Future Sound - Listening in Space

AME Ambisonic Dome. Stauffer Communication Arts
December 2nd 6:00pm & 9:00pm
December 3rd 2:00pm & 5:00pm

Tito Rivas - La oreja y el caracol (The Ear and the Snail) (world premiere)

Elainie Lillios - Ice Fields (world premiere)

Gabriel José Bolaños - Plink (world premiere)

Sarah Belle Reid - Sublimate (world premiere)

Garth Paine - Float (world premiere)

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Tito Rivas:

Tito Rivas (México) is a musician, sound artist and researcher. He studied Audiovisual Communication at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and music at the Autonomous School of Music. His work has focused on experimentation with sound and visual media as a creator, researcher and cultural manager. He is the musical director of the Ensamble Psycoacústico and keyboardist for the electronic rock group Pez Diablo. His solo project of experimental electronics and sound art is entitled Mosses/Mosgos. He served as artistic director of the Center for Radiophonic Creation in Mexico City. He is part of the founding team of the National Music Library of Mexico.

He has taught courses on sound creation and radio production at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana and at the Center for Design, Film and Television. Winner of the International Radio Biennial award in the Radio Art category in 1998 and in 2012. Sound art pieces have been presented and exhibited in venues and festivals such as the International Sound Art Festival, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Museo Ex-Teresa Current Art, World Water Forum, Sound Fragments, University Museum of Sciences and Arts, National Music Library, Iberoamerican University, University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), Alameda Art Laboratory, RadioUNAM, Spain Cultural Center, MediaLab Prado Madrid, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Casa del Lago, Carrillo Gil Museum.

His artistic interests have explored soundscape, site-specific sound installation, multi-channel sound composition, radio art, radio drama, sound documentary, and sound poetry. He has also developed a theoretical investigation on the phenomenon of listening and the theory of the sound object from a philosophical approach based on phenomenology and epistemological archaeology. He writes the monthly column "Resonances: News from the land of sounds" for Santo y Seña Magazine. He is currently deputy director of programming and sound experimentation at the National Music Library of Mexico and curator of the Sound Space of Casa del Lago (UNAM). He lives and works in Mexico City.

La oreja y el caracol (The Ear and the Snail)

Featuring Sarmen Almond, Juan Pablo Villa, voices. Ensamble Lluvia de Palos (José Navarro, Samir Pascual, Luis Miguel Costero), percussion, and the collaboration of Felipe Pérez Santiago.

This piece arises from wondering about the origin of music, about its birth as a gesture detached from the body in dialogue with the sound objects of the surrounding nature. We could imagine with P. Quignard the ancient archer who, after the heat of the hunt, plays with the string of his bow until the first harmonic is released; or evoke the moment when two stones were made to collide and in the hypnotic repetition of their sound, rhythm, cycle and the articulation of time was founded.

Elainie Lillios:

Acclaimed as one of the “contemporary masters of the medium” by MIT Press’s Computer Music Journal, Elainie Lillios creates works that reflect her fascination with listening, sound, space, time, immersion, and anecdote. Her compositions include stereo, multi-channel, and Ambisonic fixed media works, instrument(s) with live electronics, collaborative experimental audio/visual animations, and installations. She also performs live electronics with ESC Trio collaborators Chris Biggs and Scott Deal.

Elainie’s work has been recognized internationally and nationally through awards, grants, and commissions, including a 2020 Johnstone Foundation commission, 2018 Fromm Foundation Commission, 2016 Barlow Endowment Commission, and 2013 Fulbright Scholar Award. She won First Prize in the Concours Internationale de Bourges, Areon Flutes International Composition Competition, Electroacoustic Piano International Competition, and Medea Electronique “Saxotronics” Competition. She has also received awards from the Destellos International Electroacoustic Competition, Concurso Internacional de Música Electroacústica de São Paulo, Concorso Internazionale Russolo, Pierre Schaeffer Competition, and others. She has received grants/commissions from INA/GRM, Rèseaux, International Computer Music Association, La Muse en Circuit, New Adventures in Sound Art, ASCAP/SEAMUS, LSU’s Center for Computation and Technology, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Ohio Arts Council, and National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. She has been a special guest at the Groupe de Recherche Musicales, Rien à Voir, festival l’espace du son, June in Buffalo, and at other locations in the United States and abroad. 

Reviews of Elainie’s compact disc Entre Espaces (available on Empreintes DIGITALes at electrocd.com) praise her work for being “… elegantly assembled, and immersive enough to stand the test of deep listening” and as “…a journey not to be missed.” Other works are published by Centaur, Innova, MSR Classics, Ravello, StudioPANaroma, Musiques et recherches, La Muse en Circuit, New Adventures in Sound Art, SEAMUS, Irritable Hedgehog and Leonardo Music Journal.

Elainie serves as Director of Composition Activities for SPLICE (www.splicemusic.org) and as Professor of Creative Arts Excellence at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. elillios.com

Gabriel José Bolaños:

Gabriel José Bolaños is a Nicaraguan/American composer of solo, chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music. He frequently collaborates closely with performers, and enjoys writing music that explores unusual techniques, structures, and timbres. He is interested in computer-assisted-composition, auditory perception, linguistics, graphic notation, improvisation, and modular synthesizers.

Bolaños is currently Assistant Professor of Music Composition at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in composition, analysis, music technology, and acoustics, and co- directs the PRISMS contemporary music festival. He received a BA in music from Columbia University and a PhD in Composition and Theory from UC Davis. His music is published by BabelScores.

Bolaños has received numerous awards and grants for his work, including a Fulbright US Scholar Grant, the Suzanne & Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award, a Research & Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a residency at CMMAS in Morelia, Mexico, a commission from Vertixe Sonora and Hong Kong Baptist University, and a commission from CIRM and Festival Manca in Nice, France. Beyond his work as a composer and teacher, Bolaños has also written music for film, theater, and dance, has experience performing as a flamenco dance accompanist. He also enjoys swimming, gardening, and playing folk music with his wife, Megan.

Sarah Belle Reid:

Sarah Belle Reid is a performer-composer who plays trumpet, modular synthesizer, and an ever-growing collection of handcrafted electronic instruments. Her unique musical voice explores the intersections between contemporary classical music, experimental and interactive electronics, visual arts, noise music, and improvisation. Often praised for her ability to transport audience members through vivid sonic adventures, Reid's sonic palette has been described as ranging from "graceful" and "danceable" all the way to "silk-falling-through-space," and "pit-full-of-centipedes" (San Francisco Classical Voice).

Reid holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from California Institute of the Arts, with a research focus on the development of new electronic instruments and musical notation systems as interfaces for exploring temporal perception and co-creation. Her debut album for trumpet and interactive electronics, "Underneath and Sonder," was released on pfMENTUM in October, 2019. In March 2021, she released an electroacoustic EP titled “MASS”, featuring trumpet, voice, electronics, and amplified objects.

Garth Paine:

Garth Paine is a composer, scholar and acoustic ecologist. He crosses art-science boundaries with his community embedded work on environmental listening and creative place-making in addition to his environmental musical works and performances. His research drives toward new approaches to acoustic ecology and the exploration of sound as our lived context including the application of VR in health.

In 2018 he was researcher/artist in residence at IRCAM (Centre Pompideau) and Center for Arts and Media (ZKM). He continues to collaborate on research at IRCAM.

His passion for sound as an exhibitable object has given rise to interactive environments where the sonic landscape is generated through gesture, presence and behavior and several music scores for dance works using realtime video tracking and bio-sensing and musical compositions that have been performed in Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, South America, Hong Kong and New Zealand and, in 2014, Korea, Macedonia, France, and UK.

Paine's current research centers around the Listen(n) Project, on acoustic ecology project that focuses on field recording and community building. He co-directs the Acoustic Ecology Lab (AELab@ASU) with Professor Sabine Feisst, which he established in 2016. He has a long history of composing musical works from his field recordings and engaging in environmental work through sound. Recent examples include the Site Works project at Bundanon, Australia for which he composed the work Presence in the Landscape and his work Becoming Desert for the Listen(n) Symposium concert in 2014.

Paine is internationally regarded as an innovator in the field of interactivity in experimental music and media arts. He is an active contributor to the International NIME conference wher he was keynote speaker in 2016. He is on the editorial board of Organised Sound Journal, which he has also guest-edited on several occasions. He lead the Taxonomy of Interfaces/Instruments for Electronic Music performance (TIEM) projects with partners McGill University and the Electronic Music Foundation, resulting in on online database of current practice and opening up the discussion of a taxonomy for classification of new instruments to assist research in the field.

He is a professor in interactive sound and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and professor of composition in the School of Music at Arizona State University. From 2012-13, he was interim-director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and then associate director in 2013-14. From 2011-2104, he was undergraduate chair for the Digital Culture program. He is affiliate faculty at the Center for Biodiversity Outomes and a Senior Sustainability Scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory

Garth's work can be found at activatedspace.com.