The Singing Bridge by Michael Barnhart is a piece for percussion trio with recorded electro-acoustic music inspired by and utilizing samples from the sonic environment surrounding the Cincinnati- Covington Bridge across the Ohio River. Built in 1867 by John A. Roebling, it is an elegant steel spider-web towering 230 feet above the low water mark, with two central suspension cables that contain 5206 small wires each. It was Roebling's second to last design, predating his triumphant Brooklyn Bridge by 16 years. With the advent of automobiles, a steel grate driving surface was added that gave rise to it's popular name The Singing Bridge, from the sound that tires make while humming across it. During the Great Depression, my grandfather braved the heights with the work crews that painted it. As a child I often begged my mother to cross it so we could sing along. Finally awakening to the personal and public significance of the sound I began regularly visiting the bridge to record it and to assemble an audio catalog of the humming tires, tugboat engines, foghorns, cable clanks, calliope music, and blasts of radios from car windows and pleasure craft that are all part of the sound life there. In collaboration with Percussion Group Cincinnati I developed a palette of corresponding instrumental sounds, many of which use rolling objects as a means of excitation similar to the tires. Tiny phrases trimmed from recorded days, were mixed, duplicated and retuned on a computer, allowing the piece to combine the bridge's sonic vocabulary with several instrumental translations. The bridge sounds are altered and superimposed more and more as the piece progresses representing the way our memories are edited by the mind the longer they are held. Cloud Types for Auditors applies granular synthesis techniques to render sound masses asperceptible volumes. These masses are presented as a parade of seventeen noise-likeclouds; each cloud itself being composed of thousands of micro sound events, or noise-bursts, distributed variously throughout the simulated space. Whether heard consecutivelyor in parallel, these slowly transforming ‘clouds’ might suddenly emerge or vanish, grow,shrink, rotate, retreat, coalesce into a dense sound-mass, or dissolve into scattered points.This application of the technique of spatial granularisation allows the listener to hear‘through’ the sound-field, as it were, and to hear multiple simultaneous, spatiallyseparated ‘sound-points’.While the sonic quality is much to the fore, the listener can focus on the micro sound event– the clicks and bursts of each grain – and at the same time attend to the super-soundobjects, the mutating clouds structures, as they gradually describe and then envelope thespace. Cloud Types for Auditors deals exclusively with these relatively extreme temporalranges while over-stepping the intermediary rhythmic time range. The spatial distributionof the points within each cloud, whether dense or rare, static or dynamic, is a definingelement in our perception of both temporal density and overall narrative. The Golden Vanity - Alan Goodrich. The past is a form of residue, building onto the present, co-creating it. My piece takes an important song from my childhood and cements it in the present with the aid of my voice. By singing along, I'm not only breaking the rules the recording proscribes (playing the naughty child), but also breaking down the past as past - it is always present here and now, embodied in our physical selves. I carry everything with me, my experiences accumulating like dust on a record or reverberations in space. What we dismiss everyday as dirt, noise, or mere reflections are ghosts that haunt us. Ladonnatudina IV by Jeff Herriott was designed for continuous performance using headphones. It consists primarily of a repeated chord that changes slightly throughout its 14 minute duration. The piece creates an intimate aural environment for the listener, inviting them to focus on subtle changes in speed, timing, and tuning as other materials within the texture. The piece is circular in nature, can be started at any point, and listened to for any amount of time. Ladonnatudina IV has been presented as a stand-alone concert work at festivals Florida, Indiana, Scotland, New York, and elsewhere. A 4-channel installation version of the piece will be presented this June-July at Atrium Sound Space in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Men Seeking by Scott Kildall - Men leave voicemails describing themselves and what kind of woman they want to meet. The voices range from proud and hopeful to desperate and broken. Each call reveals a distinct vulnerability, and encourages us to relate to a stranger’s constructed emotional state. The listener is meant to be on headphones and walking through space, aurally isolated and yet physically present. Cninstruction - This relaxing exercise by Click Nilson should reveal the full (anti?)-algorithmic splendour of the listener's mind as they non-deterministically parse the messages concealed within. For private headphones listening only, using a portable audio player. Raw Data by Maggie Payne. I used shortwave broadcasts as the sole source for this piece. There is only one brief section which has processing, the rest being raw, unprocessed data, so it is full of static, distortion, clicks, pops and all sorts of wonderful artifacts. This open window to the world seems to make the world bigger and more precious/precarious than if every broadcast were received with perfect clarity. The piece moves from communication used in the early 20th Century to the end of the century. It's as if the entire 20th Century/world were compressed in time/space.
Adam Di Angelo (b. 1978) is a composer and acoustician. He lives in New Jersey, USA. Carlo Cerati (b. 1980) is a composer and music producer. He lives in Cuneo, Italy. Born in 1971 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Michael Barnhart was composing by age 10 due to the efforts and encouragement of dedicated public school teachers. High school experiments with tape and sequencing led to formal composition study at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (ccm) where he completed the Doctor of Musical Arts degree. Barnhart studied with Brad Garton, Marta Ptaszynska, Allen Otte and for several years with Mara Helmuth as she developed the Center for Computer Music (ccm)^2. More recent projects include the creation of a rural studio in a public high school funded by the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund, and recordings and performances as a member of the group Current Quartet. He has received commissions and support from Meet The Composer, the GE Fund, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, US-Mexico Fund for Culture, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Third Practice, Ensemble Sirius, and Percussion Group Cincinnati. Barnhart serves as assistant professor of Music and Media at Shawnee State University. Fergal Dowling is a composer of electronic, instrumental and vocal music. His workscombine electronic and instrumental writing in aurally rich forms that often employ real-time interaction and multi-channel sound spatialisation.He studied composition at Trinity College Dublin and from 2002–2005 held the Elizabeth Maconchy Composition Fellowship, which allowed him to pursue a Ph.D. in composition atthe University of York.As well as composing, Fergal is an active performer and promoter of new music. He hasperformed his own computer-based interactive music throughout Europe with varioussoloists and groups such as Ex-Machina, Concorde, Ensemble Chimera, ProjektgruppeNeue Musik Bremen, EAR Ensemble, Grup XXI and Improvised Device. His works havebeen presented in concert and as installations in Ireland, England, Germany, Sweden,Canada, the USA, and Brazil. From 2004–2007 he was co-director of the EAR Ensemble organising international electroacoustic music festivals in Ireland: Sounds Electric ’05(2005), EAR-Plugged (2006), and EAR-Drum (2007).His work as a researcher has produced software-based compositional aids and audioprocessing tools (using Csound, CommonMusic, and MaxMSP), which deal mainly withsound spatialisation, and real-time interactive strategies.He lectures in music technology at Dundalk Institute of Technology, and is represented bythe Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin. Alan Goodrich Jeff Herriott (b. 1972) is a composer who hopes to inspire the imagination. In much of his work, he uses recording and computing technology to enhance and augment the natural sounds of instruments, with a goal of creating inviting aural spaces. His pieces have been performed and commissioned by ensembles and players including bass clarinetist Michael Lowenstern, the Electronic Hammer, percussionist Greg Beyer, clarinetist Guido Arbonelli, Arraymusic, duo Contour, and CONTACT contemporary music, and have been heard at a number of different festivals and venues in North America and abroad, including ICMC, Visiones Sonoras, and the MATA Festival. Jeff is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, where he teaches courses in audio, multimedia, music technology, and composition. He completed the Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo (principal studies with composer Cort Lippe), having previously received degrees from Florida International University and Middlebury College. Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Philosophy from Brown University. In 2006, he received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain and Romania. He has received fellowships and awards from organizations including the Kala Art Institute and Turbulence.org. Click Nilson is a Swedish avant garde codisician and code-jockey. He has explored the live coding of human performers since such early self-modifiying algorithmic text pieces as 'An Instructional Game for One to Many Musicians' (1975). He is now actively involved with Testing the Oxymoronic Potency of Language Articulation Programmes (TOPLAP), after being in the right bar (in Hamburg) at the right time (2am, 15th February 2004). Maggi Payne is Co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area (USA) where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She also
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