phonon~ association is organizing the first summer school of spatial sound in North Bohemia. The project aims to actively exchange knowledge and experience in the field of surround sound between beginners and professionals in this field from associations in the Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany. The event is presented as an artist residency and symposium open to the public. The outcome of the symposium will be the MELUSINES concert, where the participants of the residency will present their new compositions.
The program of the symposium will take place from the 16th to the 30th of July in Staňkovice u Litoměřic. The concert will take place on 29 July at the National House in Ústí nad Labem.
Immersive media have entered the cultural sphere thanks to the efforts of cinema and art experimenting with perception and expanding the experience that the spectators carry away with them when leaving a cinema, gallery, concert, or theatre performance. Spatial audio is one of many examples of immersive media. We know this for instance from most modern cinema halls, where the use of Dolby Atmos has become the norm rather than a special attraction. Despite this growing popularity, there is still a lack of available spaces and institutions in Europe that allow individuals who are not part of the academic community or do not have sufficient financial resources to create in this format.
Residency
The main objective for which the project was created is to provide the opportunity for two weeks of focused work with immersive media without charging for the use of the platform. The participants of the residency, which include both professionals in the field of sound composition and beginners whom wish to learn about creative work with Ambisonics, were selected through an open call. Nearly 50 projects were submitted to the call. In the end, a total of 13 artists from the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Cyprus and the United Kingdom will take part in the residency.
In addition to the fixed media format, i.e. closed compositions, the project places a strong emphasis on performativity, i.e. the live presentation of a sound work that responds to the audience and is created in the present moment.
Löblhof & Artgrund / Stankovice u Loun
Symposium
The symposium program is designed in collaboration with the residency partners to provide the most detailed insight into the world of spatial sound. Participation in the workshops and presentations is also open to the public and is completely free of charge. The residency and symposium will be held in English at the Löblhof & Artgrund in Stankovice u Loun, unless otherwise stated.
The main partner of the project is the Austrian association OTTOsonics, which will support the residency with its open-source platform for ambisonic sound. The open-source phenomenon essentially means sharing freely available programming code without any fees, i.e. most open-source projects operate on a volunteer basis. In the case of OTTOsonics, those interested in spatial sound can download printouts from the knowledge database available on the association’s website and print out any amount of loudspeaker boxes based on a template thoughtfully developed for the platform.
This way, OTTOsonics are helping interested parties take the first step towards building their own Ambisonic sound system.
Ambisonics is a format for working with sound where a complex sound field is synthesized in computer software. The approaches can range from transferring real environments to studio conditions using multi-channel recording, or synthesizing complete sonic worlds. This can range from intimate scales for a few individual listeners to large-scale concerts and sound events. The format is modular, and the work can be presented in an 8-channel setup as well as on 22 or 49 channels for instance, where the resolution of the material being played back is increased, meaning greater precision in locating individual sound sources as well as a deeper connection of the listener to the soundscape being experienced.
Symposium program
Manu Mitterhuber, founder of OTTOsonics, will join the educational program by hosting a workshop describing the pitfalls of operating an immersive sound system from both a technical and programmatic perspective. Felix Deufel, founder of the German cultural center ZiMMT, will prepare a workshop on multi-channel recording and a presentation of the software tool Grapes for audio performance in surround sound. Enrique Tomás from Tangible Music Lab, based in Linz, Austria, will present his research on haptic interfaces for performance in immersive systems. The studio has already received several awards from the ARS Electronica festival for its contribution to the field of sound art.
Jiří Suchánek, a lecturer at the Brno University of Technology, founder of the SVITAVA platform, developer and audiovisual artist, will present his original interface, which enables control of spatial sound using light beams. The practical workshops will be followed by philosophical lectures by Vít Pokorný and Martin Nitsche, on rhythm as a biodynamic principle and the phenomenology of sound environments.
➨ Detailed program with times can be found on the Facebook event page and on the phonon.cz website.
Concert – MELUSINES
At the concert, the following artists will present their compositions created during a two-week residency on the 32-channel OTTOsonics sound system: STURMHERTA, Dimitris Savva, Jakob Gille, Identity work in progress, LORELEI & Ben Meerwein, Daniel Nulty & Ingrid Frivold, Pablo Torres Gomez, Veronika Mayer, Vojtěch Leischner & Pavel Husa and Shannon Soundquist. The participants of the artist residency will be joined by Jan Trojan and Roman Zabelov with a presentation of their project WAVED LANDS, a joint composition for Roman Zabelov’s unique amplified accordion and Jan Trojan’s sound projection in the spatial sound of the acousmonium. The concert will take place on 29 July at the National House in Ústí nad Labem at 18:00.
➨ Attendance at all lectures is completely free, although registration is required for the symposium. You can register by sending an email with the subject „summer school participant“ to phonon.crew@gmail.com, mentioning which workshops and lectures you wish to attend.
➨ Pre-sale of tickets for the final MELUSINES concert is available through the GoOut platform.
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