In March 2023 ISSTA presented a Spatial Audio Workshop and Concert at Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast
ISSTA partnered with the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast to present a two-day spatial audio workshop and concert programme in March 2023 for composers, sound artists and performers.
ISSTA hosted four emerging international audio artists, Jelena Perisic, Jenn Grossman, Cameron Clarke and Neil Quigley, to workshop and present their work in the Sonic Lab, Belfast.
- 8th March 2023 – ISSTA’s John D’Arcy presented a seminar on the creative use of spatial audio within the 40-speaker Sonic Lab
- 9th March 2023 – hear new works by our emerging artists, specially mixed for the Sonic Lab during ISSTA Spatial Audio 2023.
Concert Video
Find the video of the concert here: https://www.youtube.com/live/YGcb2VOCM2Q
Audio is in binaural so wear headphones if possible 🎧
Image
Featured artists:
Kemmer (Jelena Perisic)
A composer/singer, visual artist and translator/writer, born in Serbia, based in Limerick, Ireland. She works with sound/music (mainly vocal), video, animation, illustration, photography, and sung/spoken/written word, exploring intermedia to discover alternative modes of experiencing art and reality as a whole. She also explores the use of invented languages, obscure/undecipherable scripts and texts, and obscured/deconstructed natural languages/texts, visuals and melodic structures, in creating intermedia pieces.
Website: https://www.kemmersound.com/
Jenn Grossman
Jenn Grossman is a sound/experiential media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s concerned with the psycho-spatial, surreal, affective, and transcendent potentials of sensory media. Her work has taken the form of sound sculpture, audiovisual installation, experimental performance, sound collage, light/video events, public interventions, ambient music, and spatial audio works. She’s held residencies at I-Park Foundation, Harvestworks, presented at festivals, museums and conferences such as the Black Mountain College Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image and the New York Transit Museum, the Megapolis Audio Festival, the Global Composition Conference, the Women In/Women on Sound Symposium, along with unconventional public locations.
Website: http://www.jenngrossman.net
Cameron Clarke
Cameron Clarke is Belfast-based sound artist interested in playful interactions within city spaces that go against intended uses. His work usually takes the form of field recordings, sound walks, and audio interventions exploring themes such as psychogeography, city design and hidden infrastructure. Cameron completed an MA in Creative Arts Practice in 2021 and since has been commissioned by the Belfast Imagine Festival and presented work the Golden Thread Gallery as part of a residency at Belfast’s Digital Arts Studios. He is currently developing an audio/visual installation with animator Paul Trickett funded by Arts Council England.
Website: www.keepcalmc.com
Neil Quigley
Neil Quigley is a composer and sound artist currently based between Glasgow and Kilkenny. He has worked and collaborated with Crash Ensemble, London Contemporary Orchestra, bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward, choreographer Síobhán Ní Dhunnín and composer Sam Scranton amongst others. His work has been described as “all very synthetic, even sometimes comical” by The Journal of Music. He has studied both in the US and Europe, in areas ranging from Music Technology and Composition to Installation Art to Videogame design to ethnomusicology. His current work focuses in part on audio skeuomorphism and larger cultural skeuomorphism, the divination of objects (in particular Rhabdomancy) in late-stage capitalism and how it relates to historical divination, sonic representations of space both real and virtual, and the interpersonal politics of the musical “workspace.”
Website: http://www.quigley.life
More information
The artists were recruited via an open call for artists who wish to develop their sound practice through the use of spatialisation and immersive audio techniques.
Through this programme of events, ISSTA hopes to give the selected artists an opportunity to develop their practice in new directions – both metaphorically and literally – using the Sonic Lab’s soundsystem that forms a ring around the audience across 4 vertical levels – ear-height, cinema-height, ceiling and below.
Composing space can bring attention to the physical environment of the listener, repositioning other environments, or it can transport the listener to new imagined spaces. The Sonic Lab gives us an opportunity to explore how we use sounds all around, above and below, and we encourage composers to consider how we can extend the dimensions of our listening practices vertically.
Thanks for Queen’s University Belfast’s Music at Queen’s Events programming, and SARC’s Jonny McGuinness for technical support.