jwilzewske: video

Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Experiencing ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

W   hen at last Justine arrives, he’s at the piano
     the hammers strike and rise
with his fingers, and the pedal’s damp
   shifting carries through the instrument
as waves echo through the frame of a ship...
Now he thinks perhaps the music’s
More like a map of rain hitting water—
He’s moving closer to her without moving;
And how wonderful to be held from her
   at last by nothing but the song's duration—”
  — Wayne Miller, ’What Night says to the Empty Boat’, p. 73.

I ’d first listened to Mara Gibson's new 16:30 work commissioned by Mark Lowry of newEar Contemporary Music Ensemble in July. The DVD has Mark performing vibraphone, log drum, woodblock, gong, tam-tam, songbird whistle, cymbal, and miscellaneous percussion, accompanied by video imagery and film by Caitlin Horsmon. Bob Beck rendered a high level of engineering and production values achieved in this recording.

T he beauty of the chromatic intoning of vibraphone, punctuated by tolling woodblock, drum, and, less frequently, other instruments captured my interest from the first listening. The glisses and pitch-bent post-processed sounds of the vibraphone acoustically paralleled the imagery, the lateral motion of water in the foreground and in the distance; the water droplets in air, falling under gravity in parabolic arcs; the globules of water separating from a stream; the intercalating pastel cloud layers.

B ut now several months later—having just last week returned to the midwest after a period at our home on the East Coast, and having driven through some of the areas of hurricane-caused power outages and natural devastation—these textures and narrative arcs of ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ evoke different meanings for me. The watery surfaces now seem ominous and obscure what lies beneath.

T he reflections imply sky and sun, but these seem untrustworthy. The eddies and vortices imply structure and hidden currents, turbulence: the violence and indifference of Nature to humanity.

T he speed of the current makes abundantly clear how rapidly we will be swept away, annihilated, pointlessly. The accelerando/ritardando phrasing imparts a large-scale 2+ minute hypermeter to the piece.

N o animals or other sentient creatures are seen anywhere in Horsmon’s imagery here... bulk matter only, liquid and air. The abruptly changing frame-rate... declares a capriciousness of our frame of perception, together with Nature’s propensity to precipitous, emergent change, against which our human wishes and needs are respectively futile and irrelevant.

T here is midway through the film a montage of stop-action stills, with different transparency/saturation settings, calling into question what is motion. It brings to mind horror film sequences built up out of successions of freeze-frame stills.

T he very high-speed video of the water droplets, together with digitally-stretched contrast and/or edge-sharpening, gives heightened perception of the separateness of the individual [droplets].

W e have here a sort of ‘video-monitor-as-painter’s-canvas’ effect... a palimpsest of successive masks and over-writing of previous images and surfaces.

T he film draws our attention to the very thinness and 2-D nature of our existence in the biosphere, between the sky and the depths of water.

I n fact, most of the film is of deep water: the first 5:45 is sky; second 6:00 is water; third 4:45 is water hurled into sky—with gradual transitions between these segments.

T he piece conveys feelings of loneliness and alienation that arise from our understanding that we are alone in the universe and insignificant in its workings. Underneath the performer’s punctuated observations and soliloquy about fate and the stream of events that occupies our attention while we are alive is a certain forboding, a fear of nothingness.

T hat we are in some inescapable way alienated from Nature is an old concept, going back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century. It is also a notion that coheres with our current environmental problems, insofar as our estrangement from Nature involves a hubris that forecloses upon developing an awareness and regard for how we depend upon Nature, in such a way that we would stop harming Nature.

R elinquishing whatever agency I have in the presence of the bulk matter around me reveals my beholdenness to the agency of other humans who are living now and who will take care of me in my dying days and who will outlive me, and the susceptibility of my remains and the residue of my life’s work to the agency of all creatures and natural processes that persist beyond my tiny lifetime.

T he harsh contrast and unblinking lens of the camera—together with the continuous, unflinching sound of the music—announce the abject hopelessness of our achieving any anonymity in the flesh, or participating in any genuine reciprocity with Nature.

S uch existential worries are absent when reciprocal trans-corporeality involves the definitely spiritual, or “more than human”, or involves an ambiguity or reversibility afforded by the hardly-human-at-all, or as-minimally-human-as-possible, as in Wilderness or Zombieness.

O ne can make some sense then of this piece’s assertion that we might be estranged from the flesh without that meaning either that such estrangement puts us really outside the flesh, or that landscapes including sky and water are themselves not fleshy. We are estranged, every bit as much as sky and water are patently fleshy.

T his is a superb composition, an excellent film, a beautiful performance, an excellent recording—sufficient to propel an evening’s meditation and beyond.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Kari Johnson & Robert Burke: ‘Unity’ Concert

M any things to be enthused about last night, regarding Kari Johnson’s and Robert Burke’s KCeMA performance at Unity Temple.

Christopher Biggs – The Ends of Histories (piano, electronics, and video, 10-min)
Peter Swendsen – Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is (instrumented bass drum and electronics, 8.5-min)
Jeff Herriott – Velvet Sink (piano and electronics, 13-min)
João Pedro Oliveira – Liquid Bars (vibraphone and electronics, 12-min)
Scott Blasco – Queen of Heaven (piano and electronics, 23-min)

C hristopher Biggs’s ‘The Ends of Histories’ for piano, digital video and audio represents ideas regarding how history must end—any history, all Histories—including religious ones, socio‐political ones, geological histories, all of them. A primary-color-heavy, apocalyptic video of watery scenes and splotches of color is displayed on a screen adjacent to pianist Kari Johnson. The high-contrast, posterized quality of the video’s color palette adds to the non-human, bichromatic wolf-vision, Terminator-vision, Predator-vision, insect-vision viewpoint of the camera/cameraperson. The piano part is full of sforzando emphases, a hyper-percussive quality that is meant to mate with the punctate, unforgiving synth and cosmically abject waveform-samples on the digital audio tracks. Ms. Johnson provided a spirited, empathetic reading, flawless.

T he materials represent the following conceptions of the end of history: (1) a polarized religious End Time whereby everyone either ascends into a Pleasant World or descends into Fire—a prophetic, spiritual, transcendent End that has appeared in many forms throughout history and is currently represented by the idea that there will be some kind of cataclysm at the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012; (2) a sociopolitical End in which capitalist democracy supplants all other ideologies...; and (3) ‘scientific’ Ends... mass-extinctions.”
— Christopher Biggs, composer.

P eter Swendsen’s ‘Nothing is not there and the Nothing that is’ for miked/instrumented bass drum and electronics draws its inspiration from violent forces of wind and weather. Forces of Nature are the architects of the sonic space and textures, and humans are compulsory respondents to natural events that are not of their choosing. The majority of the piece consists of canticle-like ‘verse-and-responsory’ segments, each about one minute in length. The human percussionist (Robert Burke) is entrained in Nature’s mesh (electronics, plus waveforms captured by mics—his own playing, digitally processed, delayed, pitch-bent, filtered, and replayed through monitors adjacent to him on-stage). The piece is written in such a way that the performer becomes progressively more mindful of the sonic consequences of each gesture, each mallet stroke, for what the future will become—and we in the audience experience this sense of the long-term impact that we have, on each other, on other species, and on the planet as a whole. Burke’s finesse with extended mallet techniques—including inducing aeroelastic drum-head vibrations with his hypothenar eminence and including wiping a stick fitted with a red silastic scrubber on the drum-head to evoke wild-animal growls and anguished roaring—were ‘Never-heard-anything-like-that-before!’ breathtaking.

A long the coast, this collision is a constant negotiation: the land and sea changing back and forth; the clouds that hover near the shoreline. In the interior, however, wind and weather do not negotiate.”
— Peter Swendsen, composer.

J oão Pedro Oliveira’s ‘Liquid Bars’ delivers sonic textures that marry live marimba/vibraphone with the electronically-processed signals from two large dynamic ribbon mics positioned at approximately mid-resonator-tube height on the left side and right side of the instrument. The electronically-processed sounds mutate spontaneously under software control, modulated by the mallet strikes. The increasingly complex polyphonies and polyrhythms are fascinating and unnerving—almost like interviewing a person whose acute psychiatric problems have landed the person in your Emergency Room in the wee hours of a Saturday night. The notion of ‘self’ is called into question, not only who the self or ‘selves’ are—the one(s) in front of you—but also whether the whole assumption that ‘who’ any of us are is stable and ascertainable is faulty. The composition has ketamine-like psychotropic properties. Gee, should FDA and DEA regulate this music as a Schedule II pharmaceutical? Powerful! Robert Burke’s 4-mallet technique is superb...

L et us imagine a Marimba who can produce sound... Let us imagine that the Performer and the Marimba would each have the possibility of dividing themselves into two or more instruments and performers—and imagine that all of these play against each other.”
— João Pedro Oliveira, composer.

J eff Herriott’s ‘Velvet Sink’ is a piece that explores the possibilities of the piano through both extended performance techniques and the use of digital audio. I worry that technical obsolescence tends to make works like these short-lived. Several works realized on the IRCAM’s realtime audio processor 4X, for example, can no longer be performed, because the equipment and operating-system become obsolete so fast and cannot readily be ‘refactored’ and ported to new configurations that can render the same effects as the old ones. There are maintenance problems even with well-structured software. Pieces for ‘tape’ survive: the process of recording will always be ported to more recent technologies, such as CDs, DVDs, and hard disks. Here, though, Herriott’s Max/MSP scripts and Peak and ProTools elements are fairly portable and are likely to withstand the technology changes of this decade and the next. Kari Johnson gives tactile, delicate treatments of the keyboard passages. Repetitive eighth-note patterns, very insistent, have undulating up-down microtonal bends applied to them, until the patterns feel like waves, a gentle-swell aquatic envelope—the sonic surface is a kind of ‘minimalism-built-out-of-complexity’, sort of oxymoronic jumbo-shrimp. Then she stands up, reaches into the piano and begins plucking strings with fingertips and fingernails; hammering piano strings with percussion mallets; modifying the placements of rubber erasers between strings, prepared-piano-style—at times music-box-like, at times chime-like.

S amples were recorded using both a baby grand and an out-of-tune piano-harp from a destroyed upright piano. Some of these sound snippets were then processed and patched to generate longer sound files that were, in turn, reconfigured with ProTools. Others, notably the plucked gestures in the third movement, sound in performance much as they did during the recording. Ultimately, a unique Max/MSP patch is used in performance to control the playback of the recorded material.”
— Jeff Herriott, composer.

S cott Blasco’s (b'79) Queen of Heaven, composed for Ms. Johnson and premiered last night, consists of five movements, each conceived as [a religious—] icon, concerning itself with a single idea, turning it over and over, meditating on it from different angles. ‘Queen of Heaven’ is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “a source of comfort and inspiration to Christians from the earliest years of their history,” in the composer’s words. Blasco’s composition, informed by his Master’s degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and degree in Composition and Music Theory from Calvin College, is a highly personal exegesis. The angels’ ‘greeting’ the Mother of God in the first movement conveys more of a confrontation—as in Awed and Struck Dumb—than a ‘greeting’. Sonority and terror appear linked in other of the movements as well, enough to cause most to have second-thoughts about the appeal of the Pearly Gates.

W hen I write music, I’m not writing it ‘for me’ per se. I see it as holding out an olive branch to my audience, and offering praise by mirroring the Creator.”
— Scott Blasco, composer.

K ari Johnson is a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory where she studies with John McIntyre. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Central Missouri, a master’s degree in Piano Performance from Bowling Green State University, and a master’s degree in Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Johnson has won or placed in competitions throughout the Midwest, including the MTNA Steinway Young Artist Competitions in Missouri and Illinois and the Venetia Hall Concerto Competition. An active performer of new music and chamber music, Ms. Johnson’s recent performances include collaborative concerts at the University of Central Missouri and Pittsburg State University, UMKC’s “Carter and Messiaen at 100” festival, and the CMS Great Plains Chapter 2009 Regional Conference. In the coming year she will perform at the 2010 UCM New Music Festival and the 2010 SEAMUS National Conference.

R obert Burke is also a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory. He has enjoyed an eclectic carrier performing, studying and teaching throughout Canada, The United States, Japan and Europe. He is originally from Alberta, Canada although for the last decade has hailed New Orleans as home. A strong advocate of new music, Mr. Burke has commissioned and performed countless solo percussion works in recital and held member ship in New Works Calgary, Syncronia (St. Louis) and Conundrum New Music Ensemble. He has also been a regular member of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, The Calgary Philharmonic and The Louisianna Philharmonic. As a drumset player, Mr. Burke has performed and toured with a remarkable number of recording artists in clubs and festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including Brian Lee, Johnny Sansone, Preston Hubbard, Frankie Ford, Cyril Neville, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Peter Nero, Marvin Hamlish, and Robert Goulet. He holds degrees from University of Alberta and the University of Calgary and has served on the faculty of the University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, the University of Missouri-Columbia and Central Methodist College.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

|| Eye Candy + Ear Candy || ≤ || Eye Candy || + || Ear Candy ||

Burtner’s ‘A’aa’, Grace Lai, flute, and Michael Abrams, clarinet

Grace Lai (flute) & Michael Abrams (clarinet) perform Matthew Burtner’s ‘A’aa’ at KcEMA event at La Esquina in Kansas City (03-DEC-2010)

H ow much information is carried in [neural] spike trains? Should we use the discrete theory or the continuous one? Spike times are not discrete, and discrete calculations don’t seem to give satisfactory answers. But, on the other hand, the continuous theory assumes a continuous space, and, from the available evidence, that is clearly too strong an assumption to be valid. What, then, is the [mathematical, topological, metric] space to which spike train phenomena belong? While it might be possible to define the sum of two spike trains by simple linear superposition, it isn’t at all obvious how to define the difference. There is no reason to expect spike trains to be Euclidean. For example, with regard to color perception, MacAdam ellipses in color space are wildly non-Euclidean.”
— Conor Houghton, Trinity College, Dublin.

T he acoustic and optic stimuli we received at the KcEMA event held last night at La Esquina in Kansas City were intense, sensorially immersive, emotionally evocative, and thoroughly satisfying in terms of their well-crafted dramatic arcs, accessibility, and comprehensibility. The seven works performed were selected from among 120 compositions that were submitted by composers from around the world, in response to KcEMA’s call-for-scores last Spring.

Elainie Lillios (composer), Bonnie Mitchell (visual artist) – “2BTextures”: 2-movement work of abstract animation “takes the audience on an integrated sonic and visual journey into a surrealistic environment influenced by Nature.” This is an edgy, edgy piece with extensive, dramatic use of surround-sound spatial movement of sound, around the Mackie speaker array that was deployed around the perimeter of the audience seating area. The computer-generated visual displays were very high-dimensionality animations, with many tens of thousands of dynamic objects projected in motion at each moment.
Bret Battey (composer, videographer) – “Sinus Aestum”: inspired by the eponymous plain on the Moon’s surface, smooth and dark, “articulated by threads of white dust, like the tips of flowing waves.” Music and video sequences are propelled by algorithmic processes that sample the digital imagery of surface topographic XYZ structures of this lunar plain. It reminds me of ‘Swarm’ software, with autopoiesis and phase-transitions generated by adaptive networks of communicating processes, much like nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations in statistical physics and chemistry, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and other processes in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Composer as Dawkinsonian “blind watch-maker” impersonal God, initializing the universe and letting Creation auto-unfold as it may. This is utterly phenomenal and without doubt one of the most elegant unifications of light and music I have so far had the pleasure to experience. Bravo!
Matthew Burtner (composer) – “A’aa”: includes field recordings of lava flows and associated sounds emitted by an active Guatemalan volcano, and expresses deep ecology at a primeval, violent, chaotic, low frequency-spectrum, butt-thumping level via the Mackie SRS1500 subwoofer—convincingly conveying the notion that human affairs are puny compared to stochastic geophysical mechanical processes: not only beyond our control but largely beyond the reach of human technologies even to monitor or measure or predict. Burtner’s Nature is uncaring; however, it is not malevolent. It does not wreak shock and awe on all sentient life-forms, human and otherwise. Instead, the shrieks and rumblings of the Earth pushing viscous molten rock are surprisingly benign; nothing is imminently about to explode; this Guatemalan volcano is somewhat like standing very close to a powerful waterfall that is not going anywhere and is not going to kill us. The lava cools, creating solid crusts, and these smash together under the pressure of still-molten material behind them, generating breaking, shattering sounds. [I very much liked the percussionist, mashing fist-sized lava rocks together. The miked grating, smacking sounds of these added high-frequency effects on top of the thundering volcano sounds. Grace Lai’s flute and Michael Abrams’s clarinet, both playing long, sustained notes with pitch-bending and harmonics rounded out this ecoexperience, complementing the timbres of the realtime volcano sounds.]
Jeffrey Hass (composer), Elizabeth Shea (choreography) – “Magnetic Resonance Music”: composed after his having an MRI exam, during which he “focused on bizarre, strident, extremely loud noises and complex rhythms the machine was making.” The world according to Hass has humans as guinea pigs, to whom things are done or happen passively while doctor-priests tell you to hold perfectly still. Shea’s choreographed movements are wonderful counterparts to Hass’s impulsive quasi-chaos syncopated music. Very cool!
Christopher Burns (composer) – “Sawtooth”: mash-up of elements of visual performance and sound-art. Instead of a personal sensor-area network with transducers capturing biomechanics signals from a live performer’s limbs and trunk (3-axis accelerometers, gyros, joint goniometer angles, etc.), Burns uses the video camera on the LCD monitor of his laptop computer to capture the motions of his arms and torso and hands, which he moves Theremin-style . Scene-recognition, edge-detection, and vector velocity computations from the realtime video image datastream of motions of the performer captured from the camera are translated in software and converted into both music and visual animation. The gestures are transformed into a rich palette of pitch set and crescendo/decrescendo and articulation and other motifs. Simultaneously, the gestures yield an interesting range of optical and animation effects, projected on the walls of the performance space. The spatial positions and colors and intensities and sizes (scale) where newly ‘launched’ animation objects appear depend on the position and speed and direction as well as ‘open-hand/closed-hand’ morphology of gestures that Burns makes with his hands. The result is a truly beautiful, cohesive integration of sound and light. [Just as with the recent ‘Faster Than Sound’ event at Aldeburgh, there are issues regarding our less-than-optimal notational idioms for scoring complex computer/electronic music – video/light-show compositions, to sufficiently specify what comes precisely when and specify interfaces for multiple disparate acoustic and optical effects in technology-interoperable, manufacturer-independent ways – so as to facilitate future rehearsals and performances by persons other than the composer/video artist/dancer(s) and on the equipments of future decades when the computers and other devices and patches we now have are long-since obsolete.]
Robert Ratcliffe (composer) – “Phoenix”: repeated resurrection from sonic ashes “explores the possibility of combining characteristic features of synthetic‐driven electronic dance music genres such as acid house and techno” with elements of instrumental and electroacoustic composition. I am reminded of the sounds that titanium robot insects make during the raves that precede their exuberant mating season. This thing is absolutely danceable—very, very nice.
Mike McFerron (composer) – “Prelude to You Brought This On Yourself”: sonically explores the physical and emotional abuse experienced by an openly homosexual youth, and “attempts to comment on a human collective intolerant of an individual voice, who is not asking to be understood or even heard, but simply allowed to exist.” The tintinnabulations of small bells are synchronized with images of people that flash in front of us, accompanied by short voice-over recordings, mostly of anti-gay hate-speech by conservative religious figures. This is a deeply moving, powerful testament to the courage and resilience of those who are harmed—be prepared to be moved to tears as you listen and watch: no mere electronic music or multimedia installation work, it is a galvanizing, effective example of art as political intervention to bring about a more just society.

Battey—‘Sinus Aestum’

W hy do light shows combined with music affect us in ways that are substantially different from either stimulus taken separately? Are there features of dynamic light displays that, when designed and synchronized with music, might optimally stimulate our senses and enhance the depth of our reception of the music?

I s there a point of “sensory overload” or “diminishing returns” as regards multi-sensory stimulation to accompany music? Conversely, why do periods of silence or darkness that sometimes arise in electronic music / lightshow events cause hallucinatory acoustic and optical experiences? How might composers understand and leverage these neurophysiologic phenomena to better advantage, expressively?

M ight there in the future be implantable prosthetic devices—or legal, safe, and effective “performance-enhancing medications” (esp. glutamatergic ones or GABA-ergic ones, to modulate corticofugal transmission)—that could further enhance or extend the scope of these tandem multi-sensory experiences?

W hen I fly on long trans-oceanic flights and listen to my iPod, my perceptions of music are distorted, sometimes in interesting, revelatory ways. How, if at all, would combinations of music and light in zero-gravity space environments differ? Could space-tourism include specially-composed music and accompanying light displays that would capitalize on the sensory biophysics anomalies up there, to produce an extraordinary kind of transcendence for the travelers?

M ight electroacoustic music-light compositions in the future be composed so as to be more effective for music therapy purposes, compared to current conventional “music-only” music therapy?

H ow do the experiences that people with autism-spectrum disorders have of light-sound compositions differ from others’ experiences?

T hese questions occurred to me last night as I listened to the performances of electroacoustic and computer-based compositions at La Esquina in Kansas City. (The same questions had dogged me when I attended last month’s ‘Faster Than Sound’ event in Snape.)

Burns – ‘Sawtooth’

N eural coding has traditionally been assumed to be one of rate-coding: the stronger the stimulus, the more action-potentials per second that a sensory neuron transmits, and the stronger the perceived sensation is.

H owever, it’s now known that in various sensory systems there is ‘sparse temporal neural coding’. The timing and univariate temporal pattern of action-potentials and sequences of clusters of them in a single neuron itself carries information. The bivariate or multivariate temporal pattern of concurrently-incident action-potentials in multiple neurons, which may perhaps be in different sensory pathways (such as acoustic nerve and optic nerve pathways, thalamic pathways, cortical pathways, etc.) may likewise carry [different] information.

T he processing of sensory information by the brain is difficult to understand, in part because of complex interconnections between the sub-cortical and cortical areas. connections between the thalamus and the cortex in the brain are reciprocal, with information carried both in “feed-forward” [peripheral nerves to thalamus to cortex] and “feed-back” [cortex to thalamus] directions. Sensory signals reach the cerebral cortex after having traversed many synapses along multiple pathways. Acoustic and optical signals interact in the thalamus and possibly elsewhere, in both mutally excitatory and mutually inhibitory ways.

C onor Houghton at Trinity College, Dublin, has recently examined spectro-temporal receptive fields and filter functions in studies of the neurophysiology of bird song, using analytic formalisms of van Rossum metrics and non-Euclidean spaces. Useful, I think, for human music analysis, and not just of multi-sensory music-visual works...

A nd Stephen Coombes’s and Paul Bressloff’s edited volume (link below) covers how the patterns of spiking activity provide a substrate for the encoding and transmission of information, that is, how do neurons compute with spikes? It is likely that an important element of both the dynamical and computational properties of neurons is that they can exhibit bursting, which is a relatively slow rhythmic alternation between an active phase of rapid spiking and a quiescent phase without spiking—which is altered by “cross-talk” (statistical cross-correlations) between the spiking patterns evoked by concurrent stimulation by music and light.

W ith regard to the ‘sensory overload’ question, there is a fair amount of recent research that is germane to this. In mathematics, the triangle inequality is a defining property of norms and measures of distance. This property must be established as a theorem for any function proposed for such purposes for each particular space. For example, the triangle inequality holds for spaces such as the real numbers, Euclidean spaces, L^p spaces (p ≥ 1), and inner-product spaces. Maybe it also holds for multidimensional perceptual spaces, such as ones involving simultaneous stimulation by sound and light.

E ven if these are one-of-a-kind experiences never to be quite the same twice, and even if the communication impact of multisensory stimulation is subadditive in terms of quantitative neurophysiology and biophysics, the qualitative expressive and aesthetic result of any particular performance can nonetheless be really, really wonderful. Congratulations to each of these composers/artists/performers on these fine compositions and ‘sensorially whelming’ performances at KcEMA!

M usical Ecoacoustics embeds environmental systems into musical and performance structures using new technologies. Ecoacoustics derives its musical procedures from abstracted environmental processes, remapping data from the ecological into musical domain. It draws on techniques of sonification, acoustic ecology and soundscape composition (e.g, Truax, Westerkamp, Keller and others). The data from nature may be audio information (from wind or ocean waves, for example), or it may be a signal produced from some measurable parameter such as temperature timeseries, geological change or seismic data, astrophysical data, and so on. Going beyond mere direct sonification, the composer develops a syntax on the basis of the recorded natural processes, and creates new patterns conforming to this syntax.”
— Matthew Burtner on ecoacoustics.