Programme notes (click to expand)

More information can be found here.

Programme notes (click to expand)

Flex is a new, generative multichannel piece controlled by a Brain-­‐Computer Music Interface (BCMI). Flex investigates the playful side of electronic music performance, toying with ideas of gesture, expression and immersion through harnessing cognitive thought processes and brain wave data classification. Using a bespoke system developed at ICCMR mapped to Integra Live, a new musical engine developed at Birmingham Conservatoire, brain signals from the performer alone provide the real time control of the music.

Flex prescribes the mind as muscle, using thought to replace the physical embodiment of performance. As a result mappings are key to providing the feel, direction and nature of accuracy within the piece, from the micro up to macro parameters, replacing traditional, physical controllers to manipulate, arrange, synthesise and diffuse combinations of recorded and computer generated sound.

More information on Flex can be seen here.

Programme notes (click to expand)

The Warren explores the mental and physical shifts we undertake through the age old pleasure of walking in the countryside, to breathe fresh air into our minds. It explores How we perceive a country walk to clear our thoughts and how the shift in our aural environment interacts with this process.

Built using recordings of instruments, computer generated sounds and field recordings, the piece investigates the contrasts in the open spaces of the hills and the coombes of Rowberrow Warren, Somerset, against the density of the forest floor and the internal interactions we form whilst passing through.

In the same vain that we reposition ourselves into a different physical environment, sounds and data are relocated into new realms. Guitars and breathing become sustained cellos, white noise is sculpted into percussive rhythms, bird chatter is morphed into sweeping breezes of wind, and the noise floor of the forest takes over the monotonous urban drone and merges with our thoughts.

While computer algorithms build fire and the ground trodden on creates layers of granular thought, the lingering presence of mankind still follows us with echoing trails of machinery and melancholy.