From motion-tracked musicians to interactive sound installations, the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival is all about blending the sonic with tech.
Kicking off on 26 February and hosted at Plymouth University, the festival will feature innovations in the way we make music, all under the banner of “Frontiers: expanding musical imagination”. “This festival was originally created to showcase the research we developed in the university,” says Eduardo Reck Miranda, professor of computer music, who with co-director Simon Ible launched the inaugural festival more than a decade ago.
Among the installations and performances is an offering from Nuria Bonet Filella, who is building on dynamic data visualisations of dark matter by Ralf Kaehler and colleagues at Stanford University.
Her aim is to shed light on this mysterious substance by the creation of accompanying soundscapes that are mapped to various parameters of the data, linking for example the concentration or spatialisation of dark matter with aspects of the music such as pitch or volume.
“Our ears perceive very different things to our eyes, so by combining the visual aspect and the sonification of the same data I am hoping we can understand more,” says Filella.
Also on display will be an interactive installation, Embodied iSound, by Marcelo Gimenes that uses Bluetooth beacons and a smartphone app to allow the audience to influence the music they hear, with their movements changing the composition in real time. “As they move, this will change the sound behaviour,” says Gimenes.
Ultimately, Miranda hopes the festival will offer a taste of the future: “I think people will get a glimpse of what is to come in music technology,” he says.
Frontiers: Expanding Musical Imagination runs from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 February.
