CLARENCE BARLOW and host Scot Gresham-Lancaster have know each other for decades and over the years Scot's admiration for Clarence's amazing body of work and research has only grown. In this podcast they talk over some of that work with a focus on the pieces at the Art/Science boundary. Clarence speaks at length about many of his challenging new ideas regarding techniques for using data in new ways to construct epic and comprehensible auditory experiences. He eschews electronics and converts his data explorations to acoustic instruments. This makes his approach most approachable and singular at the same time.
We talk initially about his new piece Coronialus (2020) which commemorates the fact that the Beethoven year 2020 has been ridden with the new coronavirus. Generated by an electronic transformation of a time-stretched sound recording of the first two chords of Ludwig van Beethoven's Coriolanus Overture Op.62, the individual samples of the stereo recording stretched – for three versions of the piece (see below) – from 6 to 75, 91 and 112 seconds were manipulated by information contained in the genome of the coronavirus. This genome contains exactly 29,903 nucleobases, identified as adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil. Further, the molecules of these four bases each consist of a typical number and arrangement of atoms of the four chemical elements hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. In Coronialus, the molecular arrangement as well as the valency and atomic number in the periodic table of each individual atom in the genome form the basis of a continuously micro-time-varying downwards frequency transposition through specific sample repetition. This technique in turn led to a second temporal expansion of the already elongated sound recording. Three versions of Coronialus have been made; their durations are 4'43", 5'34" and 7'18". The transformed second Beethoven chord begins just after the middle of the piece. The title - an anagram of 'Coriolanus' - contains the word 'corona' as well as the abbreviation RNA of the acid containing the genome.
Here is a pointer to a pdfs of various papers of his
Clarlow.org Clarence's website
I would be remiss if I did not include a pointer to Clarence Barlow's early masterwork Çoğluotobüsişletmesi, here played by pianist Herbert Henck
Bio: CLARENCE BARLOW - 1945: born into the English-speaking minority of Calcutta, going there to school and college, studying piano, music theory and natural sciences. 1957: first compositions. 1965: graduated in science at Calcutta University, thereafter active as conductor and music theory teacher at the Calcutta School of Music. 1968: moved to Cologne, studying (until 1973) composition and electronic music at Cologne Music University. 1971-1972: studied also at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht University. 1971: began to use computers as a compositional aid. 1982: initiated, 1986 co-founded, 1986-1993 and 1996-2002 chaired GIMIK: Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln. 1982-1994: in charge of Computer Music at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. 1984-2005: lecturer on Computer Music, Cologne Music University. 1988: Director of Music, XIVth International Computer Music Conference, held in Cologne. 1990-1991: visiting professor of composition, Folkwang University Essen. 1990-94: Artistic Director, Institute of Sonology, The Hague Royal Conservatory. 1994-2006: Professor of Composition and Sonology at the same conservatory. 1994-2010: member of the Académie Internationale de Musique Electroacoustique in Bourges. 2005-2006: visiting professor of composition, School of Music and Performing Arts ESMAE in Porto. Since 2006: Corwin Professor and Head of Composition, Music Department, University of California Santa Barbara.
Longer BIO hereCarla Scaletti is an experimental composer and designer of the Kyma sound design language and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation. Her compositions always begin with a “what-if” hypothesis and involve live electronics interacting with acoustic sources and environments. The listener is encouraged to first watch Carla’s brilliant keynote at the 2017 International Conference of Audio Display if possible at This Link
Gregory Kramer is a composer, scientific researcher, author, entrepreneur, and teacher. He is a founding figure in the emerging field of Sonification and published the first book in this area,”Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification and Auditory Interfaces” (Addison Wesley) The definition of sonification that everyone studying this field reads was written by Greg.
Dolores Catherino is a polychromatic composer and multi-instrumentalist. Her avant-garde compositions use sonic ‘pitch-palettes’ of 106 and 72 EDO (equal divisions of the octave) and are performed on visionary 21st century keyboard
instruments.
As a musician, she is focused on exploring new sonic worlds within a polychromatic framework which simplifies and unifies our rapidly multiplying microtonal pitch-scale methods. Polychromatic concepts of musical
‘pitch-color’ and ‘interval-color’ are also intended to simplify the exploration of new aesthetic possibilities in the practice of associative synesthetic awareness: learned associations and conceptual/perceptual integration of
audible
pitch with visual color. With an undergraduate study in music and graduate study in medicine, she hopes to explore and develop integrated perspectives between the sound arts and sciences.
Barlow, who studied composition under Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1968-1970) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1971-1973), is a universally acknowledged pioneer and celebrated composer in the field of electroacoustic and computer music. He has made groundbreaking advancements in interdisciplinary composition that unite mathematics, computer science, visual arts, and literature. While he has been a driving force in interdisciplinary and technological advances, his music is nevertheless firmly grounded in tradition and thus incorporates much inherited from the past. His works, primarily for traditional instruments, feature a vocabulary that ranges from pretonal to tonal, nontonal, or microtonal idioms, and, further, may incorporate elements derived from non-Western cultures.
Jordan Wirfs-Brock studies the future of voice interactions from a human-centered computing perspective. Her research focuses on how unexpected mechanisms—sound, taste, participatory experiences—can help people understand quantitative data. For over ten years, she has been making complex information approachable as a journalist, data analyst, producer, and designer.
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