detuning a tuning by Anna Xambó @ BEAST @ Centrala (March 11, 2022)
Live coding piece detuning a tuning. BEAST @ Centrala: Anna Xambó Sedó, Milad K. Mardakheh. Centrala, Birmingham, UK. March 11, 2022.
About the event
BEAST was taken into the city for a Centrala take-over weekend and welcomed sound artists, composers and researchers for two evening gigs that explored the huge breadth of creativity and sub-genres in the world of electroacoustics and sound art.
Apart from the immersive performances by Milad K. Mardakheh and the featured guest artist, Anna Xambó Sedó on Friday, March 11, 2022, the evening also featured short performances by BEAST MA composers: Henry Eady, Michael Ryan, Joshua Dowling, Pardis Nikbakhsh and Sam Bland.
On Saturday, March 12, 2022, there were two more concerts by the improvising laptop trio, Raw Green Rust formed by Jules Rawlinson, Owen Green and Dave Murray-Rust followed by another concert featuring Dushume (Amit D. Patel), Maria Witek and Jake Williams.
Further info:
Program notes
“detuning a tuning” is a new live coding piece for four speakers that explores the sonic boundaries between tuning and detuning. The aural explorations consist of deconstructing audio recordings of Greg Chryssopoulos tuning an RX-6 Kawai Piano at the School of Music, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, which were recorded in February 2017. The tuning process is listened to by self-built algorithms in SuperCollider and used to control an abstract synthesiser. This process generates an evocative “décollage” of textural sounds, merging locally and spatially with the original recordings. This performance will premiere the material of a forthcoming album.
Anna Xambó is an experimental electronic music producer and researcher. Biased for being passionate about extreme digital minimalism and a past performer on bass guitar, she likes to explore the boundaries of digital sound focusing on low frequencies, compulsive rhythms, and noisy textures. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Music and Audio Technology at De Montfort University.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Scott Wilson and Annie Mahtani for the invitation, Milad K. Mardakheh for the event promotion and administration, Simon Smith for excellent technical support, and all the old and new friends met during the event. A big thank you to Greg Chryssopoulos for letting me record one of his piano tuning sessions at the School of Music of Georgia Tech.