February 21, 2020
Doors at 7:30. Music at 8.
Visda Goudarzi and Artemi-Maria Gioti present Soundsourcing, a participatory performance for audience and two laptop performers based on processing sound generated in real time. The Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists (SoVISA) will perform a composition by Tommy Carroll titled The Chaos of Convenience, a sonic critique of the gig or app-based economy.
Visda Goudarzi and Artemi-Maria Gioti present Soundsourcing, a participatory performance for audience members and two laptop performers that is based on processing sound generated by the audience in real time. Audience members produce vocal sounds (words, phonemes and noises) which are picked up by two condenser microphones and processed by the laptop performers in real-time.
The Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists (SoVISA) will perform a composition by Tommy Carroll titled The Chaos of Convenience, a sonic critique of the gig or app-based economy that will also serve as the first road test of an experimental method of conducting blind performers through non-rhythmic music. The music is an evolution of an experiment in harsh noise that Tommy first began as a student of Jay Alan Yim at Northwestern University. The group will consist of a trio of a vocalist, synthesist, and drummer all being lead by the conductor. The conductor, rather than using traditional conducting techniques, will operate a synthesizer rig that is only played back for the performers. Then performers use a mixture of score-based instructions and physical intuition to respond to the pitch and timbral information provided by the conductor. The challenge being able to refine the system so that the performers, who are unable to read a score as they play, are able to confidently know when new section changes have arrived and act accordingly in unison. The piece is harsh and ever-shifting. All the musicians are performing on instruments for which they lack expertise. This symbolizes the social and economic destabilization modern app-based gig work has wrought on society. A small speaker containing the audio feed from the conductor’s synth rig will be placed in a room outside of the performance space for curious audience members to go and listen while the band continues.
Artist Bios:
Artemi-Maria Gioti is a composer and researcher working across the disciplinary boundaries between art, science and technology. Her research interests include computational intelligence, musical robotics, sonification, as well as collaborative and participatory sound art. She studied Composition at the University of Macedonia (Greece), Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Music and performing Arts of Vienna, and Composition - Computer Music at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM). She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree at the same university. Since 2018 he is the Principal Investigator of the artistic research project Inter_agency, hosted at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) in Graz and exploring the potential of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for electro-instrumental composition.She is a member of the electronic duo intra-sonic.
Visda Goudarzi is a music technologist working at the intersection of audio and human-computer interaction. She is an Assistant Professor of Audio Arts and Acoustics at Columbia College Chicago and works as the principal investigator (PI) for the Austrian funded project COLLAB (Collaborative Creativity as a Participatory Tool for Interactive Sound Creation) at Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) in Austria. Prior to Columbia College she worked as an artistic and scientific researcher at IEM Graz, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, and Vienna University of Technology. Her research interests include auditory interfaces, interactive and participatory design, sound and music computing, live coding, and data sonification. Visda holds a Ph.D. in Sound and Music Computing from (IEM) a MA in Music Technology from Stanford University, and a MS in Computer Science from Technical University of Vienna.
The Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists (SoVISA) is a group of blind and visually impaired sound artists, composers, and thinkers working to strengthen the presence of sonic based art in museums and art education. As a community we collaborate on projects, discuss the challenges and rewards of being blind artists, and support each other’s creative goals both through live collaboration and artist-to-artist feedback. Recent SOVISA collective performances include appearances at the Art Institute of Chicago Block Party, the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, and Agitator Gallery. Individual SOVISA members have current exhibitions in four countries and have presented work locally at venues including the University of Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theater, Gallery 400, and Links Hall.