Compute & compose
“In an age where everyone’s got a laptop what are the implications for the computer as musical instrument?”, asks the 2005 Australian Computer Music Conference. To find out, be there, listening, talking and workshopping.
The conference will be held July 12-14 in Brisbane as part of the Queensland Festival of Music with 9 concerts over 3 days featuring Garth Paine (see page 12), Gordon Munro, Donna Hewitt, Jeremy Yuille, Robin Fox and Cat Hope. Works commissioned for Queensland new music ensembles Topology and Elision can also be heard. The concerts will incorporate multi-speaker surround sound playback systems, so audiences are in for a substantial aural treat.
Among the sounds will be words of wisdom and vision in papers delivered by, among others, Ross Bencina, the renowned audio software innovator and AudioMulch creator, and Katharine Neil, a leading game sound designer and programmer for Atari. Conference topics include artificial life, software development, instrument building, performance practices and psychoacoustics.
Bencina graduated as a specialist in electroacoustic music composition and moved on to sound design, performance, and software development. In 2002 with composers Steve Adam and Tim Kreger he formed Simulus, an improvising electroacoustic ensemble. He is the creator of AudioMulch Interactive Music Studio, software for music composition and performance (www.audiomulch.com). Bencina is currently a visiting researcher at the Music Technology Group, Audiovisual Institute, University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Katharine Neil has been game sound designer and programmer at Atari Melbourne House since 1998, creating the sound for 7 published game titles on various platforms while producing audio-based ‘demos’ for game console hardware in her spare time. Neil has written on the subject of censorship for RealTime.
For hands-on pleasures, Friday July 15 is dedicated to workshops hosted by leading computer music practitioners.
ACMC05 will be hosted at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin Grove, with some off-site concerts at White House Art Space.
RT
2005 Australian Computer Music Conference, July 12-14, workshop
July 15.
RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 6
