c)i @ ICAD in Washington, DC | 12 June, 2010

c)i has been invited to perform a concert at the 2010 conference of the International Community of Auditory Display,  at the Jack Morton Auditorium on the George Washington University campus on the 12th of June. The main portion of the conference will run from June 11-15.


ICAD is a forum for presenting research on the use of sound to display data, monitor systems, and provide enhanced user interfaces for computers and virtual reality systems. It is unique in its singular focus on auditory displays and the array of perception, technology, and application areas that this encompasses. In keeping with its theme Sonic Discourse—Expression through Sound, the conference will feature a relaxed day of demonstrations and poster presentations, and an evening concert of sonifications and compositions written expressly for the conference.


The concert draws attention to role technics (either electronic or human) in performance, in moving potential into actual expression. The acoustic and acousmatic works focus on the way in which the performers embody a hermeneutic interface between the physical and the musical domains. As a touchstone, the concert will feature the performance of several excerpts from Mark Applebaum's 'The Metaphysics of Notation,' a graphical score in which the cultural and technical practices of music reading are foregrounded by their absence, replaced by a complex and exquisitely rendered piece of visual art. By returning to this work, we hope to emphasize the role of the performer as interpreter in this hermeneutic exchange. The several works programmed focus on the translation of data into musical expression; David Sponike's 'Schnappschuss von der Erde' takes data from public databases at the World Bank, 23 categories of economic data referring to 187 countries, while Jorge García del Valle Méndez's 'road river and rail' uses live performers to emphasize and actorialize elements of the overtones of a Korean temple bell. Katharina Rosenberger's 'Torsion' establishes relationships between certain parabolic spirals found in sun flower heads and spectral analysis of the lowest octave of the piano, scaled to the temperate system. The other works emphasize the role of performers in musical performance as embodied technics. Paul Oehler's 'Protolith' bring spatialization into the domain of traditional musical parameters (such as rhythm, tempo, and pitch), while Douglas Boyce's 'Displacments 1b' explores the mediating function of the body of the performer, using spatialization to disembody and re-embody the the perceived source of sound in the performer. Finally, Cooper Baker's 'Signal Painting' analyses musical notation as geometry, discarding the semiotics of the system and producing an acousmatic metaphor for the ink and paper which is the very stuff of this tradition of music making.


I hope that those in the area can make the event!