Category: 2024

On Friday, May 24, the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series presents “Hearing Extremes” with renowned composer and UC San Diego Professor of Music Lei Liang, and New York City-based new music chamber group loadbang.

“Hearing Extremes” introduces original compositions by UC San Diego graduate students in collaboration with researchers from the university’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Jacobs School of Engineering. Through the “Hearing Extremes” seminar, composers and artists work closely with geologist Emily Chin and oceanographer Joshua Jones, to develop interdisciplinary projects outside the walls of their respective departments, to think of the entire campus as a place for “great learning,” to reconsider what each participant’s role might be in regard to the collaboration, and to create works that would not be possible without a fully integrated approach that reflects the knowledge, technology and global issues of our time.

The program features premieres of works by composers Mitchell Carlstrom, Stephen de Filippo, WANG Delong, Gabriel Soberón Nelson, Haihui Zhang, and visual artist Moe Penders Ramos.           

Motion                                          Mitchell Carlstrom

Mammalian Dialogue                        WANG Delong                       

sun moon | ocean earth                   Gabriel Soberón Nelson

Shadow III                                      Haihui Zhang

Home Range                                  Moe Penders Ramos               

Reading Mantle Petrology                  Stephen de Filippo

loadbang will perform the students’ pieces for a live audience.

About loadbang

loadbang is building a new kind of music for mixed ensemble of trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice. Since their founding in 2008, they have been praised as ‘cultivated’ by The New Yorker, ‘an extra-cool new music group’ and ‘exhilarating’ by the Baltimore Sun, ‘inventive’ by the New York Times and called a ‘formidable new-music force‘ by TimeOutNY. Creating ‘a sonic world unlike any other‘ (The Boston Musical Intelligencer), their unique lung-powered instrumentation has provoked diverse responses from composers, resulting in a repertoire comprising an inclusive picture of composition today. 

loadbang has premiered more than 500 works, written by members of the ensemble, emerging artists, and today’s leading composers. Their repertoire includes works by Pulitzer Prize winners Raven Chacon, David Lang, and Charles Wuorinen; Rome Prize winners Andy Akiho and Paula Matthusen; and Guggenheim Fellows Chaya Czernowin, George Lewis, and Alex Mincek. They are the ensemble-in-residence at Cornell University through the Steven Stucky Memorial Residency for New Music, and through a partnership with the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Boston, they are the ensemble-in-residence at Divergent Studio, a contemporary music festival for young performers and composers held each summer. Visit loadbang’s website for more.

On Friday, May 3, the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series presents “Beyond the Black Box: A Girl and Her Dog,” a performative exploration within a series of human robot interactions.

Combining the talents of playwright Hortense Gerardo, director of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Anthropology, Performance, and Technology (APT) Program, UC San Diego Teaching Professor Amy Eguchi and University of Nebraska-Lincoln Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts Robert Twomey, “Beyond the Black Box” explores questions of whether robots can generate a sense of fun defined as “pleasure with surprises.” The work is loosely informed by the story of Eurydice, “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Toy Story,” and will feature six interactive robots and a selection of robots from past research projects conducted at UC San Diego.

“Beyond the Black Box: A Girl and Her Dog” is part of the series “Dances with Robots” and will be informed by data from creative AI research experiments performed by the APT Program. The work is part of On Display Global by Heidi Latsky, commemorating the International Day of Persons With Disabilities.

“Gravebirth” is a unique performance merging diverse artistic elements to present parallel narratives of social oppression and the spirit of humanity.

The performance features the poetic text “Zendegi (life)” by contemporary Iranian poet Erfan Nazar Ahari, as interpreted by Nasim Khorassani, alongside the novel “Silence” by Syusaku Endo, brought to performative art by Kosuke Matsuda. While rooted in different historical contexts, these texts converge to depict struggles against oppression and the exploration for freedom.

“Gravebirth” intertwines sound, dance, and visual images, including light and projection, to weave a narrative that resonates with the ongoing Woman-Life-Freedom movement in Iran. The sonic landscape includes sampled folksong, noise, drone, and silence, creating a rich tapestry that encompasses both performers and audience members.

Director Kosuke Matsuda, choreographer and lighting designer Elba Emicente Sanchez, and composers/sound designers Janet Sit, Kevin Schwenkler and Timothy Gmeiner, alongside visual designers/video editors Mingyong Cheng and Nasim Khorassani, have crafted a performance that transcends boundaries, aiming to redefine the essence of humanity in the face of hardship. confront social oppression. Referencing “Zendegi (Life)” by contemporary Iranian woman poet Erfan Nazar Ahari and the novel “Silence” by Japanese author Syusaku Endo, Gravebirth aims to create a hopeful and optimistic expression of solidarity for people struggling for freedom. 

On Thursday, February 22 at 5 p.m., the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series hosts a live performance of composer Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura,” performed by violinist/violist Marco Fusi, musician, artist and UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate Michelle Helene Mackenzie, and UC San Diego Associate Professor of Sound Design Bobby McElver. The piece will be performed using several hundred loudspeakers in a custom wave field synthesis array built by McElver.

Prior to his passing in 1990, Nono composed avant-garde classical music that mixed traditional instruments with choir and/or electronics. “La lontananza” is one such work that explores an “ever-changing soundscape” blending recordings and improvisation on the performers’ part.

Program Notes:

Before becoming a score, “La lontananza” was a sonic space. 

It was a room, filled with the sounds of moving chairs, laughing and chatting, and microphones and a violin. Luigi Nono was sitting in that space, listening and taking notes, and pasting together sounds and ideas. His fascination with sounds is mixed with respect and appreciation for all of them, from the aristocracy of the violin’s nineteenth century repertoire to the everyday experience of a slamming door.  Such a composite set of elements is equally welcomed within the audio material that Nono assembled for this piece, designing an ever-changing soundscape that allows and demands that performers play along with its heterogeneous components, treading their own path within the hour of sounds that Nono has offered.

When his attention focuses on the violin, Nono sits close to the performer, entering a most intimate and secret space that listeners cannot access. Nono listens with the ears of the violinist, and together with them, explores the stuttering of the bow before the string, the uncertainty of the fingers exploring the fingerboard, searching for a way into the oscillation of the sound before it is heard. It is within these minutiae that the violin utters its first sounds, and the listeners are drawn closer and closer to the strings, within the smallest of the dynamics.

“La lontananza” is conceived as a mental space, and it develops as a real space. The recorded material and the violin explore the unique peculiarities of each room where they perform, moving through islands of sounds and clouds of silence, estranged sounds and enveloping vibrations.

Each performance develops in a different and unforeseeable experience.

QI Composer-in-Residence Miller Puckette, renowned for designing and developing two of the most widespread programs for computer music, will perform alongside guests Kerry Hagan and Irwin as part of the 2024 Initiative for the Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) series. 

The performance will include select musical compositions by Puckette and Hagan, working together as “the Higgs whatever,” and by Puckette and percussionist Irwin as the duo “øther.”

the Higgs whatever

Kerry Hagan is a composer and researcher who explores both acoustic and computer-based mediums. She focuses on creating real-time techniques for spatialization and employs stochastic algorithms in her musical endeavors. Hagan strives to achieve aesthetic and philosophical goals, drawing inspiration from mathematical and natural processes. Her work uniquely merges art, science, and technology across diverse domains.

In her role as a researcher, Hagan delves into real-time algorithmic methods for music composition and sound synthesis, as well as spatialization techniques for 3D sounds and electronic/electroacoustic musicology. She has showcased her music and research at SEAMUS, ICMC, SMC, EMS, and various conferences and festivals dedicated to electronic and computer music.

Working as “the Higgs whatever,” Kerry Hagan and Miller Puckette have developed a sound installation called Remnant that explores our ability to sense that someone is standing close to us, solely through the way we hear ambient sounds reflecting off them. Remnant has been presented both in Brooklyn and in Birmingham, England. Hagan and Puckette have also collaborated on several musical compositions, of which they will be presenting a sampling in concert on Thursday, January 11, 2024. One such piece, “Who Was That Timbre I Saw You With,” uses Leap controllers to make hand-gesture-to-sound translators. 

øther

Irwin has engaged in the fields of music, production, composition, and sound design since the 1990s. Additionally, he has served as a supporting musician for numerous music tours across various genres along with contemporary solo live electronic performances.

Miller Puckette and Irwin are the duo “øther.” They use a pair of hand-built percussion instruments, each with a piezoelectric pickup, to drive a variety of computer processes, both as control sources and as activation for different types of nonlinear resonators.