//Unheard_Landscapes - listening | resonating | inhabiting 10th FKL/ENP/AAU_CRESSON International Symposium on Soundscape BLOIS | October 27 -30

Unheard landscapes: this metaphor leaves space to imagination, to the un-thought, to the un-known, to past and future, as well as unexplored sound scenarios. It also reaches the field of auditory perception, the acoustic domain. Sound, through auditive qualities, acoustic phenomena, design practices, artistic creations, and listening experiences, offers an inspiring transversal entry onto landscapes and ambiances. Beyond the discussions on “soundscape”, approaching ordinary environments through sounds increases the awareness of our own capacities to feel, while we inhabit and move across different worlds. From an ecological perspective, resonance appears a key word, too. It puts sound and space together. It implies the idea of a plurality of bodies, things and living beings vibrating all together, sharing common contexts of time and space. The act of listening bypasses the passive meaning it usually receives. It contains in itself a completely unexpressed potential, connoted with «project», «pro-action» and «active decision» by individuals. What will be the sounds of the future and the soundscapes in which we will live, or would like to? How can listening practices evolve, how will we listen or how differently could we listen to the world around us, tomorrow? Inhabiting the world brings to us questions about how we want to manage our being in it. How do we want to inhabit the world sonically? How sound and listening do actually affect our way to inhabit it? Have we lost some of our abilities to resonate with the world? What remains to be heard? Where could the practices of listening and attuning take us to?

Panayiotis KOKORAS | US |

Soundwork

Qualia

Abstract

Qualia (2017) electroacoustic sound composition was composed at CEMI studios Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia at the University of North Texas in 2017. The composition explores the experience of music from perception to sensation; the physical process during which our sensory organs - those involved with sound, tactility, and vision in particular - respond to musically organized sound stimuli. Through this deep connection, sound, space, and audience are all engaged in a multidimensional experience. The motion and the meaning inherited in the sounds are not disconnected from the sounds and are not the reason for the sounds but are, in fact, the sound altogether. Energy, movement, and timbre become one; sound source identification, cause guessing, sound energies, gesture decoding, and extra-musical connotations are not independent of the sound but vital internal components of it. Qualia are claimed to be individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The way it feels to have mental states such as hearing frequencies at the lower threshold of human hearing or a piercing sound, hearing a Bb note from a ship horn, as well as the granularity of a recorded sound. It is an exploration of time and space, internal and universal. In Qualia, I do not experience musical memory as a sequence of instances but as a sensory wholeness that lasts the entire duration of the piece. The experience of sound itself is not sequential; it bypasses past or future; time becomes a single omnipresent unity. In this state of consciousness, time dissolves. The vibrating air molecules from the speakers, the reflections in the physical space, and the audience are the sound.

Panayiotis Kokoras is an internationally award-winning composer and computer music innovator, and is currently an Associate Professor of composition and CEMI director (Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia) at the University of North Texas. Born in Greece, he studied classical guitar and composition in Athens, Greece and York, England; he taught for many years at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. Kokoras's sound compositions use sound as the only structural unit. His concept of "holophonic musical texture" describes his goal that each independent sound (phonos), contributes equally into the synthesis of the total (holos). In both instrumental and electroacoustic writing, his music calls upon a "virtuosity of sound," a hyper-idiomatic writing which emphasizes on the precise production of variable sound possibilities and the correct distinction between one timbre and another to convey the musical ideas and structure of the piece. His compositional output is also informed by musical research in Music Information Retrieval compositional strategies, Extended techniques, Tactile sound, Hyperidiomaticity, Robotics, Sound and Consciousness. More information at http://www.panayiotiskokoras.com

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