A short while ago I went to an event which Tŷ Cerdd had organised - The Business of Composing. One thing that was mentioned several times related to the way that most composers had a portfolio career; I suppose in this case what was being discussed was the part-time nature of composing, and the the other work that we do to support this. To be honest I'd never thought of it before and it had only come up when I'd discussed funding with the Arts Council of Wales (a while ago), it wasn't terribly clear how I was supposed to define myself. When you have publications on music, technology and are based in academia, but also compose and perform work it's difficult to classify yourself and slot yourself into one of those clearly labelled 'boxes' that we all use to try and understand the world. I suppose all this is changing, particularly in the Electroacoustic world where people are programmers, academics, artists, composers out of necessity. After having a piece performed (by the Swansea Laptop Orchestra) at the CODI Electronic session at Bangor Music Festival (8/2/2019), the work was then played again at Tate Modern as part of the 'Living with the Internet of Things" event. @matthew.thistlewood has asked me to share the blog post and video, so here you go. I hope that it's of interest to people.
Blog Post http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/newsroom/2019/02/08/musical-composition-and-its-impact-on-culture-and-research/ Related Video
Sound Cloud - Pen Dinas in Voice Here are a couple of recent research papers that may be of interest: Richard Ramchurn, Alan Chamberlain and Steve Benford (2018) “Designing Musical Soundtracks for Brain Controlled Interface (BCI) Systems” in Audio Mostly 2018 - Sound in Immersion and Emotion, 12-14 September, Glyndŵr University, Wrexham, North Wales, UK. ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243274.3243288 - Open Access
Maria Kallionpää, Alan Chamberlain and Hans-Peter Gasselseder (2018) “Under Construction – Contemporary Opera in the Crossroads Between New Aesthetics, Techniques, and Technologies”, in Audio Mostly 2018 - Sound in Immersion and Emotion, 12-14 September, Glyndŵr University, Wrexham, North Wales, UK. ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243274.3243306 - Open Access
Twitter - @Alan_yn_Aber