Third Day
Workshop – Lecture – Concert
8 September 2025
Qanun - Extended Techniques
Building a better BEAST: The Development and Recent Practice of “Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre”
Csound for Beginners
Curated by Damian Marhulets
19:00 - 20:00 | Music Museum
Curated by Paul Ramage
20:15 - 21:15 | Music Museum
Live Events
Workshop
Qanun – Extended Tehniques
Summary
A Specialized Workshop for Contemporary Composers
“The Qanun: From Classical Techniques to New Sonic Horizons”
This hands-on workshop focuses on the qanun — a traditional Iranian string instrument — and explores how it can be reimagined in contemporary music and composition.
We’ll start by revisiting the instrument’s standard playing techniques, then dive into extended techniques that push the boundaries of its sound. These approaches open up exciting new possibilities for composers looking to develop their own unique musical voice.
What to expect:
• Listening and discussion around recent works written for the qanun
• Creative approaches to notation, including graphic scores for non-traditional sounds
• A deep look at how collaboration between composer and performer can lead to new techniques and ideas
This workshop is open to composers, composition students, qanun players, and anyone curious about exploring new sonic territories.
Location: Music Museum
Biography
Biography
Lecture
Building a better BEAST: The Development and Recent Practice of “Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre”
Summary
This talk will explore practices of immersive audio presentation by Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST), from early developments through to the most recent innovations, exploring aspects of technology, system design, diffusion, ambisonics, live elements, and hybridised approaches. BEAST is a large-scale (ca. 100 loudspeaker) system for the presentation of electronic music, and one of the leading international systems of its kind.
Workshop
Csound for beginners
Summary
This workshop introduces the Csound language and provides a beginner-friendly approach to writing both code and music. We’ll be using Cabbage as the front-end software. Participants will learn about variable types, how to generate basic sounds, and by the end of the session, we’ll create our first audio plugin.
Location: Music Museum
Biography
Concert 3
Curated by Damian Marhulets
Location: Music Museum
Program Note
Out of Bounds is an experimental audiovisual composition that explores the eerie aesthetics of liminal, non-existent spaces. Inspired by an extreme form of video game exploration—where players intentionally seek out hidden areas never meant to be seen beyond the eyes of developers—the piece delves into digital environments that exist on the fringes of virtual worlds. These zones, often used to test mechanics or store out-of-sight assets, transcend their intended function and become uncanny, purposeless non-places—much like prehistoric cave paintings hidden deep underground, made to be unseen. The work presents a series of images depicting empty, uncanny rooms. Though they appear captured with cheap digital cameras from the 1990s, these places are entirely artificial—generated using early, now-obsolete AI models. They are abstracted simulations of space: environments that never were, and never could be, inhabited. Paired with sparse, minimal sound design—subtle acoustic auras—Out of Bounds evokes the sensation of a simulated presenceThe viewer becomes a silent intruder, an uninvited observer of places not meant to be seen. These images do not welcome us.
Biography
Biography
Program Note
While traditional market research gains its findings almost exclusively through interviews and questionnaires, the data from which is usually collected retrospectively, neuroscientific methods can be used to determine customer preference directly and unfiltered by measuring evaluation processes in the brain.” (From “Business and Innovation” 01/2010) All people are recorded as data by the economy. Directly or as an average in the form of a target group. Sometimes we hope that this will make our lives easier or bring us profit, sometimes we don’t even know that the data is being collected. The crucial question is: do we control the data or does the data control us? To what extent do we have control over what data is collected and how it is interpreted? ent_wicklungTM is an interactive connection between humans and computers. Movements are read by the computer and control parameters of the music. Based on contemporary market research and control systems—such as Paypal—the connection between movement and music (data input and output) is not always transparent, however. The boundaries between determining and being determined become blurred. (From the original program) Written in 2010, the play deals with market-based algorithms that manipulate people today without anticipating their AI-supported development.
Program Note
(TL;DR: “plundering” is a solo performance where I play 440 glitchy, genre-mashed samples across five keyboards. By pushing AI music generators to their limits, I collected and reassembled their “failures” into a high-energy, improvisational mix — blurring the lines between DJing, live performance, and AI-generated plunderphonics.) The process for my instrumental solo performance “plundering” began with the generation of hundreds of musical snippets using various online AI-driven music generators. By inputting prompts with intentionally unrelated musical descriptions—such as “percussion electronic madness glitch distortion extreme gabber minimal orchestra free jazz” or “dubstep on acoustic instruments, jazz big band, extremely chaotic, klezmer” — my goal was to uncover unusual genre combinations, musical “failures” and AI-generated glitches. These often resulted from the algorithm’s limited training data, producing fragmented or incoherent musical structures. I primarily focused on high-energy material with the intent of assembling a collection of samples suited for live club performances. After an extensive selection and refinement process, I categorized the samples, chopping them into loops that could be triggered via a keyboard. To accommodate a vast sound library, I employed five master keyboards, each with 88 keys, giving me access to a total of 440 samples in real time. This setup allows for a highly dynamic performance, positioning me as both a keyboardist and a hyper-DJ — layering and juxtaposing multiple tracks every second, existing in the creative space between curation and composition. The resulting music bears a strong resemblance to plunderphonics, a sampling-based genre pioneered in the 1980s by John Oswald. However, rather than sampling from individual works, my approach draws from a collective archive — the vast dataset of musical material used to train the AI. I am not borrowing from a single artist but rather from an aggregated musical consciousness, reassembling it into something new. By experimenting with performance techniques and real-time improvisation, I transform these pre-generated fragments into spontaneous compositions, constructing a sonic mosaic on the fly. plundering_01b is one of the first attempts to perform on the instrument in real time.
Biography
Biography
Program Note
MEI pt1 is a remix of the all-time classic piece for solo flute by contemporary composer Fukushima. It transforms the opening long notes and hollow landscapes of the original into a granular buildup of thriving beats
Program Note
Fractal waves is part of Rofalski’s ongoing attempt to mingling acoustic piano with electronics. With the use of live arpeggios and programmed grooves he creates a distinct blur like ocean waves rendered in glistening 8bit.
Biography
Biography
Program Note
Dark bass wobble is an attempt to mixing live recorded percussion and marimba with industrial drum & bass. Drums by Felix Schlarmann, inspired by Berlin-based Samurai label.
Concert 4
Curated by Paul Ramage
Location: Music Museum
Introduction
At the crossroads of centuries and languages, this ciné-concert offers a lively rereading of old films – anonymous or forgotten – through original sound compositions created by young contemporary artists. These silent, fragile images from the 1910s and 1930s become living matter once again. Their silence is reinvested, questioned and sometimes shaken up by very contemporary sound worlds: music with electronic, noisy or vocal sounds… Each soundtrack becomes a listening gesture, a form of address to the ghosts of the frame. This program is partly the fruit of a cross-creation workshop between the Electroacoustic Composition class at the Conservatoire de Paris and the Cinémathèque Robert-Lynen in Paris. Each year, a dozen or so students are invited to imagine a voice, a parallel or complementary sound universe for these films, offering them a new, unexpected light. This dialogue between viewpoints and creative and production tools from very different periods enables a rereading and mutual enrichment of the works, and offers an unprecedented encounter between past and present.
Biography
Biography
Program Note
Les Halles Centrales is a piece of music inspired by the film of the same name by Boris Kaufman. It was premiered as part of the Ciné-concert organised by the Cinémathèque Robert Linen in Paris in January 2023. The piece accompanies the film’s generous portrayal of the night’s work.
Program Note
‘Éclipse des Rêves’ is a piece I composed inspired by a Persian poem by Ahmad Shamlou, which tells of an eternal struggle between darkness and light. I sought to convey this tension and duality through music, playing on contrasts and the progressive transformation of sound materials.
Biography
Biography
Program Note
With this piece, Romain Arnette enters into friction with Follow the Leader, Amedée J. Van Beuren’s 1929 film, hijacking its codes to reveal its flaws, tensions and unspoken meanings. Far from a nostalgic restoration, his sound creation performs a critical translation: period rhythms are displaced, distorted and dissonant. The sound material becomes a revelation – sometimes playful, often disturbing – of a collective imagination in mutation, between Hollywood’s golden age, political urgency and burlesque absurdity. Here, Romain Arnette composes a shifting, obsessive sound architecture, where memories of the syncopated jazz of the past collide with heavy electronic textures. The film becomes the medium for a parallel narrative, in which the archive is less a document than a playground of echoes and shifts. An invitation to see differently, to listen through, to follow… without being guided.
Program Note
Paris at the end of the 1920s was a city with many faces, and one that was very much alive. You arrived by barge, via the canals that join the Seine, where thousands of workers toiled. From the Opéra to the Butte Montmartre, to the rhythm of the historic monuments, the journey through the capital reveals a changing crowd… An urban portrait on an unprecedented scale, Études sur Paris is a lyrical tour of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. A pioneer of art documentaries, André Sauvage captures with extraordinary visual sensitivity the hustle and bustle of the city, the high points and working-class districts of a capital undergoing profound change. Somewhere between naturalism and modernity, his personal and sensitive vision brought him closer to the great visionary filmmakers of the time, such as Dziga Vertov and Jean Vigo. A monumental work! [Cindy Rabouan]