Speakers that Speak To You is a newly-commissioned work by DeForrest Brown Jr., which traces the trajectory of techno’s machine-like aspects and its connection to embodied dance and live music histories. Considering the genre’s origins by activating the spatial qualities of sound, Brown extends his musical and theoretical practice through the advanced sonic infrastructure of EMPAC’s Studio 1—Goodman.

The project opens up to the implicit origins of techno that Brown traced in his book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture (2021), wherein he has historicized techno as a genre rooted in a powerful political and cultural force that emerged within underground architectures and industrial spaces in Detroit. Brown's exposure to early Afrofuturist and jazz musicians, Black southern marching band compositions, and second-wave techno producers of the 1990s led to the development of his Black radical politics within the techno genre. The project will engage with recordings from the artist’s new album Techxodus, which operates as a musical successor to the ideas in his recent publication. Additionally, Brown plans to spend the next year developing tracks and performances around his notion of a “free-jazz”-inspired take on techno. With this new piece, Brown continues his research by reactivating cultural soundscapes and critically mapping the sounds of techno through the mode of a listening session.

DeForrest Brown Jr. is producing Speakers That Speak To You in residence at EMPAC with curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, Sidney Pettice, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

The 2022 President’s Holiday Concert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will take place on Sunday, Dec. 11, at 3 p.m. in the Concert Hall of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) on campus.

The event is free, open to the public, and will be followed by a reception. RSVPs are required.

The concert, titled “Many Voices, One Song,” features a selection of music that will celebrate the diversity and shared purpose of the Rensselaer community. In addition to the Rensselaer Orchestra and Concert Choir, the program will feature the inaugural public performance of the Rensselaer Jazz Ensemble and a featured performance of Indian classical music by first-year RPI student and tabla virtuoso Vivek Pandya.

“As Rensselaer enters a new era of growth and renewal, moving forward as one community, it is wonderful to watch how our annual holiday concert is evolving,” said Rensselaer President Martin Schmidt. “This is a great opportunity to reflect on the diversity of our experiences and make new memories together in anticipation of a bright future.”

Under the direction of Lecturer Robert Whalen, the orchestra will perform Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a musical tribute to the service and sacrifice of health care workers in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The jazz ensemble, directed by Lecturer Jillian Willis, will offer a cross-section of jazz history, including the standards “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Nature Boy” alongside the contemporary composition “Running Out of Time.”

"During our first semester, the Jazz Ensemble students strived to understand the nuances of improvising a story through sound, revere the importance of melody, and value the art of active listening,” said Willis. “In this performance, we graciously present our lessons of the blues, the American songbook, and contemporary jazz in celebration of the President's Holiday Concert."

Other highlights of the program include works by Mxolisi Matyila, Lili Boulanger, Arvo Pärt, Edward Elgar, and an arrangement by student composer Rose Bollerman. The program will close with Antonin Dvorak’s thrilling and celebratory “Carnival Overture.”

Using the medium of music, this program foregrounds remembrance and joy; it celebrates the dedication and creativity of our Rensselaer students; and it affirms the fact that — whatever our differences — we can join together in solidarity to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Sound artist, composer, and performer Bora Yoon premieres her newest work PHONO KINETIC (formerly SPKR SPRKL) for spatial audio, interactive projections, and gestural, digital, and acoustic instruments. PHONO KINETIC is a one-woman performance and z-space poem tracing the journey of a carbon atom, articulating the many cycles, scales and recombinant alchemical forms life takes; a contemplation of time, within sonic and spatial environments and dreams visualized in an enveloping theatrical landscape.

As a multi-instrumentalist and established electronic musician, Yoon performs signature soundscapes, made up of spoken stories, hauntingly beautiful soprano vocals, synthesized music, found sounds, and unusual acoustic instruments. In PHONO KINETIC, Yoon gestures using superDraw, a custom software instrument created by visualist Joshue Ott, paired with the hardware of Imogen Heap’s Mi.Mu gloves. A powerful tool, superDraw responds to Yoon’s on-stage movements, establishing graphic digital and architectural set design and dramatic visuals in real time, animating Yoon’s temporal, sonic, and spatial compositions.

With various configurations of holographic, multi-channel audio utilizing EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, PHONO KINETIC conjures worlds of sound through auditory dream language, shadows, and kinetic manipulation. Multimedia theatrical director Ashley Tata directs this part-electronic concert, part-sound-object theater event. Yoon premiered an excerpt of this new work, titled SPKR SPRKL at TIME:SPANS contemporary music festival in NYC, August 2021, where EMPAC presented newly commissioned musical works for the Wave Field Synthesis Array in a series of concerts.

Paper Pianos​ is a full-length theatrical work co-directed by Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian and South African-American director Nigel Maister. The work combines the testimonies of four refugees and resettlement workers with intricate hand-drawn animations of Syrian visual artist Kevork Mourad to vividly depict the dramatic emotional landscape of displacement and resettlement experienced by refugees throughout the world.

Performed live by the 18-piece contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, Paper Pianos invites EMPAC audiences to contemplate the dislocation, longing, and optimism of refugees.

Tonight's performance of A Kind of Ache begins at 7PM.

“What would it feel like to be the majority?”

A Kind of Ache is a multimedia installation and concert from composer Sarah Hennies, sculptor and conceptual artist Terry Berlier, and electroacoustic duo The Living Earth Show that reimagines a world designed from and for a queer identity.

The drums-and-guitar duo will play on Berlier’s sculptures alongside Hennies, using objects, music, and their imaginations to wonder “What would it feel like to be the majority?”

The Living Earth Show–guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson–is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists, seeking to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded. This performance marks the beginning of a multi-season residency for The Living Earth Show at EMPAC, offering engaging and exciting large-scale work from artists with whom they work closely.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves) is an electro-acoustic performance and installation for EMPAC’s Concert Hall by Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navas and Venezuelan composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares. It is performed by American percussionists Taylor Long, Robert Cosgrove, and Clara Warnaar on an array of playful instrument-sculptures by Navas, which fuse iconic motifs of 20th century modernism with traditional boat-building tools and techniques.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas is an expansive work of visual art and music inspired by the Aula Magna, the Central University of Venezuela’s auditorium, and the artworks commissioned for the campus by Venezulan, European, and American modernists by its architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the early 1950s. The Aula Magna houses Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling (1953), known locally as “nubes” (clouds). It is the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall to reflect optimal acoustics. This feature resonates with EMPAC’s Concert Hall, which houses the first fabric ceiling to span the full-length of the hall to shape the sound.

Deeply embedded in the afterlives of iconic modernist artworks, Navas’ sculptures, installations, and performances trace the use and misuse of such works over time as they are circulated as reproductions and appropriated away from the site and context of their original making. For Cuando las nubes eran las olas, Navas’ sculptural instruments, costumes, and scenography and Escalona-Mijares’ multi-layered approach to electro-acoustic composition interweaves the architectural properties of the Aula Magna with its thick social and sonic history in an exploration of the relationship between sculpture, acoustics, and space.

Composer and artist Miya Masaoka will premiere a new piece written specifically for EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array and present a talk on recent research and work in spatial audio composition.

Inspired by the three-dimensional and perspectival painting techniques developed by artists during the 15th-century Italian Renaissance, in her new project, Masaoka seeks to draw parallels between those revolutionary conceptions of space with the current possibilities for sonic spatiality in the 21st-century.

Masaoka has been working with early systems of hardware and software of spatialization including ADAT, C Software, and acoustic strategies including choirs, ensembles, and the BBC Scottish Orchestra in a spatial context. An award-winning composer, she has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Luciano Berio Rome Prize in Musical Composition, the Fulbright among many others. She is a Professor at Columbia University and directs the MFA program in Sound, a hybrid program with the Computer Music Center and Visual Arts. In the photograph above, Masaoka is shown with a Dan Bau, and she sometimes references the monochord as a clear and physical representation of the spectral harmonic relationships of intervals and natural tuning systems.

Wave Field Synthesis is a special way of creating sounds in space. The EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis system (EMPACwave) is a unique loudspeaker set-up with hundreds of speakers that was developed and built at Rensselaer over the past several years. While Wave Field Synthesis technology is not new, the design of EMPAC’s array is acknowledged by international experts to finally allow musicians to create music to the refined degree that has been promised by this theory of sound generation for over four decades.

A four-year archival, research, and multi-genre storytelling project on the life journey of a Lyricist. PROPHET: The Order of the Lyricist, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped Hip Hop’s Emcee/Lyricists.

Tracing the evolution of artist Mental from Emcee to Lyricist, 7NMS invites audiences to enter a world of mind power, bravery, self-determination, and triumph- facets of the artist's quest for self-realization.

PROPHET makes its own imaginative evening-length performance contribution to the scholarly, civic, and ancient bodies of radical Black expression. Light and moving-image visuals as well as multi-channel audio installation will accompany the live dance and vocal performances. Such environments layering multiple media are the company's signature aesthetic; previous work like Memoirs of a Unicorn featured a built multi-sited environment of sculpture, light, sound, movement, costume, and projection. PROPHET is an extension of this practice that acknowledges the Emcee and Lyricist’s role and presence more explicitly.

While taking its primary shape as a live performance at EMPAC, PROPHET will also manifest as an ethnographic memoir, an experimental film, and an album.

Sound artist and musician Tim Bruniges will be in residence with support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Through the use of live, regenerating audio systems his performance and installation projects aim to foreground the volumetric, tactile experience of sound. During his residency Bruniges will work with live audio, tape, and EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array to develop new work.

In 2019 Bruniges was awarded a PhD for his research on live sound installation practice and was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and Research Excellence award from UNSW Art & Design. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from COFA, UNSW, and a Bachelor of Arts (Mus) with distinction from the University of Western Sydney. His works have been exhibited in Australia, USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Iceland, Russia, and Dubai, and written about in Artsy, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. His work is held in private collections and at Artbank Australia. 

Supported by the Flanders Department of Culture, Youth and Media, Marco Fusi is in residence in Studio 1 with Patricia Alessandrini to work on EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis array.

Fusi’s work with Wave Field Synthesis expands his research and performance practice through a collaboration with Alessandrini that explores acoustic feedback through technological and instrumental interaction. Fusi plays the viola d'amore (VdA), a baroque instrument that can generate and control acoustic feedback through performance techniques. Working with Wave Field technology enhances the possibilities for feedback within and outside the VdA, blurring the distinction between virtual and physical sonic sources.