CANTI SPAZIALIZZATI #15
Listening scores

Monika Szpyrka - Mikroskopia (2023) *

Jakub Majchrzak - Strzał w kolano (2023) *

Mar Sala Romagosa - d.e.a.f (A third ear to a silenced body or how many homes a body has) (2023) **

Maciej Michaluk - Quick Response (2023) *

Paweł Kulczyński - Silent Treatment (2023) *

* - word pemiere, Canti Spazializzati commissioning
** - Polish premiere

Monika Szpyrka
Mikroskopia (2023)

Silence and darkness may contribute to the activation of listening. Sounds appear somehow closer, at times even magnified, as if observed through an acoustic microscope. It reveals, if only for a moment, hidden life. We can trace acoustic paths, move through sound’s diverse physical states, and discover the intertwining of simplicity and complexity in natural regularity. The sounds may be considered organic – a kind of tissue to look at, touch, and shape at will. The darkness also allows one to sense the signs of presence, with no certainty as to whether it is real or merely imaginary, to base conjectures on mishearing and delusion.

 

Jakub Majchrzak
Strzał w kolano (2023) *

A solo music project developed at the invitation of Canti Spazializzati by Jakub Majchrzak, until recently involved in such bands as Kurws and Przepych, a member of Wrocław’s independent music community CRK Salka. Majchrzak is drawn to unstable, vital and unattainable structures that are both controllable and resisting control. While he considers composing as a method of tracing the paradoxes of a composition, improvisation serves to test its resilience; it is about shaking its structure. Acts of self-vandalism on the work’s grammar expanding over time. In defence of the digressive character of the music-making flow.

Majchrzak does not usually deal with electronic music, so the quadraphonic work he chose to undertake also had to be tangible and based on his preferred conventional means – in this case, a classical guitar (quarter-tone tuned) plugged into four separate guitar amplifiers via a piezo microphone. The amplifiers’ output signals are given expressive identities by means of horizontal, vertical or still processing of the sound texture itself.

 

Mar Sala Romagosa
d.e.a.f (A third ear to a silenced body or how many homes a body has) (2023)

The project combines poetry, visuals and music to voice the shadow of a silenced body. The concept grows out of a state of constricted consciousness where the mental picture is not complete. Hence, interpretation has an open path. Mar Sala Romagosa, an avant-garde flutist who is moving away from the tradition by exploring her voice through tubes. The experience is created during the performance involving the body as initiator and terminator of the sculptural process. The elements interact with each other and myself in a dialogue of mutual exchanges, where the voice turns into a spatial sound element becoming a third ear and transcending the containing body. Allowing all the sounds to come out, the known, the unknown, the sweet, the sad, the urgent. This performance will not just be an audience stimulus, but also responds to the visual senses, in order to appeal to the ear awareness and its conditioning. The repertoire transcends conventional playing techniques with live electronics, stage lighting, body percussion and a varied range of instruments such as piccolo, flute, paetzold flute and prepared electronics.

In the series of pieces called "on intimacy" Ruud Roelofsen attempts to capture the sound world of the phenomenon called ASMR. "on intimacy II" in its original form is an open score based on a deconstructed text; the deconstruction is such that the sounds do not register as speech and have lost their meaning. This specific version–"on intimacy IIa"–is written for piccolo and electronics in close collaboration with Mar Sala Romagosa.

When the brain has the conflicting information, it tries to make sense of that conflict and depending of what type of modality is providing more salient information, that information might override or at least combine with the other information.

These series of ear manipulation pieces are meant to invite the audience to immerse themselves - their ears - into a new dimension of the private and public sonic surroundings. It is a proposal to discover and question the ways we hear and how we listen. And maybe, to find lost sounds that have been ignored.

Attached to the ear manipulation pieces there is a legend with the meaning of every sign from the graphic score. Please read the signs and perform them apart to understand the physicality of the gesture as long as the affect it has.

 

Maciej Michaluk
Quick Response (2023) *

For a score to represent a musical work, it should serve two functions: descriptive and prescriptive. On the one hand, it should facilitate the formation of the work’s sound image by the listener, and, on the other, it should also provide the basis for its execution.

While knowledge of the (textual and graphic) codes used to create a score certainly facilitates the perception of a musical work, it still puts the listeners at best in the position of passive interpreters. This changes radically when we present them with an interface that allows them to control sound events here and now. In this way, the listeners are, as it were, given back the voice in their own cause.

 

Paweł Kulczyński
Silent Treatment (2023) *

Composition developed with and around the audiosphere of the Wrocław section of the Oder River, using mic and hydrophone recordings, and the recordings of object vibrations and magnetic fields. Its narrative and sound structure draws on climate and weather processes, the activity of humans, animals and plants, and the river itself. It addresses the issue of the relationship between the city and the river through the use of sound tools aiming to identify important relations associated with this key urban artery.

The multi-channel concert is part of a series of compositions exploring the borderlands and interrelationships of the audiosphere of the expanding human civilisation and the adjusting natural world in the context of the climate crisis. This edition is primarily focused on field recordings made around and along the Wrocław section of the Oder River and its bridges, including those produced using hydrophones and seismographs, as well as electromagnetic wave sensors. We present both minimally processed and highly modified materials, as well as those used for synthesis based on the data derived from them. They range from remote urban landscapes across the seasons to microsounds of rustling water, crumbling ice, the activities of birds, amphibians and insects, to the electromagnetic noise of urban infrastructure and the resonance of grand bridges.

The composition’s integral element consists of spatial information built directly into the features of the synthetic instruments. Each midi note is directed and positioned in space independently of the others by means of a complex chain of sound synthesis and propagation, allowing the dispersion of individual elements of the instrumentation in a virtual, omnidirectional acoustic space. This method differs significantly from the common adaptation of stereo tracks to multi-channel configurations and offers a refined richness of spatial sound in electro-acoustic compositions.

The 2022 Oder environmental disaster has drawn attention to the need to recognise rivers as legal persons in public debate. When we mindfully spend time by the river, it appears to us as a subject, a person. Meditating on the apparent ‘nothing going on’, listening to the soundscape above and below the surface of the water, and gazing into its depths, are the elements of deep listening practice. The spectral aspect of the multi-channel electro-acoustic composition Silent Treatment is significant both with regard to the cited and modified field recordings, as well as the synthetic instrumental elements. Numerous tonal, harmonic and narrative transformations occur at a slow pace; similar phenomena can be observed in the city’s audiosphere viewed from the perspective of the river. Organic micro-distortions of unequally tempered scales introduce multiple resulting tones and instability in slowly evolving clusters. Some seemingly static parts of the recordings were captured by a slowly rotating set of microphones, producing a distinct animation of the perceived space and shifting sound planes. All the components of the composition come together in an arbitrarily defined, abstract and unreal acoustic space, in which the elements of instrumentation move freely and intertwine with field recordings in varying proportions, creating an absorbing auditory universe inspired by the Oder River in Wrocław.

The composition was created as part of the 2023 Mayor of Wrocław Scholarship.

A day after the concert Paweł will lead the workshop Canti Spazializzati Sound Lab about the spatialization techniques which are used in his composition.