2019 and 2024, the Mexican government appointed him to the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, a national programme that awards outstanding artists from all disciplines. He was a member of Neopercusion, Madrid based contemporary ensemble, currently he is a member of Vertixe Sonora Ensemble and Synergein Project. He has been part of the Forms of Culture Research Group at the Study Programme in Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices and Cultural Studies of the National Museum and Arts Centre Reina Sofia. He has been awarded with the 2021 Best Music Award of the International Computer Music Association.
Andrea Laudante, Paolo Montella and Giuseppe Pisano: Non è un atlante di traiettorie algo-siderali
This piece is neither an exploration of movement nor a calculated map. Instead, it invites the listener to experience a sonic drift, propelled by precise mathematical rules. Large sound masses govern the flow, turning slowly with heavy inertia, while sharper, faster sounds cut through the space, leaving vivid acoustic traces. The resulting soundscape is a complex web of intersecting paths. Musical fragments pulse rhythmically, creating a changing geometry of sound that expands and contracts around the audience. Originally composed in High Order Ambisonics, this work was forged collectively—through shared practices, exchanged sounds, and the unpredictable alchemy of collaboration, allowing the music to evolve in ways no single mind could anticipate.
About the artists
totaleee is a trio of composers of acousmatic music and laptop performers consisting of Giuseppe Pisano-Riise (1990), Andrea Laudante (1993), and Paolo Montella (1986). In their composition work they use immersive audio technologies to create fictional environments of plausible and impossible nature. This is done through the use of multichannel synthesis techniques, physical modeling of room acoustics, field recordings, and feedback loops. The trio debuted with their first piece ‘Non è un compendio di Etologia numerico-digitale’ in 2023 and since then their works have been played in many different contexts including ICMC (2023 Shenzhen, 2024 Seoul), Ircam (Paris), Sonosfera (Pesaro), ACMC (Sydney), Prix CIME, WOCMAT (Taipei) and many more. They have also received awards such as the first prize at ISAC 2024 (International Sonosfera Ambisonics Competition), the Teresa Rampazzi Award at CIM XXIV and a Distinction per Category at CIME 2023. totaleee is the first stable project to emerge from Napoli Totale Elettronica [NTE]: an open and fluid composers’ society that embraces the collective electroacoustic works produced by affiliated artists from and/or based in Naples. Connected to the NTE collective are the DIY portable loudspeaker array VOLTA and the festival for multimedia arts Marginale.
Teerath Majumder: Nor’wester
The Bengali new year (mid-April on the Gregorian calendar) invariably brings with it violent storms near the Bay of Bengal. We call them Kal Baishakhi. They can wreak havoc on people’s daily lives, damage crops, cause floods, and displace people. The suffering is considerable. Yet, somehow, knowing that these cataclysmic events are inevitable helps generate acceptance. We know what nature has in store for us, the destruction it will cause; we also know it will pass. It is all part of the cycle. During a particularly difficult time of my life when I was reconciling with several grave losses, the Kal Baishakhi and our acceptance of it was inspiring. It helped me see the bigger picture beyond the carnage, the impermanence of everything, and the strength in us to grieve and overcome loss. Nor’wester is a depiction of not just the dynamics of a storm but also our tumultuous experience of it. It is gradual and sudden, momentary and eternal, stationary and chaotic. These are some of the qualities that have been expressed in this piece through electronic timbres and spatialization. The piece was written using a range of generative processes that gave rise to complex timbres. The sounds were modeled using wavetable and granular synthesizers along with careful parameter randomization. No audio samples were used. The piece also explores different combinations of polyrhythmic patterns that fit within a fixed cycle length. Moving frequently between these combinations often creates a disorienting effect while maintaining a grid-like rhythmic quality. The sounds then went through first-order ambisonic encoding (mono, stereo and granular). Ambisonic effects such as delay, reverb and compression were applied during mixing. The ambisonic master was then decoded for octaphonic playback.
About the artist
Teerath Majumder is a Bangladeshi composer and technologist who works in interactive and immersive media, computer music, and sound design. He questions socio-sonic dynamics that are often taken for granted and reimagines relationships between participants through technological mediation. In 2025, he created Do Not Feed the Robots, a participatory concert involving a range of “interactive objects” and automatons. In the same vein, his 2022 work Space Within fostered collaboration between audience members and featured musicians using his “interactive objects.” His collaboration with Nicole Mitchell resulted in the immersive sound installation Mothership Calling (2021) that was exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California. He composed and designed sound for Qianru Li’s immersive multimedia piece A Shot in the Dark (2023) that explored Asian-American identity in the face of anti-Black police violence with reference to the shooting of Akai Gurley in 2014. His compositions have been performed by Hub New Music, Transient Canvas, and London Firebird Orchestra among other ensembles. He often collaborates with dancers and filmmakers in various capacities and produces genre-bending electronic music for his studio projects.
Yu Qin: Ocean Reflection
Ocean Reflection is a 22-minute sonic journey exploring the ocean as a vast system of hidden energy operating on temporal scales far beyond human perception. Drawing on field recordings from the North Sea—including both oceanic soundscapes and offshore drilling infrastructure—the electronics function as a structural, time-based layer that is organically coordinated with the music through the piece. Sustained harmonic fields and slow-form processes in music evoke the ocean’s apparent calm and depth, while industrial sounds gradually surface, revealing human intervention not as an immediate rupture but as a long-term disturbance embedded within marine systems. Ocean Reflection invites listeners to reflect on scale, time, and the asymmetry between human activity and ecological response.
About the artist
Yu (Hayley) Qin is a composer and improviser, currently a PhD candidate at UC Irvine, whose work weaves music, dance, and digital technologies into immersive, interdisciplinary experiences. Drawing inspiration from marine environments, human psychology, and neuroscience, her creations explore hidden energies, human-nature interplay, and collective imagination. Her works have been performed across North America and East Asia.
Wei Yang: rain contained, rain contains…
“rain contained, rain contains…” is a fixed-media piece exploring the close relationship between everyday objects and nature. Made from sounds of bottles, tubes, and rain, it invites listeners to discover sonic connections and containment between the profound and the ordinary. Bottles and resonant tubes act as vessels of containment, symbolically setting boundaries. Yet, by performing them, their distinctive sounds—clinks, taps, and resonances—uncover hidden textures and melodic fragments that break through the physical. Rain, a fundamental element, unifies the soundscape. While shaping the acoustic environment, the rain also consists of drops, each of which can be contained and has its own unique sonic profile. Through careful transformation and juxtaposition, the piece highlights the shared granular qualities that allow bottle and tube sounds to seamlessly transform into rain, and vice versa, blending the domestic and the natural. This sonic alchemy explores how these elements “find and contain each other,” fostering an “ecological listening” that reveals the deep interconnectedness of our everyday objects and the natural world. Various signal-processing techniques were employed to achieve a wide range of sonic materials and spatial transformations, including granular synthesis, filtering, spherical-angular decomposition/recomposition, a custom spherical-cap order upmixer, a custom reverb with feedback delay networks, and more.
About the artist
Wei Yang is a composer/sound artist from China. He works with different media, through which he often contemplates the body’s role in sound production, sound in space, as well as the integration of various data from the performance environment (reverberation, light, etc.). Wei composes both instrumental and electronic music, and often incorporates various sensors and physical computing to build performative systems that allow dynamic interaction among different actors within the system. His works have been performed internationally at various events, including the Darmstadt Summer Festival, Salzburg Music Festival, BEAST Festival, NUNC!, ICMC, ISAC Sonosfera, Tomeistertagung, ORF Musikprotokoll, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, SEAMUS, Espacious Sonores, Festival Atemporánea, Nucleo Música Nova SiMN, Sound Image Festival, and Ars Electronica.
Gabriel Araújo: SAW
A hyperrealistic space of bees, motors, and sawtooth waves. The piece focuses on the commonalities of these sounds and explores the constant transformation of materials, between the natural and the artificial, the real and the impossible, the biological, the mechanical, and the fantastical.
About the artist
Gabriel Araújo. Composer, multimedia artist, and educator whose work bridges ecological, technological, and cultural models through sound, video, and transmedia pieces. He is Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Texas A&M University – Central Texas. Gabriel studied composition with Paulo Guicheney at the Universidade Federal de Goiás (Brasil), and obtained his master’s degree from the CNSMD de Lyon (France), where he studied with Michele Tadini and attended the classes of Martin Matalon and François Roux. He completed his DMA at the University of Texas at Austin under Januibe Tejera, where he served as Assistant Intructor for the Experimental and Electronic Music Studio. He received the Funarte composition prize from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture at the Biennial of Contemporary Brazilian Music, the Rainwater Innovation Grant, and was a finalist at Prix CIME/ICEM and MA/IN Awards. He has collaborated with performers such as PHACE Ensemble, Vertixe Sonora, HANATSUmiroir, Line Upon Line Percussion, the Orchestra of the National Opera of Lyon, Soundmap Ensemble, Atelier xx-21, Olivier Stankiewicz, Alice Belugou, and have been featured at festivals such as MA/IN Festival (IT), Ars Electronica Forum Wallis (SWI), MUSLAB (ECU), SEAMUS (US), Lontano (BR), Plurisons (BR), CNMAT (US), Empreintes (FR), Electric LaTex (US), Festival No Conventional (Colombia).
James Harley: Wild Fruits: Epilogue
Wild Fruits 5: Epilogue is an electroacoustic soundscape work from the Wild Fruits cycle, begun in 2003. The piece includes spoken text taken from Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau, recorded by Jim Bartruff, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, recorded by Anne-Marie Donovan. The sounds are all based on field recordings from various locations, processed in the studio. Originally conceived as an 8-channel surround-sound work, Epilogue uses material from the other works in the cycle, treated in new ways.
About the artist
James Harley is a Canadian composer teaching at the University of Guelph. He obtained his doctorate at McGill University in 1994, after spending six years (1982-88) composing and studying in Europe (London, Paris, Warsaw). His music has been awarded prizes in Canada, USA, UK, France, Austria, Poland, Japan, and has been performed and broadcast around the world. Recordings include: Neue Bilder (Centrediscs, 2010), ~spin~: Like a ragged flock (ADAPPS DVD, 2015), Experimental Music for Ensembles, Drums, and Electronics, with Philippe Hode-Keyser (ADAPP CD, 2022), Lithophonica, with Gayle Young (Farpoint 2025) . As a researcher, Harley has written extensively on contemporary music. His books include: Xenakis: His Life in Music (Routledge, 2004), and Iannis Xenakis: Kraanerg (Ashgate, 2015). As a performer, Harley has a background in jazz, and has most recently worked as an interactive computer musician.
Raul Masu and Francesco Ardan Dal Ri: Inside the metal plate
This 5.1 acousmatic work is entirely constructed from the resonant behaviour of a single metal plate, activated through a set of physical and acoustic excitations. All sound material is generated via controlled feedback processes, bowing, mallets, and additional excitation techniques that probe the material responses and instabilities of the plate. Feedback is not employed as an effect, but as a generative mechanism, where the plate, transducers, amplification, and acoustic space form a dynamic system capable of producing emergent sonic behaviours. The resulting sounds do not represent the plate, but rather make audible its internal activity, thresholds of stability, and variations in resonant response. The 5.1 spatial distribution places these sounds around the audience with the intention of situating the listener inside the resonant body itself. Through an immersive aural experience, the work proposes a form of embodied self-perception, in which listening is no longer external to the sound object but coincides with it: the audience does not listen to the plate, but listens as the plate, temporarily adopting its vibrational perspective.
About the artists
Raul Masu (1992) is Professor of Electroacoustic and Multimedia Composition at the Conservatories of Trento (Italy). He holds a PhD in Digital Media from Universidade Nova de Lisboa and adjunct faculty in Computational Media and Arts, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Guangzhou (China). His compositional practice includes works, presented in festivals, conferences, concerts, and performances in 10 counties. He has published approximately 70 papers in international venues in the fields of electronic music (NIME, TISMIR, Organised Sound, Audio Mostly, Sound and Music Computing) and interactive technologies (CHI, DIS, TEI).
Francesco Ardan dal Ri began his musical career as an electric guitarist and thereminist and continues to collaborate with artists on both regional and international scenes, working in live performance contexts as well as in recording studios. Over time, his interests have progressively shifted toward contemporary and experimental music, with a particular focus on the creative possibilities offered by software-based systems and electronic instruments, both commercial and self-designed. He earned degrees Electronic Music from the Conservatory of Trento with top marks. This trajectory led him to pursue a PhD at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento under the supervision of Prof. Nicola Conci, focusing on artificial intelligence and deep learning applied to audio signals.