Yati has successfully received funding from the EU/Goethe Haus I-Portunus musicians travel funding grant to work with ensemble Maskfest in Italy! The tours will begin in summer/autumn 2021 and/or as soon - hopefully - as the Covid situation improves in Europe and hopefully take place in Venice, Florence, Bologna and other places in Italy. Very kind thanks to this excellent funding scheme and its partners!
Yati will moderate the Sound Art panel: Seeing the Sound: The Visual Manifestation of Music on Thursday, 6th May 2021
As part of AvidOnline Learning (Mumbai), Yati will moderate the Sound Art panel talking about visual music together with Prof. Joseph Hyde (Bath-Spa University), Dr. Eleni-Ira Panourgia (Université Gustave Eiffel) and Yashas Shetty (Srishti School of Design):
Seeing the Sound: The Visual Manifestation of Music on Thursday, 6th May 2021 @ 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM (IST) - this is 1:30pm UK time!
The event is free and open to the public (takes place online) and should be an interesting discussion on the fields of linear music and sound relationships to image/object/etc. and art!
Registration for the event can be made here: https://www.avidlearning.in/programmes/2021/live-seeing-the-sound-the-visual-manifestation-of-music/
Awards season 2021: Oticons Faculty Competition announces their winners
Oticons Faculty Film Music Competition have announced their winners for 2021:
https://faculty.oticons.com
As Administrator of the Jury and jury member since 2017, it is a pleasure each year to witness the new and rising film music composition talent that comes through this competition! This year, the winners were quite clear and showed real professional promise. It is a statement to the resiliency of music that the quality of musical ideas remain high, even as many creatives are fatigued with all the changes and cancellations in the industry. Here’s to the new talent!
Presentation of paper on reciprocal Sound Art at Seeing Sound 2020 12.12.2020
Yati will be giving a paper on his research and performances of sound art works to Saundaryalahari at the Seeing Sound 2020 conference at Bath-Spa University on 12th December 2020 between 14:45 - 16:45 with a live Q&A afterwards. The conference normally takes place every two years and outlines most high-level research in sound art and visual music techniques in academia.
The programme and running order can be seen here:
http://www.seeingsound.co.uk/seeing-sound-2020/2020-presentations/
The paper itself can be viewed here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LQravr6tLfb4904FLULqdIK6git3pHoY/view?usp=sharing
The title of the paper is: Saundaryalahari – a search for a reciprocal audio-visual system
Abstract: The Saundaryalahari project is a series of works based on an 8th Century Indian literary work in Sanskrit written by Adi Shankara called the Soundarya Lahari or Saundaryalahari (Sanskrit: सौन्दर्यलहरी) meaning "Waves Of Beauty”. The outputs of this project explore through music, sound and visuals the “non-verbal” creativity found in these ancient texts while utilising the structuralism of the spiritual/graphic formation of the Sricakra, which defines and arranges the verses from outside to inside. As part of this, the Saundaryalahari sound art “system” utilises signal modified electronics and interactive visuals to attempt to translate image into sound and back again – providing the opportunity for the music to have a “feed forward” loop to regenerate musical materials within a composition and interact directly with the performer or ensemble during a performance.
In this paper, I will explain the genesis and evolution of the current Saundaryalahari reciprocal audio-visual system and why going beyond an arbitrary representation of visuals to audio/music allows for more distinct co-compositional approaches in performance and creation. Considerations on research into synaesthesia, experimental animation and improvisation will be discussed along with an introduction to the most recent Saundaryalahari audio-visual sound art works by the author. The project is funded by a Creative Scotland – Sustaining Creative Research Grant with the goal of exploring how Sound Art works can play a role in potentially transcending inequities of excessive miscommunication (i.e. social media, fake news and other overly prolific verbal/text-based communication in media).
A blog into the current research strands of the Saundaryalahari project can be found here: http://www.yatidurant.com/saundaryalahari-blog.