Somewhere between May and September (2024)

Rob Lye

‘Somewhere between May and September’ (2024) is a new spatial work exploring a wandering through a fractured stretch of recent English history, an ancient Cornish hedgerow, a far-right march in central London, waves breaking on a beach, underwater recordings of a countryside lake and spatial synthesis are compiled to explore the passing of time and an underlying sense of political anxiety. It continues an arc of work exploring the perception of time and its relationship to a larger idea of aural history.

Please see Rob’s website here.

Einleitung zur “Legende der heiligen Elisabeth”

Franz Liszt

St. Laurenzen church in St. Gallen, Switzerland, has recently finished the installation of an immersive church organ.

The project is the brainchild of St. Laurenzen organist Bernhard Ruchti.

This recording is Take One of his interpretation (“Einleitung zur”) “Legende der heiligen Elisabeth” by Franz Liszt. It was recorded on a hot summer night in June 2024 with a spcmic by Hans-Martin Buff, complete with an introductory thunder clap in 3rd order Ambisonics.

I was in the tide, the tide was in me

Nik Rawlings

Originally composed for a multichannel A/V installation and created on residency in Alexandria and Glasgow with Cairo-based visual artist Ghada Eissa. The work considers episodic and fluid temporality in Bipolar experience. For this event, an excerpt is being shared. The closing section has been mastered for Ambisonics, fluttering vocal harmonies are scattered around the soundfield, while spatial parameters are modulated by vocal amplitudes. 

Please see Nik’s portfolio here.

Diamonds and Rust (2024)

Freya Dooley

This work is an audio version of a film of the same name. Diamonds and Rust follows an invisible protagonist, Jane, as she finds and secures an undefined and precarious office job, where the manager wears designer socks and the hot desks remind the team of their vulnerability to replacement. In an attempt to define her own value, Jane oscillates between states of usefulness and dysfunction, production and refusal, eventually organising increasingly long cigarette breaks with colleagues: meetings where everyone contributes, and noone actually smokes. 

Diamonds and Rust was co-commissioned by Site Gallery, Artes Mundi and Wales Venice 10. The soundtrack features vocals and music composed in collaboration with Emma Daman Thomas (Islet).

Jan Meneima - Travel field recordings log

Jan is sharing some field recordings from his travels recorded immersively in Madeira, Surinam just above Brazil and Bath.

Jan is also sharing some of the technical aspects of our Mobile Immersive Audio Lab.

Please see Jan’s profile here.

Signal to Noise (2024)

Joseph Hyde

Signal to Noise is the latest performance project by AV artist and BSU Emeritus Professor Joseph Hyde. Usually it’s performed live and with immersive visuals, but a special sound-only edit is presented here. Signal to Noise brings together long-term obsessions with ‘noisiness’ in the broadest sense. It is concerned by how order can emerge magically from chaos in complex systems. We can see this both in nature and in man-made systems - from starling murmurations (a key part of the visual dimension of the work) to analogue modular synthesizers (which you’ll hear here). These ideas were core to the cybernetic movement in the 60s which continues to be relevant today, even into current ideas around machine learning. The sound, in 16-channel AmbiX format, was orginally developed for the Amoenus ambisonic system at Iklectik in London, and later development was at EMS in Stockholm.

Becoming Tree (2024)

Annie Mahtani & Dion Dobrzynski

Becoming Tree is an immersive audio retelling of Olaf Stapledon’s science fiction story, ‘The Man Who Became a Tree’ featuring an augmented forest soundscape, inviting audiences to listen to the inner life of a tree.

Created by Professor of Electroacoustic Composition and Practice at the University of Birmingham, Annie Mahtani, and environmental humanities scholar and Impact Fellow at Bath Spa University, Dr Dion Dobrzynski.

We are playing an excerpt during our programme. To listen to the full version of Becoming Tree, please click here.