Critical Sonic Practice Roundtable: Making Immersive Audio Accessible
7:00 – 7:45 pm (Doors open at 6:45 pm)
A panel discussion, led by Leila Adu-Gilmore, focusing on how to increase access to immersive audio technology for marginalized communities and their music creators. Panelists: DEBIT (Delia Beatriz), MC Tingbudong (Jamel Mims), Rhiannon Catalyst &
Keynote Speaker Michael Veal (Yale University) latest book Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital
Immersive Mixtape Concert
8:00 – 10:30 pm
Showcasing new spatialized works by music creators across genres, activating the 56 channel immersive sound system in the Cantor Theatre.
Program
Peter Traver
Eric Lyon + Margaret Lancaster
Daniel Faronbi
Izzi Ramkissoon
Ikwe (Kelsey Van Ert)
MC Tingbudong (Jamel Mims)
Kelvin Walls
Alicia Lee & Leila Adu-Gilmore
Keisha Thompson
DEBIT (Delia Beatriz)
H Prizm & Earl Blaize (of Antipop Consortium)
MAYSUN
Bios & Program Notes
Alicia Lee
Clarinetist, Alicia Lee, enjoys a diverse musical life performing old and new works in solo, chamber, and orchestral settings. She is Assistant Professor of clarinet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she also performs with the Wingra Wind Quintet. Prior to her appointment at UW, Alicia was a resident of New York City for over a decade where she performed and toured regularly with a variety of groups including The Knights, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and NOVUS NY. She is also a member of the composer/performer collective, NOW Ensemble with whom she has premiered dozens of new works written for the ensemble. She is a founding member of Decoda, the Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall. Founded on the principles established during their time as fellows in Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect program, Decoda’s pursuits place equal emphasis on artistry and community engagement. She has performed at the Marlboro, Lucerne, Spoleto (Italy and US), Yellow Barn, and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festivals. Alicia has held positions with the Santa Barbara Symphony and the Bergen Philharmonic in Norway. She earned degrees from Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and The Colburn School. She resides in Madison with her husband, bass player and composer, Kris Saebo, their son Jack, and Bonnie, the sheepadoodle.
Daniel Faronbi
Daniel Faronbi is music technology researcher, jazz pianist, and composer based in New York City. He has performed for music groups spanning a wide variety of genres and has received both jazz and classical piano training. He has worked as a studio manager for Studio 381 at the University of Nebraska and has published two albums. Daniel has shared the stage with jazz heavy hitters such as Benny Golson, Bobby Sanibria, Micah Bell, and Dave Stryker and maintains an active performance schedule at top jazz venues in New York City including the Django and Nublu. Aside from his composition and performance endeavors, Daniel is a Music Technology PhD candidate in the Music and Audio Research Laboratory (MARL) at New York University. His research interests lie in human centered controls for generative audio systems. He has served as a research intern for top audio companies like Dolby Laboratories and Bose Corporation He holds two bachelor’s degrees in Music Technology and Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Nebraska.
“Time” is ever present yet ineffable. Liberating while being all constraining. “Take Time” is a piece that celebrates the joy that comes from contraining yourself to the limitations imposed to us by time. It is a work that plays with time by constructing a groove with an asymetrical time signature. This song was written for an upcoming quintet album. The instrumentation: trumpet, alto sax, piano, bass, and drums has been proven time and time again to be a power ensemble for producing groove and harmony.
DEBIT (Delia Beatriz)
DEBIT aka Delia Beatriz is an electronic music composer, sound expert and accomplished critical intellectual based in nyc. Debit has performed and participated in hundreds of shows & festivals worldwide such as like roskilde,atonal,sxsw, norberg festival, RMBF & the whitney biennial and in a number of conferences and panels, including Audio Engineering Society, unam’s aleph, Mutek Montreal, Mutek Mexico, Rewire Festival, among others. She is an adjunct professor of Global Electronic Music, Electronic Music Performance & Computer music synthesis in the Music Tech program at NYU. She holds a Masters degree in Music technology from NYU. Her research involves Music information retrieval (MIR), (proof of )conceptual applications of these state of the art processes and the critical interrogation of the power architectures of databases that source these. Her graduate work connected AI and an archeological archive of Mayan wind instruments from the Late Classical Period, while surveying pre-hispanic electronic music legacies, resulting in a critically acclaimed record she performed around the world in various scales of production. She got her B.A. from Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Latin American Studies. Her bachelor’s thesis titled The Incunables investigated the role of the book & the printing press as a colonial technology in Mexico. She is currently developing catabolism, an open education resource focused on the creation and commission of critical tools for electronic music praxis, community and profit building.
H Prizm/Earl Blaize (of Antipop Consortium)
Anti-Pop Consortium formed in 1997 when Beans, High Priest, M. Sayyid and producer Earl Blaize met at a poetry slam in New York City. The four of them put out a series of mixtapes (proper cassettes!) on their own Anti-Pop Records and called them “Consortium” volumes 1, 2 and 3. The people who were picking up the tapes began to refer to the coalition behind them as the Anti-Pop Consortium and the group as we now know it was born. The Consortium’s emblem – a stylised corporate stick figure with a burning head – was also already in place, created by the graphical smarts of High Priest himself. With it, the team began their assault with an infamous xerox and sticker campaign that landed Priest in jail for vandalism under Giuliani’s “increased standard of living regime.” Coupled with the verbal pyrotechnics of their live show, the Consortium gained the favor of both staunch B-boy purists and experimental electronics heads. The backpackers were in awe of the group’s varied and contrasting, quickfire rhyme styles, whereas the techies loved their four man MPC jams. Dan The Automator signed the group to be the first act on his new imprint, 75 Ark. The result was “Tragic Epilogue,” an album made up of tracks taken from the last mixtape plus some new material. It was swiftly followed by “Shopping Carts Crashing,” released on a Japanese label and exported to fans across the world. But then, in an iconic move, APC signed to UK electronic label, Warp. The classic “Arrhythmia” followed in 2002 and took APC’s sound to a worldwide audience. To promote it they went out on Radiohead’s world tour and returned to the States to go straight out on a giant DJ Shadow tour. The album was receiving great notices and cemented their status as landmark innovators. But differences over their next creative step, plus the pressures of constant touring all took their toll. “We broke up,” Sayyid explains, “six months after that record was released.” In 2007 the group re-formed and signed to Big Dada for the release of “Fluorescent Black.” The album was once again rapturously received and the group have been touring on and off since.
Ikwe (Kelsey Van Ert)
Ikwe (Kelsey Van Ert) is an African American and Ojibwe multidisciplinary artist and musician from St. Paul & Minneapolis, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been supported by organizations such as The Shed, Brooklyn Arts Council, Audiofemme, Wyckoff House, SECCA, Buckham Gallery, and Wa Na Wari. She is currently a Music Technology Masters student at NYU Steinhardt. She was a 2018 Artist In Residence at The Shed where she developed and presented her musical piece, “MAKADEWIIYAASIKWE”the Ojibwe word for, “a Black woman; a woman of African descent.” The work was later recorded during the 2019 Protest Garden artist in residency at The Wyckoff House. Her work has been presented at Lincoln Center Out of Doors with La Casita, the Brooklyn Prelude Festival, SECCA in Winston-Salem NC, Beckham Gallery in Flint MI, and Wa Na Wari in Seattle WA. Kelsey is currently a Music Technology Masters student at New York University.
“MAKADEWIIYAASIKWE” Excerpt: This piece was originally part of a larger music performance piece titled “MAKADEWIIYAASIKWE” created in residence with The Shed NYC. This piece was shot on the Fon Du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe/Anishinaabe) reservation in northern Minnesota. The film takes place in the school that Kelsey’s Great Grandmother Harriet attended as a child which is now abandoned. The sound of the cow-hide hand drum, wind, passing cars, melting snow, and creaking wood was captured in real time during filming. The audio is overlaid with a phone conversation between Kelsey and her grandmother Marjorie, about why Great Grandmother Harriet did not pass down the Anishinaabe language to her and her siblings when they were children. Kelsey grew up listening to her Great Grandmother Harriet speaking Anishinaabe as Alsheimers and Dementia drew her back to a time in her life where she spoke her first language. However, Kelsey’s younger cousins, born after she passed away, did not experience their language. Later in the piece, Kelsey reads words that children may learn in school, and struggles to pronounce them in Anishinaabe.
Izzi Ramkissoon
Izzi Ramkissoon is an award-winning electro acoustic multimedia composer, performer, and audio-visual artist. He has written works for a variety of media including theater, dance, installations, alternative controllers, and interactive multimedia. His compositions deal extensively with the use of technology in composition and have been featured at SEAMUS, NYCEMF, NIME, SPARK, LUMEN, Look and Listen Festival, Black Maria Film + Video Festival, World Maker Faire, MATA Festival, Figment NYC, NYC Creative Tech Week, NY Music Month, Italy, Norway, Greece, England, Mexico, Czechoslovakia and numerous other venues and festivals, both nationally and internationally. In his work he fuses media, technology, IDM, hardcore, classical, musique concrete and various other resources to perform interactive, improvisatory, and experimental works. Currently, Izzi is serving on the New York Electro-Acoustic Music Festival Steering Committee, teaching 200-400 level undergraduate music technology courses, giving guest lectures and performances, and performing with various electronic music groups as a solo artist and musician.
“Asperity of Lace” is a multimedia composition for clarinet, piano and interactive electronics that uses techniques such as pitch shifting, editing, delay, time compression and expansion, prepared piano, and fm synthesis. The piece uses real-time pitch tracking on the clarinet to enable the computer to map pitch to fm synthesis. The piano is prepared using metal slides, chopsticks, and other objects. Samples of a prepared piano were recorded by the composer and then arranged using patterns inspired by the open hole fabric. Open holes are created in the piece by adding and subtracting rhythms and layers. This creates designs in the form by removing threads from the original whole. When a sound is removed, elements of the performer’s sound is revealed and move towards the foreground, while other elements move to the background. This sometimes reveals the performer or the electronics form underneath. This version of the piece is without performers and interactive electronics to be distributed in 56 channels.
Keisha Thompson
Dr. Keisha V. Thompson is Professor of Psychology at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York. She is also the co-creator and co-director of the Historically Underrepresented Faculty & Staff Resource Center at Kingsborough. Dr. Thompson holds her doctorate in Counseling Psychology from Texas A&M University. A Native of Trinidad & Tobago, Dr. Thompson grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Business Communication at Baruch College, CUNY, and her master’s degree in School Counseling at Hunter College, CUNY. Her clinical experience includes college counseling, community mental health, the federal prison system, VA medical center, and various K-12 school settings. Her professional interests include diversity issues in higher education, themes of psychosocial development and mental health in Black youth and women. Being a first generation immigrant and college graduate, Dr. Thompson’s work addresses issues of cultural diversity. As such fostering diversity is the focus of her scholarship, teaching, and service to her community. In the classroom she operates from a socio-political framework which allows her to address issues of culture, health, and social justice as they relate to individuals and institutions. Dr. Thompson’s research agenda is centered around Blackness in the African diaspora. Dr. Thompson enjoys spending time in the classroom and community empowering individuals through expanding their knowledge base and encouraging them to be change agents in society. To this end she founded the #goalsbrunch series, the Misadventures of An Inspired Woman Podcast, and recently completed production on her first documentary film There All Along: The Women of Trinidad & Tobago 1970 Black Power.
“Dear Younger Me” is a transformative project dedicated to creating healing spaces and opportunities for Black women to engage in self-compassion, community building, and personal growth through workshops and immersive art experiences. Our mission is to address the inner child while providing models of empowerment for Black women and girls. Workshop- Combines psychoeducation, mentoring, and creative expression to empower Black women to heal and grow. Immersive Art Experience Engages viewers in self-reflection and encourages empathy and understanding of the Black female experience. Transports visitors to a world that affirms and celebrates Black womanhood and reminds them of their inner resilience. The Transformative Power of Healing Empowerment Black women leave the project feeling inspired, seen, and heard, with a renewed sense of purpose and belonging. Education: The project educates the wider community about the Black female experience, building empathy and understanding. Community: The project fosters a sense of community among Black women, promoting collective healing and support. Collaborators: Keisha V. Thompson, Eric Lyon, Ben Knapp, Dacia Kings, Tianyu Ge, Geefa Adane, Sydney Johnson, Meaghan Dee.
Kelvin Walls
Music Technology PhD Candidate
Leila Adu-Gilmore
Leila Adu is an astonishing force in the space where electropop, avant-classical and singer-songwriter meet. Exploring her roots in New Zealand, Britain and Ghana, Adu is an international artist who has performed at festivals and venues across the world. Compared to Nina Simone and Joanna Newsome by WNYC, Adu has released five acclaimed albums, and has given visionary solo BBC and WQXR performances. Adu’s credits include Ojai Music Festival, Bang on a Can, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Late Night with David Letterman, and composing for a Billboard charted album. Adu holds a Princeton University music composition PhD. In 2022, Leila Adu–Gilmore was awarded a Charles Ives Composer Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“Inertia” (bass clarinet, voice and synthesizer) in three connected movements’ two chant-like vocal songs are about the human lag in action for climate protection and peace. The middle movement is a clarinet solo reworking a microtonal birdsong motif from a tiny island in Ghana, echoing with spatialized delay effects. This piece was commissioned by Alicia Lee, Assistant Professor of Clarinet for the Fall Research Competition by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies at UW-Madison.
MAYSUN
Etienne Mason, known professionally as MAYSUN, is a composer and sound artist known for his unique blend of drumming expertise and sound design, creating immersive atmospheric soundscapes. With a focus on the use of physical space to shape and manipulate sounds, he crafts compositions that serve as soundtracks to his life events. MAYSUN’s work is characterized by an innovative approach that transforms real-life sounds into musical tones, skillfully interweaving the dimensions of time and space within his compositions. His artistic journey is driven by a deep passion for exploring spatial audio, technology and a desire to create meaningful emotional connections through his music. In addition to his artistic pursuits, MAYSUN has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) since 2023 and is a proud member of the international artist collective Inland Ocean. He completed the prestigious 2024 ITP/IMA Fellowship at New York University and is currently a mentor at New Inc.
MAYSUN (Live) presents a performance featuring using a cymbal, serving as both an acoustic sound source and a means to shape ambient textures. The piece unfolds in real time, with both spatialization and sound improvised to create a fluid interaction between live acoustic elements and immersive digital textures.
MC Tingbudong (Jamel Mims)
Jamel Mims is an African American rapper, multimedia artist and revolutionary based in New York City. Also known as the bilingual mandarin storyteller MC Tingbudong, his work concerns the historical and contemporary cultural connections between Black America and China, social movements, memory and augmented/virtual/hyperreality. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at Boston College, and studied at the University of Busness and Economics in Beijing. After graduating, he recieved a Fulbright scholarship to pursue an independent study about hip hop in China. He was an artist-in-residence at Found Sound China, a US State Department funded music diplomacy residency that brought select American and Chinese producers together for a collaborative tour. He began studying mandarin as a freshman at Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC. As MC Tingbudong, he has performed extensively across the U.S. and China: including South by Southwest Music Festival, China Week LA, Yue Space, NOX Chengdu, and Modern Sky Music Festival. His work has been shown at Telematicc Gallery, WallPlay, and SmackMellon Gallery in New York City, and has been featured in The New Yor Times, i_D magazine, Variety, VICE, The Nation, Radii China, PBS News and more.
VIRAL《不要出门》is an EP and virtual world created by black bilingual mandarin- language rapper MC Tingbudong. Written as a conversation between China and Black America, the project is produced in collaboration with artists across the Chinese and Asian diaspora. Told through six interactive musical experiences, it is a re-imagining of an era of pandemic and protest as a pirated video game sent from a revolutionary future. Explore the metaverse of MC Tingbudong in this choose-your-own-path virtual adventure created from hours of personal footage, news clips, virtual reality videos, and other original content. Connect and chat with other people from around the world in an interactive 3D playground. Boot up the floppy drive, grab your mobile phone, and put on your VR headset – VIRAL is an immersive experience that blurs the lines between language, online and IRL, retro and futuristic. Experience it at tingbudong.nyc
Michael Veal – KEYNOTE
Michael E. Veal has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1998. Before coming to Yale, he taught at Mount Holyoke College (1996 – 1998) and New York University (1997-1998). A self-described “musical pan-Africanist,” Veal’s work has typically addressed musical topics within the black Atlantic cultural sphere of Africa and the African diaspora. His 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life and music of this influential African musician to explore themes of African post-coloniality, the political uses of music in Africa, and musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. His documentation of the “Afrobeat” genre continued with the 2013 co-authored autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat. Professor Veal’s 2007 book Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae 2007 examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s transformed the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song, and examines sound technology as a medium for the articulation of spiritual, historical and political themes. His forthcoming book Living Space surveys under-documented periods in the careers of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and draws on the discourses of digital architecture and experimental photography in order to suggest new directions for jazz analysis and interpretation. Professor Veal is also the leader of the musical groups Michael Veal & Aqua Ife and Michael Veal’s Armillary Sphere. Undergraduate courses that Professor Veal has taught have included: Music Cultures of the World; Theory & Practice of Ethnomusicology; Traditional and Contemporary Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa; Jazz in Transition 1960 -2020; Jazz & Architecture; Music and the Post-Colonial and Popular Music: The Experimental Tradition. Graduate courses have included: Music in Africa; The Recording Studio in Sonic and Cultural Perspective; Topics in Jazz Studies; Recalibrating the Ethnographic Radar (A History of Ethnographic Recording), African Counterpoint, Musical Afro-Futurisms, and Proseminar in Ethnomusicology. Selected Publications:
Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press, 2000)
Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007)
Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat (Duke University Press, 2013)
The Sublime Frequencies Companion (co-edited with E. Tammy Kim) (Wesleyan University Press, 2015)
Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital (Wesleyan University Press, 2024)
Rhiannon Catalyst
Rhiannon Catalyst is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, producer, and author creating change through art, sound, science & technology. She just returned from touring in Japan to perform and co-produce global concerts and livestreams in Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, and Hiroshima as part of an international and intercultural delegation of 51 global leaders for the International Day of Peace. The Hiroshima broadcast was co-produced by Catalyst Culture Labs, which she founded as a multimedia production company and creative incubator dedicated to social and global change. Catalyst has produced immersive theatre and installations for the New York Hall of Science, Rubin Museum of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, Harvestworks, Multichannel Music Festival, and VR events with NASA research facilities including JPL, Ames, and Langley. Catalyst builds tours with BELLA GAIA- created in ongoing partnership with NASA to simulate the Overview Effect and inspire visceral connection to the planet and humanity using immersive theatre, live performers and NASA data visualizations. She’s currently developing her collaborative immersive ice theatre piece “Ancestors and Glaciers” featuring ambisonic sound of a melting iceberg in Iceland, and working with Bridge Multimedia to empower accessibility with NYU PINE (Program for Inclusion and Neurodiversity Education), STEMIEfest for inclusion in STEM education, and CAST in partnership with the Dept of Edu and OSEP. Catalyst began making music and producing massives- underground art and dance music events- as a teen with the goal of using the arts to facilitate change, healing, and bring together diverse communities on the dance floor. She became Music Director of The Lunatarium at 20, co-creating years of events and immersive experiences at a now legendary underground art and music venue while working to help overturn the Cabaret Laws in NYC . She’s been featured in the NY Times and the book “Parades, Parties, and Protests” on creative resistance culture, and continues to work in dance music, one of the most powerful cultures of music and inclusion.
Eric Lyon
Eric Lyon is a composer and audio researcher. His software includes “FFTease” and “LyonPotpourri.” He is the author of “Designing Audio Objects for Max/MSP and Pd,” and “Automated Sound Design,” a book that presents technical processes for implementing oracular synthesis and sound processing across a wide domain of audio applications. Lyon’s work has been recognized with a ZKM Giga-Hertz prize, MUSLAB award, the League ISCM World Music Days competition, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lyon is Professor of Practice in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology.
“Laughter is the Best Medicine” was composed for Margaret Lancaster in 2020. A Covid piece, “Laughter” looks for relief in strange places. The efficacy of laughter is called into question by the sinister opening moment, borrowed from Derek Jarman’s 1978 film, “Jubilee.” Throughout the score, discipline is partnered with the need to vent. The spatialized version presented this evening was created for the Immersive Mixtape Festival.
Margaret Lancaster
“New-music luminary” (The New York Times) and multi-hyphenate creative, Margaret Lancaster (flutist/performance artist/actor/dancer/amateur furniture designer) has built a large repertoire of interactive, cross-disciplinary solo works that employ electronics and mixed media. Performance highlights include Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Santa Fe New Music, Art Basel/Miami, Edinburgh Festival, NIME/Copenhagen, and the 7-year global run of OBIE-winning Mabou Mines Dollhouse (Helene). She really likes to laugh.
Peter Traver
Peter Traver is a PhD student in NYU Steinhardt’s Composition program. His doctoral research centers around computer-based music generation systems using deep learning and other probabilistic techniques. Additionally, he is interested in musical topologies of chords and rhythms that can be used to construct probability distributions for generation. His background includes degrees in applied mathematics and music, as well as profosseional experience as a performer (vocals, tenor), arts administrator (zFestival, Harvard), and engineer (Dolan, Astranis). He holds degrees from Brown University & NYU, having also attended programs and courses at Harvard University and Boston Conservatory @ Berklee.
“for better or for worse” (2024) is an electroacoustic piece centering around interviews of William MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried. The piece juxtaposes the philosophical guidance of MacAskill (re: effective altruism) that is known to have influenced SBF’s philanthropic practices prior to the collapse of his cryptocurrency trading platform FTX in 2022. Huge thanks to Hypercube for performing this work and providing the recording stems for this concert, and to Paul Geluso for spatializing it for this performance. Additional thanks to Leila Adu-Gilmore for organizing this festival.