Evening Concert 4B
Concert 4B presents the full range of contemporary computer music in a chamber ensemble setting. Ensemble 404—Hamburg’s specialists in new music—navigates a program that spans highly spatialized sound worlds to audiovisual metamorphoses.
Experience how physical instruments meet the precision of algorithms, creating new hybrid identities in the process.
Program Overview
Kryptobioza
Lidia Zielinska
Tide, breath
Zihan Wang
Everybody Loves Me
Howard Kenty
Present-Day Jakuchu Series: Butterfly Pictures “Inachis io”
Naotoshi Osaka
Coming and Vanishing
Yixuan Zhao
Zusammenspiel I
Javier Alejandro Garavaglia
Vesscape
Danni Zhao and Congren Dai
About the pieces & artists
Lidia Zielinska: Kryptobioza
Cryptobiosis is a reversible, temporary state of extreme reduction in life activities of a composer, as a response to unfavourable environmental conditions.
About the artist
Lidia Zielinska (*1953) – Polish composer, professor-emeritus of composition and director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the Poznan Academy of Music; numerous awards for orchestral, multimedial, electroacoustic works; books, papers, guest lectures, summer courses in Europe, both Americas, Asia, New Zealand; vice-president of the Polish Society for Electroacoustic Music.
Zihan Wang: Tide, breath
This work integrates spatialised fixed-media electronic music with semi-improvised acoustic instrumental performance. Animated scores and sound scores are employed to guide performers and to synchronise their actions with the electronic sections. The compositional focus is spatial counterpoint which extending the interplay of traditional contrapuntal voice relationships into three-dimensional space. This approach generates perceptible parallels, interweaving, imitation, and conflict between instrumental and electronic elements through the parameters of position, distance, diffusion, and timbre. Spatial attributes therefore function as primary compositional parameters rather than post-production effects.
The work is inspired by reflections on the macro and micro-structures of two kinds of sound: human crowds and natural environments. Through extensive field recording, I observed a shared underlying principle: both soundscapes arise from the continuous accumulation and interaction of innumerable micro-sonic events, producing macro-level shifts in energy, fluctuations in density, and emergent directional tendencies. For example, footsteps, conversations, breathing, and whispers in a crowd collectively form an ever-shifting granular timbre. Similarly, natural sounds such as rain, wind, rivers, and flocks of birds can exhibit comparable behaviours. This work seeks to establish a perceptual and structural connection between these two sound worlds through electronic composition.
About the artist
Zihan Wang 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).
Howard Kenty: Everybody Loves Me
“Everybody Loves Me” is a piece for voice, percussion, and live electronics that takes the words of Donald Trump as its only source material to depict a hellish kinetic nightmare. For this incarnation, I would be the vocal performer, and control the electronics onstage. I would need a percussion performer and the percussion itself to be provided by the festival.
About the artist
Howie Kenty is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer, occasionally known by his musical alter-ego, Hwarg. His music, called “remarkable” with “astonishing poetic power” (Intl Compendium Prix Ars Electronica), is stylistically diverse, encompassing ideas from contemporary classical, electronic, rock, and ambient genres, as well as sound art, political issues, and visual and theatrical elements. Howie is an Assistant Professor in Studio Composition at Purchase College. Listen at http://www.hwarg.com.
Naotoshi Osaka: Present-Day Jakuchu Series: Butterfly Pictures “Inachis io”
Ito Jakuchu (1716–1800) was a mid Edo period Japanese painter renowned for his brilliantly colored depictions of plants and animals. I have long been fascinated by his works. There was a time when I myself collected butterflies, and I was deeply captivated by the designs and patterns on their wings. This piece is inspired by those wing patterns, transforming their visual designs into musical imagery. Jakuchu also painted butterflies, and with the idea of composing as if I myself were Jakuchu painting a picture, I titled this work as part of my “Present-Day Jakuchu” series.
When visual and auditory perception are viewed at a higher level of abstraction, they share many common qualities. In this work, the visual impressions of the butterfly are linked to the sounds and musical structure.
Inachis io (The European Peacock Butterfly) has eye spot patterns on a reddish brown ground, reminiscent of a peacock’s feathers, which gives the species its name. Although it is not found in North America, South America, or Oceania, it is widely distributed across the Eurasian continent, including Europe and Asia. Many butterflies of the Nymphalidae family are elegant in appearance, and this species is no exception; it can be seen in many places. In the composition, I developed the music around two motifs: the background coloration and the eye spot patterns. Unlike my previous work, this piece does not depict flight or resting behavior; instead, it focuses solely on the coloration and patterns visible when the wings are fully spread.
This piece was originally written in 2023 for violin and piano. For this performance, it has been newly expanded with an added electroacoustic part, making this the premiere of the updated version. The electroacoustic materials were created as fixed media, primarily using granular synthesis and FM synthesis. However, the sound files are structured as passage level cues, and their playback timing is performer controlled and triggered in real time.
About the artist
Naotoshi Osaka received his Master’s degree from Waseda University and, after working at NTT Laboratories, has pursued research and composition in electroacoustic music. His works have been selected for the ICMCfive times, and for the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF)three times. He served as President of the Japan Society for Sonic Arts (JSSA) from 2009 to 2018. He is currently a research fellow at Waseda University and Tokyo Denki University, holds a Ph.D. in engineering, and is Professor Emeritus at Tokyo Denki University.
Yixuan Zhao: Coming and Vanishing
Coming and Vanishing is an Audiovisual work for solo flute and electronics that explores a transient and unstable phenomenon.
The flute interacts closely with the electronic layer through air sounds, breath tones, and extended techniques. Pitch and noise are deliberately blurred, allowing the instrument to function not as a melodic foreground but as a fluctuating presence. The electronic part is primarily built from processed human whispers and breaths, materials detached from linguistic meaning. Through subtle layering and diffusion, the voices lose semantic clarity and become abstract sonic matter. Acoustic and electronic sound exist in a continuous state of mutual negotiation, shaping and destabilizing one another in real time.
The visual draws inspiration from traditional Chinese landscape painting while incorporating a surrealist sensibility. Through gradual transformations of light and shadow, the imagery reveals and amplifies microscopic details within the sound. Rather than illustrating the music, the visuals function as a parallel perceptual layer, extending the listening experience into a spatial and visual field.
Sound and visual are not merely layered media, but revealing a dynamic process, existing only within the persistent tension between appearance and disappearance, presence and loss, immediacy and dissolution.
About the artists
Composer: ZHAO Yixuan is a composer, a lecturer at the Dept. of Music AI and Music Information Technology, Central Conservatory of Music, China, and a visiting researcher at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK.
She has been dedicated to exploring the practice of digital audio and artificial intelligence in music composition and collaborating with performers to search for more possibilities in technological performance environments. Her composition spans interactive music, electroacoustic music, contemporary music, and new media art.
Visual Designer: WU Shuangqi (/’su:ki/) is an inter-media creator and visual-physical experimenter engaged in visual media, contemporary theatre, physical improvisation, visual design, sound, audiovisual, photography, editing, etc.
Her creations are mainly based on physical experience, deconstructing and visually outputting the body and external information, intending to explore the assembly, pattern, motivation and form in the algorithms of flesh and behaviour, to gain extension in perversion and mutation.
Javier Alejandro Garavaglia: Zusammenspiel I
Electroacoustic composition in which a live viola and a live clarinet (in A) are combined with spectral digital DPS effects and multi-channel spatialisation in 8.1 surround sound. The latter applies Ambisonics (4th order) in real-time added to a system developed by the composer and documented in several international papers and articles (including MIT’S Computer Music Journal).
About the artist
Award-winning composer, violist, sound artist and retired university music professor with a broad and interdisciplinary approach to digital art and related technologies. His work focuses primarily on various aspects of music/sound composition and performance supported by computing, with a constant search for new sonic experiences combining new developments in computer-aided sound synthesis, live interaction, extended instrumental techniques and sound spatialisation. Compositions are performed/broadcast in Europe, America and Asia in world-renowned concert halls/broadcasters and include electroacoustic music (acousmatic, interactive, multimedia), instrumental music (e.g., solo instrument, ensemble & orchestra) and sound art (e.g., installations). Plenty of his acousmatic music can also be found on commercial CDs by Edition DEGEM, Cybele, EMF, etc.
Info: https://tinyurl.com/JavierGaravaglia
Danni Zhao and Congren Dai: Vesscape
This work repeatedly performs the same action: pouring sound into a hollow system.
The breath of the flute is not treated as lyrical material, but as a continuously failing act, namely, blowing, gasping, breaking, and losing control. Pitches emerge again and again, yet never settle. The electric bass introduces low-frequency pressure and inertia, an irresistible downward pull that keeps the entire sound field at the edge of overload.
A live electronic system analyses the performed sound using AI, distributing features such as breath, impact, and pitch deviation across multiple “vessel” sound sources and visual entities. In its touring performance version, the original vessel installation has been translated into an 8.1 spatial audio field, allowing the acoustic presence and directional behavior of the vessels to be simulated through multichannel diffusion. These vessels are not metaphors for containers; they function as receivers of pressure, being filled, stretched, and forced into vibration. The harder the music pushes, the more unstable the vessels become; when the performer attempts to regain control, the system exposes even more fractures.
The structure begins with an almost violent injection of energy, gradually shifting into a direct confrontation between body and object. Unstable registers and microtonal deviations are continuously amplified; rhythm is fragmented into dense, short bursts of broken gestures, until the system briefly collapses. In the end, sound is exhausted, leaving only residual breath and unfinished pitch afterimages.
This is not a work about “generation”. It is a sustained experiment in pressure, control, capacity, and limits. The system never truly responds to the performer; it merely records how pressure fails, again and again.
About the artists
Danni Zhao is a Chinese composer and electronic music artist. She studies Electronic Music Composition at the Central Conservatory of Music, where she received the National Scholarship and recommendation for postgraduate study. Her works have won awards at international composition and electronic music competitions and have been presented at events such as ICMC and major music festivals. She is active in concert music, film, documentary, theatre, and game scoring.
Congren Dai is a PhD candidate at the Central Conservatory of Music, specialising in Music AI. He holds an MRes in AI and Machine Learning from Imperial College London and an MSc in Data Science from King’s College London. Having interned in computer vision at Google and engaged in music AI projects at Huawei, he now applies Large Language Models to musical score understanding and instrument recognition in his research, alongside contributions to continual learning.