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VIDEOGRAPHY

Introduction to 'Antisphere' (2019) | Out on 'Emily Howard: Torus' Portrait Album | NMC Recordings
04:20
RNCM PRiSM

Introduction to 'Antisphere' (2019) | Out on 'Emily Howard: Torus' Portrait Album | NMC Recordings

Emily Howard introduces her orchestral work 'Antisphere' alongside an excerpt recorded by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni, ahead of the release of her portrait album 'Torus' on NMC Recordings: release date 28 April 2023. PRE-ORDER 'EMILY HOWARD: TORUS' FROM NMC RECORDINGS HERE: https://nmc-recordings.myshopify.com/products/emily-howard-torus // Emily Howard (2019): Antisphere EP73424 ©Peters Edition Limited, London Recorded by the BBC at The Bridgewater Hall on 29 October 2022, as part of the RNCM PRiSM Future Music #4 Festival. Feat. BBC Philharmonic Conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni Production team Emily Howard | Composer & Director RNCM PRiSM Stephen Rinker | Recording Engineer Matthew Bennett | Producer Thirdman Productions | Videography Thirdman Productions & Bofan Ma | Audio-visual Post-production Zakiya Leeming | Interview Production // Album info: Emily Howard is a multi-award-winning composer who is deeply fascinated with the "poetry" that can be found in mathematical shapes and processes. The development of a series of geometry-inspired orchestral works has been central to her creative practice over recent years, and these Orchestral Geometries make up three of the four pieces on Howard's new album, Torus. The work which gives the album its name, Torus, was a 2016 BBC Proms Commission described by The Times as "visionary", and was the winner of the orchestral category of the 2017 British Composer Awards. Here the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins bring to life, Howard's meditation on the shape which her collaborator, the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy describes in his notes for the album as "a finite flat geometry where top and bottom are joined into a cylinder which is then connected at both ends to make a doughnut shape." Howard translates this into vivid music punctuated with continual oscillations and pulsations, with the void in the centre of the shape playing a vital part in this music of stark contrasts. Antisphere, which was featured in the Barbican's high-profile Life Rewired season in 2019, interprets the impossibly concave imaginary shape of its namesake. An uncanny panorama of "huge gyrations" and "estranged pitches" (Paul Griffiths), are heard here performed by the BBC Philharmonic with conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni. Although she is inspired by the intricate mathematical properties of each form, Howard goes further to produce her Orchestral Geometries. She meditates on each form, its distinct character and "shape-energy", saying, "the musical score often emerges through the consideration of multiple journeys around the imagined entity, from multiple viewpoints." During the composition of the smaller-scale work sphere, Howard imagined travelling across the convex surface of the shape, encountering different landscapes which are brought to life in this recording by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. The newest work on the album is Compass for string septet (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with conductor Gabriella Teychenné) and solo percussionist (Julian Warburton). Howard conceives of this piece as a synthesis and evolution of her Orchestral Geometries, elaborating on the soundworlds of all three geometric forms, producing music which is more weird, more abstract, perhaps symbolising a new chapter in the composer's body of work. This new album follows Magnetite, the critically-acclaimed portrait disc which NMC released in 2016 as part of the label's Debut Disc series. Catalogue no: NMC D274 Release date: 28 April 2023 // The album and the recording of this work are supported by PRiSM, The RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music, funded by the Research England fund Expanding Excellence in England (E3).
Robert Laidlow (2022): Silicon
43:50
RNCM PRiSM

Robert Laidlow (2022): Silicon

00:00 - Intro 00:27 - I (Mind) 16:52 - II (Body) 29:36 - III (Soul) Recorded live at the WP given by the BBC Philharmonic & Vimbayi Kaziboni, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 29/10/2022. Part of PRiSM Future Music #4: https://www.rncm.ac.uk/research/research-centres-rncm/prism/prism-news-and-events/future-music-4-25-29-october-2022/ Producers: Matthew Bennett & Robert Laidlow Recording Engineer: Stephen Rinker Live Electronics Cues: Bofan Ma Videography & Post-production: Thirdman Productions - Programme Note: Silicon is music about the orchestra, about technology, and about what an orchestra might be in the age of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI). It is also music that uses technology; AI permeates this piece from start to finish, from top to bottom, as composer, instrument, performer, improviser, and inspiration. Like all technologies, AI reflects the values and interests of the society that creates it and throughout Silicon it primarily acts as a mirror through which I re-examine the orchestra. This piece is also a tribute to the symphony, although I don’t know whether that makes it a symphony itself. It does have some of the trappings of an 18th-century symphony. However, if Silicon is a symphony, it’s one for those who grew up in the Internet age like me - an age of social media-induced numbness, information overload, a vanishingly uncertain future, and an overbearing, immutable past that can often feel oppressive in its ubiquity. Like the Internet, the orchestra contains near-infinite possibilities, a deep history, and many biases. The first movement, ‘Mind’, relates to the future and the past. Often, the benchmark for a ‘successful AI’ is how convincingly it can copy something that already exists, such as a Beethoven symphony, a Rembrandt painting, or someone’s face and voice. This movement uses an AI that creates musical scores. Almost always, these come out in the style of an existing (long dead) composer, but with uncanny twists: sometimes the music will suddenly begin travelling backwards through time, to obsessively repeat over one idea, or to begin referencing itself. I wondered what this says about the music that orchestras play, and the way that AI is designed today. As a living composer, the last thing I want to do is recreate what already exists. This movement, therefore, tries to make something new out of something old. It begins with simple material played by the orchestra, composed in turn by myself and AI, but quickly falls down a rabbit-hole to somewhere both utterly alien and inescapably familiar. Movement II, ‘Body’, is primarily concerned with fakeness, authenticity, and control. AI is used constantly to create fake, or ‘deepfake’, content online - I wanted to explore the idea of fake music, which is both funny and unsettling. There’s a prominent AI-powered instrument, made specifically for this performance, morphing between the sounds of the human players. The piece spins between several deepfake dance styles at the speed of a social media algorithm with a disappearing attention span, but the orchestra, like a marionette, is always beholden to the AI lurking in the background. ‘Soul’, the last movement, is the most direct example of AI acting as a mirror for the orchestra. Specifically, it acts as a mirror for this orchestra: the BBC Philharmonic. We hear, alongside the physical players, the sounds of an AI that has listened to and learned from decades of BBC Philharmonic radio broadcasts. AI does not distinguish between ‘sound’ and ‘music’ in the way that humans do, and so in amongst the eerie, brash, beautiful, and lyrical AI-generated orchestral sounds are the phantom voices of radio presenters, the solemn act of tuning up, and the applause and cheers that it has learned from you - the audience. To me, these sonic rituals are the fingerprints of the BBC Philharmonic and get to the heart of what an orchestral performance really is - an act of community. Perhaps one future for this technology is its inclusion in and contribution to this community. - AI tools used during the composition process: MuseNet: https://openai.com/research/musenet FolkRNN: https://folkrnn.org/ Google Magenta DDSP: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst PRiSM SampleRNN: https://github.com/rncm-prism/prism-samplernn - Acknowledgement: This work was composed as part of Laidlow’s doctoral research (“Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Process of Contemporary Classical Music”) at the Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM) at the Royal Northern College of Music. This research was made possible by a Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with the BBC Philharmonic, supported by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and the National Productivity Investment Fund. The project & its documentation were also supported by PRiSM through the Research England fund Expanding Excellence in England (E3).
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