Electro Dream Space

Remove the visible and be touched by sound. Experience a transformation of the world, the way it behaves, and the traces that it leaves behind in this unique electroacoustic music concert unfolding inside EMPAC's high-density loudspeaker arrays, featuring hundreds of loudspeakers.

Natasha Barrett will perform this public concert as part of the Spatial Audio Summer Seminar, which takes place at EMPAC July 18-20, gathering audio experts, musicians, and composers for an intensive exploration of sound in space. Works will include one of Barrett’s latest compositions in high-resolution Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, as well as recreations of works not previously heard in full 3D.

Natasha Barrett is a composer and performer of acousmatic and live electroacoustic concert works, sound and multi-media installations, and interactive music. She is a leading voice in the new wave of artists working with Ambisonics, 3D sound, and its contemporary musical context. Her work is commissioned, performed, and broadcast throughout the world by festivals, organizations, and individuals, and includes a regular schedule of portrait concerts and featured programs.

Her inspiration comes from the immediate sounding matter of the world around us, as well as the way it behaves, the way it is generated, and by systems and the traces that those systems reveal. These interests have led her into the worlds of cutting-edge audio technologies, geoscience, sonification, motion tracking, and some exciting collaborations  involving solo performers and chamber ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for new music and the way it can touch the listener.

Barrett will spend two weeks before the concert as artist in residence at EMPAC, where she will collaborate with the digital artist and filmmaker Mark Downie on the new work Innermost, which will be premiered this coming September at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway. Innermost will be performed at EMPAC in Spring 2020.