[May 30] Caroline Chen + Crystin Magnus, Nick Patterson + Ros Morley

Caroline Chen’s “Magic Touch” showcases the artist inside a virtual space controlling images through hand gestures via a Kinect. Hands and other joints control the direction of the ripples,  the degree of dampness and the rotation of the image/painting. Nicholas Patterson’s “For Bass Viol” aims to capture some of the fluid quality of early French lute and harpsichord music, using a broad harmonic framework upon which a performer would build a performance. The relation between the performer’s and the electronic parts is flexible, and driven by the performer. Chen and Patterson will also present other works.

[May 30] Caroline Chen + Crystin Magnus, Nick Patterson + Ros Morley

Caroline Chen + Crystin Magnus
Nick Patterson + Ros Morley
Wednesday, May 30 2012, 7pm
FREE

Caroline Chen:
Magic Touch – for Kinect xbox360/visual/sound
Perpetual – iPad/visual/sound (w. Crystin Magnus)
Flux – iPad/sound

Nick Patterson:
For Bass Viol – for viol and electronics, w/ Rosamund Morley (bass viol)
Couriers – for text and electronics, w/ Narine Atamian, Rachel Susser (reading)

Location:
Harvestworks – www.harvestworks.org
596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleeker

1) Caroline Chen: Magic Touch – for Kinect xbox360/visual/sound
Perpetual – iPad/visual/sound (w. Crystin Magnus)

Flux – iPad/sound

Caroline Chen’s “Magic Touch”is a work in progress project, which showcases the artist inside a virtual space controlling images through hand gestures via a Kinect device. Images will be projected and speakers will surround the space. Chen uses high-resolution scans of paintings that can be manipulated.  Hands and other joints control the direction of the ripples, the degree of dampness and the rotation of the image/painting. The image, (using Max/Jitter OpenGL), over time, opens up, floating in space, as if the artist immerses herself inside the painting – slowly the image rippled, warp, swirl and responds to her whim. The music will be at times meditative, at times chaotic, at times rhythmic, traveling through space through multiple speakers, to create and enhance the experience of visual effects.

For this presentation, she mixes them into stereo. Samples of sounds from everyday life, a passing train, waves crashing on the shore, lightning striking, city sirens and other environmental noise are sequenced together as background sounds.

Caroline Chen is a classical trained musician and electronic music composer. Her works explore the effect of spatial and temporal arrangement on one’s listening experience. There are constant aural stimulus in our daily life, in particular in new york city, sound of broken glasses, siren, subway noise, or sound in the nature– the sound of the ocean, or walking in the park, the sound of breathing, leaves rustling, and so on. “At times, I record these sounds, at times, I use the pre-recorded samples. I take and manipulate them generating new sounds which one may not recognize its sonic source, thus, giving a listener a different aural experience. I also integrate these new sounds with video that I create. I scan and render 2D paintings into 3D animated digital images that transform over time. Projecting sounds in space along with projecting these 3D images in motion on a large screen create an unique visual-aural experience.” Her interests have expanded to include interactive multimedia works, such as a multimedia project that links sound and video through a kinect motion controller device, or an iPad, and another project that involves building a microcontroller to link LED-matrix lights with sound using Arduino (an open-source microcontroller).

Cristyn Magnus—visual/audio programmer – http://cmagnus.com
Juan A. Romero – technical support in Supercollider programming language.

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2) Nick Patterson: “For Bass Viol” (for viol and electronics) Rosamund Morley, bass viol
“Couriers” (for text and electronics) Readers: Narine Atamian, Rachel Susser

“For Bass Viol” was written for Ros Morley of the NYC-based viol ensemble Parthenia, a piece that takes loose inspiration from the “unmeasured preludes” of early French lute and harpsichord music. Quasi-improvisatory in nature, they used a broad harmonic framework upon which a performer would build a performance, although constrained by various performance conventions. Visually, the notation often presents a page of whole notes with no bar lines. Although this piece is not improvisational, it aims to capture some of that fluid quality, and the relation between the performer’s and the electronic parts is flexible, and driven by the performer.

“Couriers” sets a short text by Franz Kafka, taken from a series of short parables found scattered throughout his writings. Elements of the written and the recorded spoken texts, as well as the text encoded into ASCII and Morse code, are all used to generate sonic material which provides the accompaniment.

Kafka: They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other — since there are no kings — messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

Nick Patterson is a composer (and music librarian) based in New York City. More of his work can be heard at nickpatterson.org.

Rosamund Morley has performed on viola da gamba and its medieval ancestors with early music ensembles as diverse as ARTEK, The Boston Camerata,  Les Arts Florissants, Sequentia, and has toured worldwide with the Waverly Consort.  She is a member of Parthenia, New York’s premiere consort of viols, with which she plays both early and newly commissioned music and records music from 16th and 17th century Europe.  As a member of My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, she explores the riches of the early English song repertoire and each year performs one Elizabethan or Jacobean song book in its entirety on the 400th anniversary of its publication.  Much in demand as a teacher throughout the United States she has also been invited to summer courses in Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy. She leads the viol consort for the Yale Collegium Musicum and directs the Viols West Workshop at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA.

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