Oslo based British composer Natasha Barrett’s Innermost is a collaboration with US digital artist Marc Downie (OpenEndedGroup). Following their previous collaboration at the Pompidou Centre, Paris last year, Innermost fuses ambisonics, 3D sound and stereoscopic projection. Points of light and sound are animated around the sound system in patterns that each possess their own characteristic ‘gait’ – a unique way of moving and behaving.

Innermost will be premiered this coming September at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway and performed at EMPAC in Spring 2020.

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.

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

Stick around at the end of Accepted Students Day to hear Rensselaer's own orchestra in its home, the spectacular EMPAC Concert Hall. This Spring, the Orchestra presents classics of the orchestral repertoire: Sergei Prokofiev's colorful suite of music from the film Lt. Kijé depicts the imaginary life of a Russian soldier brought into the world by way of clerical error. Tchaikovsky's rousing Slavonic March musically describes the rise out from under tyranny of an oppressed people. Finishing the program is Beethoven's grandest orchestral essay, his Symphony no. 5 in C Minor.

In the Fall of 2018, the Rensselaer Orchestra performed at New York City's Carnegie Hall. Hear why this flagship student ensemble has been so celebrated within the Rensselaer community.

Though it has been claimed that “Musical interface construction proceeds as more art than science, and possibly this is the only way that it can be done” (Cook 2001), the role of engineering in interface design and construction is equally major, albeit sometimes neglected (Medeiros & Wanderley 2014). Given the unique physical and cognitive requirements of musical performances, it is essential that performers have access to responsive and reliable interfaces, many times including innovative engineering solutions (Hollinger & Wanderley, 2015).

In this talk I will discuss ways to address these complementary claims, building upon several examples of musical interfaces developed at the IDMIL, McGill University, including tools to help prototype musical interfaces (Malloch et al. 2014; Calegario et al. 2017).  

Dr. Marcelo M. Wanderley runs the Input Devices and Musical Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill University. He is also a researcher at INRIA Lille, which is the Institut National de Recherche en informative automatique, a European center specializing in human computer interaction.