After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of his kind, and Sanra, his mahout, embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. A story of discovery and mourning in which the spectator becomes the protagonist, the film follows the duo as they are stalked closely by a group of poachers, who begin to die one after another under mysterious circumstances. 

Carlos Casas’s Sanctuary offers a mesmerizing sonic and visual cinematic environment that immerses the audience in the sounds, textures, and hues of the jungle. Projected on the mega-screen in EMPAC’s Concert Hall, and featuring live Ambisonics, Wavefield Synthesis, and infrasound to induce a deep sense of physical closeness with the elephant, Sanctuary presents a unique sensorial experience that collapses the boundaries between art, nature documentary, and adventure film.

Chris Watson collaborated with the bioacoustician and elephant communication expert Joyce Poole to record the acoustic sphere of elephants. Tony Myatt developed the infrasound speaker and implemented the spatial audio. Both will perform live on the speaker systems installed throughout the hall. This is the US premiere of the project, which was previously presented at the Fondation Cartier, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels.

Okeanos takes the audience on an auditory underwater journey around the globe. Years of recordings from pole to pole will be performed with three audio systems in the Concert Hall: a dome of 64 loudspeakers used to project sounds around the audience in an Ambisonic environment, a Wave Field Synthesis array, consisting of hundreds of small speakers placed above the audience, and a custom-built infrasound speaker used to create the lowest frequencies, which can be more felt than heard. The composition will include songs, signals, and vibrations from the smallest crustaceans to the loudest and largest animals ever to have existed.

Chris Watson and Tony Myatt will perform a version of the work specifically developed for EMPAC’s Concert Hall and its audio systems. This new version will also integrate sound materials recorded on the Northeastern coast of the US and humpback whale recordings from the Silver Banks (Dominican Republic).

The concert this evening will inaugurate a 36-channel “Ambisonic” loudspeaker installation in EMPAC’s large Studio 1. The program will feature a selection of electronic compositions written specifically to reach listeners from all spatial directions. Electronic music composed for loudspeaker systems built around and above the audience has been pursued for over 60 years; since its inception, EMPAC has been creating listening and production environments for sound to move freely through space beyond the confines of traditional stereo or surround-sound systems. 

The pieces played during this concert are mostly only available to the public in reduced stereo versions, since there are not many concert halls and performance venues where they can be experienced in full multi-channel sound projection. This concert offers a rare opportunity to listen to this music as it is meant to be heard. The program will include Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge from the mid 1950s, as well as Edgar Varese’s Poème électronique, which was famously performed in 1958 at the Brussels Worlds Fair over hundreds of loudspeakers in a pavilion designed by the architect Le Corbusier. The very first computer-music work created with “the simulation of moving sound sources,” Turenas by John Chowning (1972), will also be presented, along with newer works from the 21^st century offering a wide variety of different musical styles that use loudspeakers as “ensemble.”

The pieces will be performed by Hans Tutschku (Harvard University), who is a composer, performer and teacher of music created for two ears and many loudspeakers. 

For more information about this event please visit the RMA Facebook event.

In response to the (age-old) complaint that there's nothing new happening in music, EMPAC modestly announces New Nothing, a series of concerts featuring national and international musicians working in the hybridized terrain of experimental-leaning popular music. These groups exemplify a global reality in which music hasn't just crossed borders but made them irrelevant. Popular music will never be the same.

Pianist Marilyn Nonken and cellist Steven Marotto were in residence in EMPAC's Concert Hall to record composer Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981).

This annual event, featuring student performances as part of an electronic dance music mini-festival for the entire incoming class, is the culmination of a two-day workshop. Incoming freshmen participating in the workshop have the opportunity to work with fellow students and EMPAC staff to learn firsthand about the technology and work that goes on behind the scenes at EMPAC. The hands-on workshop paired students with EMPAC mentors, who guided them through the creative process with lighting, audio, video, and stage technologies.

Please see event at arts.rpi.edu for more information.

EMPAC’s Spatial Audio Seminar was a gathering of composers and programmers discussing technologies such as Wave Field Synthesis and High-Order Ambisonics. Taking place over five days, this intensive seminar covered the technical, theoretical, and practical issues surrounding spatial audio platforms. A collaboration with IRCAM and Stanford University’s CCRMA, the program gave participants experience with hundreds of channels of audio, including EMPAC’s new 500+ speaker wave field array.

On the seminar’s second night, workshop leaders Markus Noisternig and Rama Gottfried joined with experimental cellist Okkyung Lee to perform a program of music composed for spatial audio systems. In addition to playback pieces by composers Natasha Barrett and Olga Neuwirth, Lee and Gottfried performed the latter’s piece, Fluoresce, and Lee improvised with Noisternig, who spatially manipulated the performance through an Ambisonic dome.

andPlay recorded its debut album playlist, which contained works by Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, and Clara Iannotta. Described by the multimedia website I Care If You Listen as “enthusiastic champions for new music and collaboration” and performing “with a welcoming and dynamic spirit,” andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire through performing rarely heard works and commissioning emerging composers. The “genre-busting” New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, has commissioned over 30 works.

playlist was released September 27, 2019, by New Focus Recordings.