Mexican Multichannel Music (MMM)
Concert Program for ASU DAME. Stauffer Communication Arts
Friday November 17, 5:00 pm. Stauffer B #123. $5. Buy tickets here.
Sunday November 19, 3:00 pm. Stauffer B #123. $5. Buy tickets here.
Curated by Tito Rivas
Fonoteca Nacional
This program integrates works by contemporary Mexican composers who explore soundscape, acousmatics and multichannel language as elements in their compositions. The collection of works presented in this concert have in common the question of the origin of sound, at different levels and dimensions: from the sonority that emanates from nature and its bio-ecosystems, through the coloration that urban landscapes acquire; and from there to the mediation that technology makes in them, producing syntheses that either imitate those natural elements or recreate other sound worlds arising from algorithms or artificial intelligence. A shared attempt to respond sonically to specific questions shares the research of each of the artists, which results in different aesthetic approaches.
Sprachen der Natur (2021)
Tania Rubio
15' 05''
CASI NADA (2012)
Manuel Rocha Iturbide
11' 20''
Pre(N)ature (2023)
CNDSD (Malitzin Cortés)
7' 56''
Post Antropocene Record No. X-482
Edmar Soria
8' 45''
La oreja y el caracol (The Ear and the Snail) (2022)
F. Tito Rivas
9' 02''
Total time: 52'08''
Program Notes
Sprachen der Natur (2021)
Tania Rubio
15' 05''
The piece is part of my artistic research on “Biomusic, from animal communication to music composition”. During the last 10 years, I have been recording different natural soundscapes, mainly in Latin America and central Europe. During my short lifetime, I have been listening and perceiving how the natural soundscapes are changing, getting noisier from the technophonic intrusion and quieter from the native species. With the current piece, I intend to transfer my listening and emotional experience of the transformation of the soundscapes through an imaginary aural world. The question that triggered the origin of the piece was: How do the anthropogenic effects in the natural ecosystems sound like?
I want the audience to travel to a poetic world where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a complex reality, in which every action produces an effect in naturecultures.
CASI NADA (2012)
Manuel Rocha Iturbide
11' 20''
This 20-track soundscape composition was originally made for the Experimental sound space in the MUAC Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City in March 2012.
I wanted to create a situation of privileged listening that can’t exist in the real world.
The central theme of this work has to do with the virtual and metaphoric recreation of soundscapes that we listen clearly, far away, in the room of our house through an open window, in an isolated park in the middle of the city, etc. But the idea here was to replace some of the common soundscape sounds with instrumental and electronic sounds, mixed up with daily concrete sounds, like the telephone ringing, bells in a temple in India sounded by the worshipers, etc. In this way, these different sound worlds mix up, recreating interesting soundscapes that interact with each other, and offering in this way a new realm where the sounds are different in color from those in reality, but at the same time, a realm that benefits from the structural and textural complexity of the real world.
Pre(N)ature (2023)
CNDSD (Malitzin Cortés)
7' 56''
Generative audiovisual composition based on AI and musical AI and musical algorithmic processes. Pre(N)atura is an audio-visual movement that speculates organic wind instruments composed of translucent membranes, mycelia, bioluminescent bacteria inhabiting and resonating inhabiting and resonating in humid and tropical forests. By means of glass flute engines and different inflatable breaths, they become text to inflatable breaths become text to devise, rather than objects, disturbing organisms.
Post Antropocene Record No. X-482
Edmar Soria
8' 45''
In 1950, Alan Turing published his famous article entitled "Computing machinery and intelligence" in which, among other things, he proposed the so-called "imitation game" in order to establish a type of heuristic with which it would be possible to know whether or not a machine exhibits intelligent behavior. The article begins with the powerful and forceful question: can a machine think?
A little more than 70 years later and after the long road travelled in the study and development of artificial intelligent systems, a new question is proposed here: Can a machine dream? In that sense, this acousmatic work represents (from a speculative point of view) the experiential record of the first machine that was able to dream, some time ahead in a unknown future. And so, this works place us at the first person ́s perspective of its first dream.
La oreja y el caracol (The Ear and the Snail) (2022)
F. Tito Rivas
9' 02''
With the performance of: Sarmen Almond, Juan Pablo Villa, voices. Ensamble Lluvia de Palos (José Navarro, Samir Pascual, Luis Miguel Costero), percussions and the collaboration of Felipe Pérez Santiago.
This multichannel 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 Pascal 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.
This concert is made possible through and exchange of creative work between the School of Arts Media and Engineering and the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, Arizona State University and Fonoteca Nacional, Mexico City. The exchange is sponsored by Dr. Garth Paine (ASU) and Dr. F. Tito Rivas (Fonoteca Nacional).