As the new academic year kicks in, we have prepared a series of masterclasses for our existing and new students both for our BA and MA courses. As with previous years we will focus to showcase various strands of professional practices and carreer pathways from within our BA, MA and PhD student & staff community and beyond. This year we are happy to have a wide range of topics ranging from Artist Identity Development, Sounds Queer? experimental music production, Heritage Sites and sound art, music and mental health, freelancing work, cross-dressing and sound arts, composing for film and video games as well as, radio plays and music production projects.
Professional Practice Masterclasses are supported by Creative Sound & Music, University of Brighton.
1-9 June | DMSA Facilities| Grand Parade, University of Brighton The private view is on the 31st of May and starts at 4pm. Last Entry – 9.30pm Weekday opening times are from 10am until 5pm, and weekends from 12pm until 5pm. FB Event
We are honoured to be presenting to you the works by our third year students consisting of an eclectic mix of sound and musical compositions, live AV performances, experimental films, sound murals, generative art and installation pieces. Spanning across this wide range of practices and processes, all the works are supported by an underlying thread of challenging our perceptions and engaging us in a more attentive process of listening, feeling and experiencing.
This year we are happy to nominate four of our student pieces for the Nagoya Award and the newly launched Ithaca Awards. An * will be added next to the nominated pieces.
Good luck to all our students and congrats on their hard work!
Detailed schedule to follow.
AD Design: Jedd Winterburn
::Works on Display::
Thom Aurelius – MAX (Animation) | SS1
MAX is a short, animated film that depicts a story of a young boy, Max, who is experiencing the struggles of fitting in socially at high school. The project itself is a collaboration between two creative artists, Thomas Aurelius (producer, composer and sound designer) and Peter Golijanin (animator).
The animation’s main intention is to use the power of punk-inspired musical motifs and naturalistic sound-design to represent the feelings of Max as a character and the world that he is living in. This results in the audience relating themselves to the character of Max and his onscreen experiences.
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Sonny Bacon Sonny Bacon – Lost In Process ( Experimental Film) | SS1
Lost in Process is an audiovisual experiment intended for large screen projection. The film explores sound’s ability to evoke, shift and steer atmospheres in combination with visual material. The audio of the piece was created using a variety of elements, featuring self-captured field recordings, foley and manipulated instrumental compositions.
The visual material was created through the recording and arrangement of still and moving image content captured using an array of visual technologies; DV Tape, 35mm and 16mm film. Themes of destruction, time and surveillance are presented as the experimental film unfolds.
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Danny Baron – A Call To Perish (Immersive Radio Play) | SDL
A Call to Perish is an immersive radio play, which explores a fictional settlement that takes a turn for the worst. The play travels through different areas of the settlement, highlighting its diverse and unique soundscape, executed through diffused sound. The main concept behind this project is to use sound to create an observable story for the listener without any visuals or, in other words, the internal cinema. This project is to be exhibited in a 5.1 surround sound setup, optimising the realism and making it as engaging as possible for the listener.
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Amanda Brooks – Sinkhole (Sound Installation) | Performance Studio
Sinkhole is a multi-channel sound art installation exploring themes of descent and life’s daunting threat of ‘going under’.
Using processed field recordings taken in various railway transport systems, the piece extensively uses audio relocation and movement, with sound panning between multiple speakers in an immersive cylindrical formation. The audio of the piece is manifested as a heavy volume of ‘water’ dropping onto the listener, creating a feeling of standing in an insurmountable sink under a giant tap. The sound then takes on different directions, engulfing the listener horizontally, vertically and diagonally.
The digital audio workstation Logic Pro X audio was used, alongside a fundamental production system with IRCAM plugin software. T.R.A.X Voice Transformer v.3 was utilised for sound processing with S.P.A.T Revolution controlling the vertical, horizontal and diagonal movement of the audio.
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Duncan Cabral – Digital Forest (Surround Sound Composition) | SDL
Digital Forest is a surround sound composition that utilises environmental sounds to create a sonic space. Examining concepts of audio exploration and immersion, Digital Forest looks at sound’s potential to transport a listener to another place. Sound design, soundscape building, and surround sound mixing are all used within this work. The digital audio workstation Logic Pro X was used extensively, with plugins such as Serum, ES2, ESE being utilised alongside hardware synthesisers such as the Korg Monologue, Microbrute and Yamaha CS.
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James Carroll – London Atmospheres (Experimental Film) | SDL
London Atmospheres aims to utilise soundscapes and visuals in order to capture the urban atmosphere found in various locations of London. Exploring the relationship between sound and image in film, London Atmospheres focuses on how atmosphere and tension is created. The footage of this piece was shot in central London at night in order to relay the intended atmosphere, with field recordings of the various London locations also being taken.
The soundtrack London Atmospheres uses musicality alongside environmental sounds in order to create an immersive piece, with a sense of underlying suspense in order to capture the listeners attention. A variety of software was used in the recording and editing processes, such as Adobe Premiere Pro CC, FL studio 12 and Logic Pro X.
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Jack Cleary – FLUCTUS (AV Performance) | Performance Studio
Fluctus, which is Latin for waves, explores the concept of brightness in sound and visuals.
The work synthesisers the ideas of musical “Brightness, Flux and Logos” presented by philosopher Heraclitus, which attempt to describe how the universe works.
Brightness is a sonic quality determined by the number of harmonics, the more harmonics the brighter the sound. Flux is fluidity whilst Logos is structure, generating the tension necessary for the string to vibrate to create sound.
Inspired by classical Indian and ambient music, the performance is produced using Ableton and a collection of electronic instruments. The visuals, created in Touch Designer, are vibrating lines organised into a spherical shape while the timbre of sound informs the colour of the visuals through interaction with an OSC controller.
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Nile Ezra – Nightshift (Musical Composition) | SS1
Nightshift is a series of three atmospheric instrumental tracks, which explore themes of darkness, inspired by science fiction and horror films such as Interstellar and The Shining. Using the digital audio workstation Ableton, various sound design techniques such as sampling, granular synthesis and Foley have been implemented to create varying aspects of sounds reminiscent of nightfall.
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Daniel Fadil – Erosion (Short Film) | SS1
Erosion explores the physical forces at the coast as a metaphor for Britain’s erosive nature towards languages from other shores, with the sounds of the physical washing out eternally those of a minority culture. In this case, the examined language is Romany, or rather, the remnants of it familiar to the artist. Even in its distanced existence from British influence, it has still been diminished to the point of no longer being a language. A narrative based on isolation and foreignness is used to play out the history of this phenomenon.
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Tarek El Goraicy – Singularity (AV Performance) | Performance Studio
Singularity is an audio-visual live performance of two songs from of my upcoming release Human Condition.
The presentation, containing elements of improvisation, consists of one laptop running an Ableton Live set, which is navigated through the use of a MIDI controller. Live synthesizers and live vocals are utilised, with a second machine also generating realtime visual projections through the use Touchdesigner and a MIDI-interface.
The performance aims to present a coherent interactive relationship between sound and visuals in the context of an immersive live performance, countering the traditional DJ/laptop-performance of electronic music.
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Brianna Leeds – The Safe Space (AV Installation) | SDL
The Safe Space uses a quadraphonic audio set up to combine meditative tones and abstract art, forming an encompassing environment of mindfulness and peace. This project integrates research from the field of colour therapy, music therapy and spiritual influences. In the safe space the audience can gradually disengage from personal symptoms of anxiety or stress by experiencing the serene audiovisual display in their own time.
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Olivia Louvel – The Whole Inside (Generative AV Installation) | SDL * ITHACA AWARD NOMINEE
Guidance: this work contains sensitive content.
The Whole Inside is a generative sound mural combining artificial and human voices, expanding the plastic dimension of voice on contouring the body.
The work confronts femininity and abuse, when the body is being depersonalised, subsequently dissociated as a defence mechanism to cope with a traumatic event.
The harrowing polyphonic vocal composition is based on a text sourced from the Incels (involuntary celibates) forum. On debating how to murder a woman, some members of the Incels community propose diverse actions, one being to rape her then to “take a surgical knife, cut open her abdominal area and remove the organs”.
Since October 2018, the site incels.me has been suspended due to the content that violated the domain’s anti-abuse policy. Applying principle of conditional logic, the randomised audio is carrying on indefinitely, revealing itself to the experiencer over time.
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Jamie Moore – The Lily Pond (AV Installation) | Performance Studio *NAGOYA AWARD NOMINEE
Consisting of three large projector screens and 6.1 channel surround sound, The Lily Pond is inspired by Monet’s Water Lilies series (1914 – 1926), in a modernisation of their concepts. The work runs for a total length of 1 hour 40 minutes, creating a slow moving and enveloping spectacle on a grand scale, which cannot be interpreted in the same way from any viewpoint or temporal instance.
It uses field recordings and video taken at Monet’s garden in Giverny, as well as images taken of his paintings at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, re-imagining the works and expanding them into a multi-sensory environment, within a contemporary context.
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Joseph Purefoy – Sampling the World (Musical Composition) | SS1 – 229
Sampling the world is a five track EP exploring the art of sampling in an attempt to demonstrate the vast possibilities found in manipulating and repurposing a sound. The work was produced with the digital audio workstation Logic Pro and focuses on expanding audio from its original context, shifting sound to a new sonic dimension.
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Dominic Rae – Fits the Frame | SS1 – 229
Fits in The Frame is an experimental folk-inspired concept EP. Informed by themes of narrative, Americana, analogue photography and folk music, it aims to explore the gap between the continuous, uninterrupted flow of time and people’s tendency towards quantizing the idea of time into discrete, separate moments and sections.
A key facet of the EP is the consideration of ‘Morii’, the desire to capture a fleeting moment, which brings together the ideas of music, photography and storytelling by each component’s intrinsic nature: music as continuum, photography as instantiative capture, and storytelling as a bridge between the two.
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Luke Vosper – My Bedroom (AV Performance) | Performance Studio
Stemming from a desire for a more natural and immersive way of composing and performing electronic music, My Bedroom is a studio and live setup that focusses on DIY and self-built hardware and instruments. Drawing inspiration from a space used for composition, performance, and instrument construction, My Bedroom explores an improvisation-based approach to electronic music.
As well as analogue and acoustic instruments, My Bedroom takes full advantage of digital tools. Using custom software and patches alongside complex synthesis techniques and an extensive sample library, this allows the music of the piece to be created in an improvisation-driven, performative way.
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Matt Were – Piano I Ching (Prepared Piano / Interactive AV Installation) | 229 *ITHACA AWARD NOMINEE
Piano I Ching is an interactive audiovisual piece. The audio from the installation starts when a webcam picks up movement within close proximity to the piano. This results in solenoids and motors being triggered, brushing, scraping and hitting the piano, giving a familiar object a completely new vocabulary of sounds.
Each casting yields two trigrams (a hexagram), and each of the trigrams is associated with a sound sequence relevant to the time of the year. This piece attempts to create a synthesis of a Western cultural icon, the piano, with an Eastern cultural icon, the I Ching, by interpreting the latter divinations through sound on a prepared piano.
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Jedd Winterburn – Zenith (AV Composition for multiple screens) | Performance Studio *ITHACA AWARD NOMINEE
Zenith is an audiovisual installation that incubates the practise of attentive listening, inviting the listener to discover an awareness of sound that can enrich one’s life after the event. The unique viewing experience of Zenith is notably engaging, operating over two screens and 4.1 surround sound in a highly curated environment. Hosting a palette of noise curated to explore the fringes of musicality, Zenith aims to promote the abstraction of sound’s form and function.
Wednesday 5th June | 12-8pm
Performance Studio, Grand Parade fb event page
Join Us for this year’s DMSA DAY, a full day of presentations, talks and performances, showcasing the work of our 1st, 2nd and 3rd year students, including experimental music, diffused audio pieces, experimental film, sound & moving image collaborations, sound art and radio art pieces as well as DYI and interactive instruments and processes.
This year we have the honour to have Kathy Hinde as our guest speaker.
Kathy Hinde’s work grows from a partnership between nature and technology expressed through audio-visual installations and performances that combine sound, sculpture, image and light. Drawing on inspiration from behaviours and phenomena found in the natural world, she creates work that is generative; that evolves; that can be different each time it is experienced. Kathy aims to create work that gives rise to a poetic and reflective experience that enriches an appreciation of the everyday, inviting a heightened awareness of the world around us.
Also, Radio Cascabel will be coming down to Brighton for a brief presentation of a new project space and sound art venue to be launched in London and to seek collaborations and proposals from our students.
The event will close with immersive audio-visual performances by Tarek, Luke Vosper and Jack Cleary. The performances start at 5pm.
The event is sponsored by the Creative Sound & Music Research Group (School of Media, University of Brighton).
Our second year student Jade Gunner has been accepted for an internship at Criterion Games (EA) as an audio designer, working on creating and implementing sounds and audio for their upcoming games.
Jade has been developing a very unique sonic vocabulary that is present in all her sound design work for the course and beyond.
Here you can watch Jade’s portfolio that she developed during her studies on the course:
and ‘Her Body’, an audiovisual piece about the objectification of the female body in creative media industries
As part of the International Women’s Day 2019 campaign to #BalanceforBetter, Sound and Music showcase the profiles of 31 composers and their unique contributions to composition in the UK. Alumni Akiko Haruna and Guoda Dirzyte, current student Jade Gunner and DMSA Course Leader Dr Maria Papadomanolaki are profiled in the showcase that is part of the online archive of British Music Collection.
British Music Collection provides unparalleled access to the modern history of composition in the UK. Established in 1967 as a means for contemporary composers to deposit scores and recordings for performers to access, it now consists of almost 70,000 works and recordings from over 3000 20th and 21st century composers and sound artists.
The value in the collection is undeniable – providing access to over 50 years of contemporary composition – but it’s not without fault. The underrepresentation of female composers, or those who identify as female, across the original collection is stark, and a reminder of the progress that has been made, and must continue to happen, in and across new music.
Much of the British Music Collection now exists here online, and this provides a great opportunity to readdress this imbalance and the original aim of the collection: providing access to the work of contemporary composers.
All That Scratching Is Making Me Itch is a en event curated by Stephen Mallinder featuring films by our students Aki Purser, Jedd Winterburn along with a fine selection of Scratch Video films, live music and more.
We talk to Laurence Owen ahead of his masterclass on Monday the 26th. Laurence graduated from the course in 2011 and since then he has led an amazing career as a freelance composer, songwriter, sound designer and voice performer. He has written music for the BBC, Toyota, O2, Stella Artois, Sipsmith, ARTE, The Beano, Historic Royal Palaces and the V&A Museum, and provides sound design for critically-acclaimed multimedia theatre company 1927.
DMSA: Where do we find you now? LO: Physically, I’m catching up on some admin in my living room in Norwich. Mentally, I’m formulating the music and lyrics for an upcoming musical adaptation of Jekyll & Hyde that I’m working on.
DMSA: Three important words that represent you as a creative person LO: 1. Craft – I’m more interested in making things that serve a function than making things that exist purely for themselves.
2. Accessibility – I don’t personally subscribe to the “if anyone else likes what you’re doing, that’s just a bonus” philosophy (but completely respect anyone who does).
3. Narrative – I like stories, and I like making (and consuming) music and sound that involves storytelling elements.
DMSA: When did you start working with sound and music? LO: I started writing and recording music when I was 14. I really hope I’ve improved a little bit since then.
DMSA: In what ways has the DMSA course supported or helped you to develop into who you are today creatively and professionally? LO: Having the space, time, equipment and permission to work was, on its own, hugely helpful. But I also left feeling actively encouraged to blur the lines between sound and music, art and design, highbrow and lowbrow. The DMSA course taught me that there are no set paths into the creative industry, and no set careers when you arrive in it.
DMSA: Can you tell us a bit more about The Time Machine? LO: The Time Machine is the most recent of four productions I’ve co-written with my writer wife Lindsay for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s a musical adaptation of HG Wells’ novel, and although it’s a Victorian story, we’ve chosen to tell it in the style of a 1950s radio play. We have a table of foley sound effects, and I’ve written a Bernard Herrmann style B-movie score, as well as playing live theremin during the show. We’ve been touring the country with it for a year, and it’s just about to be retired so that we can work on our next production.
DMSA: Other plans for the future? projects, events, visions? LO: Our Jekyll & Hyde show is the next major project I’m working on. Aside from that, I’ve always enjoyed scoring factual/documentary work, so I hope to do more of that. I’m also seeking to score more experiential entertainment – theme parks, VR attractions, interactive museum installations, and so on. But truthfully, I never know what’s around the corner. That’s what keeps this job exciting, and a little scary… but in a good way!
Please pop in to the opening event of Imagined Title Sequences by School of Media students, which will be running in rotation from 4.30-6.00pm this Thursday the 22nd in the foyer of Edward Street.
The project was produced in association with CINECITY The Brighton Film Festival. All of the sequences have been made by the BA Design for Digital Media students in Level 5. Some of the students have used footage kindly leant by Screen Archive South East and some of the sequences have been made in collaboration with Level 5 students on the BA Digital Music and Sound Arts course.
It will also be screened on Fri 23rd, Sat 24th & Mon 25th Nov 10am-5pm.
Monday 26 November, 4:30-6, Performance Studio, GP
We are thrilled to have critically acclaimed composer Laurence Owen (DMSA alumni 2011) back to give a masterclass.
About Laurence
Laurence Owen (DMSA 2011) is a composer, songwriter, sound designer and voice performer. He has written music for the BBC, Toyota, O2, Stella Artois, Sipsmith, ARTE, The Beano, Historic Royal Palaces and the V&A Museum, and provides sound design for critically-acclaimed multimedia theatre company 1927. His film credits include the Sundance Film Festival official selection White Morning, which earned him two music award nominations at SoundTrack Cologne Festival. Laurence has produced music and sound design for productions at London’s Young Vic and Trafalgar Studios theatres, and was nominated for Best Theatre Sound at the ProSound Awards for his work on 1927’s Golem. He has also co-written four original musicals for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (one of which won a 2015 Malcolm Hardee Award), and was composer and musical director of Cat & Mouse, a Village Underground and 1927 co-production.
About the session: How to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades Composer
For the last seven years, I’ve been professionally making music for a wide array of film, theatre, radio, TV and corporate clients – mostly just a few days’ work at a time. It’s not all been glamorous, but it has all been solid, paid composing work. By not specialising with laser-focus on any one area, I’ve built up a diverse and ever-growing network of clients that has provided me a livelihood.
In this session, I’ll tell you about the steps I’ve taken up to this point, ever-available opportunities that you could exploit, and how to keep you well-prepared and confident in this competitive field. Since DMSA students all have different specialities, I’d also like to find out your individual skills, and discuss how you might apply them to kickstart this kind of composing career.
We are happy to have Louise Colbourne from Design For Digital Media with us to lead two workhops on experimental film.
Places are limited so please email Louise (l.a.colbourne@brighton.ac.uk) to secure your place. Information on the two sessions can be found below.
DIRECT ANIMATION Room:225 5pm 15th November 2018
This workshop will to offer you the opportunity to work directly with celluloid 16mm film using the technique of direct animation.
This is a practical workshop in which you will be provided some 16mm film stock to work on top of to create a loop of a few seconds in length. We will then join the loop and play the outcomes through a 16mm projector. It is possible to capture the projected images on a camera or phone if you would like to use them in the future.
You will also be shown how to effect and adapt the optical sound track.
The process of direct animation involves either scratching into the surface of the film’s emulsion to make sequential patterns and shapes, or drawing / painting images, textures and shapes on to clear leader.
CONTACT PRINTING Grand Parade Dark-room 7th February 2019
A further workshop will be held in a darkroom facility where you will be able to process your own short film strips. The technique used is contact printing (or photogram) and an optical soundtrack can also be created here. It is possible to create contact prints by exposing small objects and other film strips onto high contrast film stock which then creates an inverted, negative image.
