Tagged / music composition

BU Sonic Arts concert featuring Jonty Harrison

You are warmly invited to the first BU Sonic Arts concert of 2023/24. Come and experience the magic of immersive, spatial music and sound!

We are delighted to welcome composer Jonty Harrsion, an inspirational and acclaimed figure in electroacoustic music. This is a rare opportunity to hear Harrison’s work projected on our multichannel loudspeaker system, here in Bournemouth University’s Screening Room, Poole Gateway Building, Talbot Campus. The programme will be a historical retrospective, charting his evolving compositional practice, moving from stereo to 8-channel, to extensive multichannel, and then to ambisonic sound. Jonty is Emeritus Professor of Composition and Electroacousitc Music at University of Birmingham.


http://www.electrocd.com/en/bio/harrison_jo/

Date: Thursday 7th December 2023
Time: 17:30-19:30
Location: Screening Room PG217, 2nd Floor, Poole Gateway Building, Talbot Campus
Admission is free but please book a ticket : https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bu-sonic-arts-concert-featuring-jonty-harrison-tickets-760552030597?aff=oddtdtcreator

International Composer Residencies for BU academic

I was recently selected for two composer residencies in Sweden, first at Elektronmusik Studion (EMS), Stockholm (June 2023), and then at Studio Alpha, Visby International Centre for Composers (VICC), Visby, Sweden (September 2023). Both studios feature immersive multichannel surround sound systems of extremely high quality, enabling me to explore in-depth the compositional possibilities of spatial audio. 

Studio 2 at EMS Stockholm

Studio Alpha at Visby International Centre for Composers

During these residencies I was able to focus on the use of ambisonic sound. Ambisonic sound is used in many areas of the creative industries, such as music and sound recording, music creation, cinema and TV sound design, and game audio. The format allows for spatial audio ‘environments’ to be created within a virtual listening space using computer software, positioning and moving individual sounds around the listening area. Most significantly, this spatial audio can then be decoded for any playback system – from binaural for earbuds, conventional stereo, and on to immersive audio systems of 64 loudspeakers or more, yet always retaining the composed spatial image.

This scalability of ambisonic sound makes it extremely flexible when presenting immersive audio work in different venues of different sizes, and with different loudspeaker layouts. At EMS, I was able to work using their 15.1 Genelec sound system, which features an array of ceiling loudspeakers, as shown in the photo.

These residencies gave me fantastic opportunities to commence composing new electroacoustic work whilst exploring the ambisonic technique in-depth, using a variety of software tools in different music studio environments.

Ambrose Seddon, Department of Creative Technology and EMERGE