8.1 Ambisonic Sound System
2024-2025








A continuous research project exploring spatial audio and ambisonics that began in 2021, sparked by a VR short film at an exhibition in Moscow that implemented head tracking and spatialized audio. This experience revealed new possibilities for storytelling and immersive live performances.

After initial experiments with mixing music in ambisonic with binaural output, the project was paused until 2024, when I built a quadrophonic array and later expanded to an octophonic system in collaboration with Hilary Cox.
We conducted two octophonic sessions at Zenner to explore audio spatialization techniques, working with diverse sound sources including analog synthesizers, microphone arrays, and virtual instruments in Ableton. Our goal was to develop a reliable, reproducible, and low-latency workflow that could serve as a framework for future concerts at the venue.

This spatial audio approach dissolves traditional boundaries between musical performance and sound system design. In a multi-channel setup, the design process becomes an integral part of the performance, transforming individual instruments into distinct entities within a virtual sound space that completely envelops the listener.
Symphony of a raging body
ongoing






Dance performance and interactive soundscape, 2024/2025

Role - Composer, Sound Designer, System Designer

with and by Nobutaka Shomura (dance/ choreography), Anna K Bitter (concept, stage design), Hilary Cox (concept, creative support), Theresa Dorn & Lili Marleen Grzimek (costume design)

Symphony of a raging body is a multimedia dance performance and interactive soundscape that attempts to explore the challenges we confront in the catastrophe of changing/ breaking relationships. How can we give expression to experiences of the transformative processes of dissolution? How do we respond and redefine ourself when familiar environments are destroyed or transmuted into new forms? How do we respond emotionally and with our bodies to the realisation of the vulnerability and finiteness of our planet?

In four chapters (stages of rage and mourning/ reassembling) the dancer and performer Nobutaka Shomura will enter a complex choreography of movements that reflects the pain of loss and the possible ways of navigating those feelings. The aim of the performance is to understand experiences of loss less as lost territory than as a space we work through.

The centerpiece of the performance and the installation is a responsive generative audio system that translates the movements into sound in real time. The performer‘s movements are therefore captured by motion sensors, which feed the captured data to custom-written algorithms that interpret and convert it for use by generative audio instruments. Real-time processing allows bridging of the corporeal with technology where the sonic output feels more like the extension of the body, rather than an externality. The setup will thus enable the performer to investigate the increasing interconnectedness of the corporeal and the technological. As well as it will help to re- imagine the body as an expressive matter.

Proud Flesh
10.2023






PROUD FLESH iteration 1.0 is an ongoing research into queer desire, cruising and its metamorphic potential.

As the composer for this project, I was deeply involved from its inception, working closely with performer Laurean Wagner and curator Anna Bitter. Through extensive composing sessions and rehearsals, we collaboratively crafted a sonic landscape that translated the core themes of desire, tension, sexuality, and transcendent unity into rich musical textures. Each element of the sound design was meticulously developed to embody these emotional narratives.

The project was presented on 27.10.2023 at MOLT Gallery in Berlin

Project description:

Urban cruising spots are a place where the intersections of race, class, and sexuality blur in a dynamic choreography of seeing and being seen, desire and risk. A mycelial setup of intimacy amidst the public. Deeply rooted within cis gay male culture its focus has been on a normative, cis male body as the object of desire. For its first edition presented in October 27th at Molt Gallery Berlin the berlin based collective fatal | violet (Laurean Wagner, Anna K Bitter) brings together artists from several disciplines to create a transmedial performance evening: PROUD FLESH. The presented works (including object installation, live performance, video and live soundscapes) aim to (re)open the cruising territory as a narrative space for queer/nonbinary bodies and their biographies through a sex-positive, queerfeminist lens. A perspective that questions the role of bodies in public cruising spaces as well as the part nature can play as its setting.

Collaborators:
Laurean Wagner (Performance)
ft. Anna K Bitter (Video, Installation)
Jessyca R. Hauser (Performance/Reading)
NANA (Annalise Van Even) (Performance)
Nora Aaron Scherer (Performance, Video)
Nobutaka Shomura (Ambient Live/DJ Hybrid Set)
Haemin Jung (Object, Video)
Moran Sanderovich (Object)

Materia
04.2023






Role - Sound Designer
Artist: Davide Bernardis
Curator: Carmen Lael Hines
Exhibition Design: Lorenzo Perri and Sabrina Morreale
Commissioner: Blaise Agüera y Arcas

https://www.kandlhofer.com/exhibitions/127-davide-bernardis-i-materia-curated-by-carmen-lael-hines/

The project was exhibited between 29 March and 5 May 2023 at the Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna.

The work employs complex image-generation techniques such as generative adversarial network (GAN) for image processing, light and electron microscopy data of organic neural tissues, satellite image processing, and hyper-realistic 3D rendering. Divergent methodologies and languages are applied to process the emerging complexity of our planet and its temporalities - collapsing into a unifying multi-scalar vision of the contemporary landscape.

As sound designer, I created a sonic landscape that paralleled these diverse methodologies, weaving together distinct audio elements to mirror each scale of observation. Massive planetary phenomena were expressed through sweeping full-range drones, while microscopic processes were rendered through intricate granular synthesis. By carefully balancing field recordings with digital synthesis, I established an ethereal soundscape that emphasized the interconnectivity between computational, microscopic, and planetary realms, reinforcing the project's exploration of dissolving boundaries between these scales.

Created by artist Davide Bernardis (Berlin) and commissioned by Blaise Aguera y Arcas in collaboration with a team of international independent designers and scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (Dresden), and Human Technopole (Milano), Materia (Latin Noun: materia; English: substance, material) considers how we can re-imagine relations between consciousness, technology, and the natural world.

Sound Design / Composition
2020-2024






From 2020 I have been working as a freelance composer and sound designer for various commercial and artistic projects. Here are some selected works.


“Kosmos / Nekros”
10.2023








The project was developed during The Terraforming 2021 at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, Russia

Project team: Neilson Koerner-Safrata, Adonis Leboho, Valeriia Tolkacheva Program Directors: Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev

Kosmos Nekros is a 20-minute video essay interrogating the limits of human knowledge and experience through space and death.

As the project's composer, I crafted a score that amplified the profound themes explored through Valeriia Tolkacheva's research, Adonis Leboho's writing, and Neilson Koerner-Safrata's visual design. After in-depth discussions with the team about the emotional resonance of each chapter, I composed the entire soundtrack in an intensive two-day period, weaving together music that enhanced the film's exploration of cosmic boundaries and human mortality.

Born out of design-research on the topics of geotechnology, geourbanism, and geoengineering, the film explores modern implications of space and life systems.

Kosmos Nekros started as a simple observation, that only three humans have died in outer space.

To die in space is to approach two shared unknowns: the limit of the human in terms of its mortality and our planetary limits in the extension of outer space.

The culmination of the research was to define Cosmos and Necros, the shared boundary conditions at the limits of knowing and unknowing.

Nikolay Boyadjiev presented Kosmos Nekros at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and it is currently being compiled into a Terraforming anthology.