Notam at Ultima: Spatial Audio Salon 2024

As part of the Ultima festival 2024 Notam will be hosting Spatial Audio Salon for the third time – this year at Den norske filmskolen.

At Den norsk filmskolen we will create a unique sound dome installation with 32 speakers. Over two days (September 16th and 18th), we will host the world premiere of works by Tulle Ruth, Natasha Barrett and Signe Heinfelt. In addition, there will be works by Trond Lossius, Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer, Bjarne Kvinnsland, Giuseppe Pisano, Gunn Tove Grønsberg and Rune van Deurs. Tickets for Spatial Audio Salon can be found here.

Spatial Audio Salon is a collaboration between Ultima, Den norske filmskolen and Notam.

 

Program

Monday September 16th

Concert I: 7.30 PM
Natasha Barrett – Glass Eye (wp)
Knut Wiggen – Sommarmorgon
Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer – LOKESLOTTET (wp)
Ernst van der Loo – Hypnagogia (2019)

Wednesday September 18th

Seminar: 4.00 – 5.00 PM
Ecology in Sound Art
In sound art and music, there is a growing focus on the consequences of human activity on ecological systems, alongside an increasing willingness to listen to non-human perspectives in a way that challenges anthropocentrism. This panel discussion, featuring composers Tulle Ruth, Signe Heinfeldt, and Bjarne Kvinnsland, will explore these themes through the works presented in the concert following the seminar, which focus on listening to reindeer, elves, and whales, respectively. The conversation will be moderated by John Andrew Wilhite (Ph.D. candidate at NMH with the project Ecologies of Listening).

Concert II: 6.00 PM
Tulle Ruth – REIN-Symfoni (wp)
Signe Heinfelt – Fairies (wp)
Trond Lossius/ David Rothenberg/ Bjarne Kvinnsland – The Moving Sounds of Whales (wp)

Concert III: 8.30 PM
Giuseppe Pisano – a chuva, talvez // la pluie, peut-être (wp)
Trond Lossius – Drift studies (Clouds)
Gunn Tove Grønsberg og Rune van Deurs – Glemselens pøl

 

About the works:

Glass Eye (WP)
Natasha Barrett

Glass Eye is a spatial audio, electroacoustic dystopia in which the proliferation of surveillance technology is an invisible force, quietly eliminating resistance and projecting an appearance of normality. The energised sounds of protesters are displaced by the sounds of youths playing football on the street. The Glass Eye focuses on undesirables in the crowd, singles them out and eliminates them in a transformation from expression to apathy that eventually dissolves into harmless tones as surveillance secretly controls our opinions and behaviour.

Glass Eye was commissioned by Notam with support from the Norwegian Composers Fund and a Norwegian Government Grants for Artists.

Sommarmorgon (1972)
Knut Wiggen

Knut Wiggen (1927 – 2016) was a pioneer within computer music. In 1964 he was the first director of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm. Between 1964 and 1970 Wiggen and his colleagues constructed the world’s first hybrid studio, where a computer was in control of all the analogue equipment. Wiggen also implemented a designated software for the studio, called MusicBox. This work, Sommarmorgon, was composed in 1972. Sommarmorgon has been mixed for ambisonics by Cato Langnes.

The Loki Castle (2024)
Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer

The Loki Castle was created and performed by Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer’s unmanipulated multivocal voice as a commission for Det Norske Solistkor in 2023. It premiered in the University Aula in Oslo on February 10th. The version for one voice was released on the critically acclaimed album ONE VOICES in March of 2024. The work is made for surround, and the spatial aspect of the music is particularly emphasised, in the same way as water envelopes creatures of the sea.

The piece is inspired by a location in the Norwegian Ocean, with the same name as the piece – The Loki Castle. Here, at a depth of over 2400 metres, one can find several undersea volcanoes, and a rich number of unknown living organisms. The Loki field is the most northern known hydrothermal field, containing deposits of minerals and metals. There is great interest, and ongoing plans to extract these deposits for commercial interests – to unknown environmental consequences.

Hypnagogia (2019)
Ernst van der Loo

“Hypnagogia- the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep — Mental phenomena that may occur during this ‘threshold consciousness’ phase include lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucinations, and sleep paralysis.

With the composition of music in a spatial environment we are able to approach the auditory illusions experienced during this state of mind. These illusions are de-facto not stereo or mono. We are hearing those illusions in a space, be it the room we are in or the room we think we are in, in that particular moment.

Reindeer Symphony (WP)
Tulle Ruth

In this composition by Tulle Ruth, the listener is transported into an auditory landscape based on field recordings of a reindeer herd. Thanks to Inge Even Danielsen and Gåebrien sijte, båatsoe/sørsamisk reindrift, Riasten, Ruth has been able to follow the reindeer during gathering. Through this she’s had the opportunity to listen to and make recordings of the herd.

As the reindeer moves around you can hear a clicking sound. This sound originates from the joints in the reindeer’s lower hind legs and is a tool in their communication. Through examining the clicks, Ruth has been able to determine that they have different tones, and thus can form scales. The clicking is an important tool for the reindeer, and the herd. The clicks are heard, and most likely picked up as a vibration through the earth.

Fairies (WP)
Signe Heinfelt

In Fairies, composer and sound artist Signe Heinfelt delves into the auditory world of English folklore and fairy beliefs. Inspired by field recordings from sites reputed for contemporary fairy sightings, Heinfelt crafts a piece that intertwines the mystique of these legendary creatures with the natural soundscapes of their alleged habitats.

Heinfelt’s field recording journey took her to various enchanted locations across England. In Cornwall, near St. Just, she explored a location where a man was said to have been kidnapped by fairies. In Dartmoor, she drew inspiration from the music of composer Thomas Wood, who once claimed to have heard the fairies’ music in the national park. The infamous Cottingley, known for the 1917 hoax where two young girls convinced many of the existence of fairies through fabricated photographs, also plays a significant role in the composition.

This piece investigates the sonic representation of fairies through the lens of Norwegian folklorist Jeanette Sky’s theory: our perception of nature shapes our beliefs in magical beings. By manipulating the concept of fairies, Heinfelt suggests, we might influence broader societal views on nature conservation.

The Moving Sounds of Whales (WP)
Trond Lossius/ David Rothenberg/ Bjarne Kvinnsland

Humpback whales sing long, beautiful songs that are closer to music than language, sometimes moving human listeners to tears. The male whales change their song, all together, from month to month and year to year. When one whale changes his tune and the new song is accepted, all the other whales quickly follow and change theirs, so they all wail the new tune.

Sperm whales, the largest of the toothed whales, use clicks for echolocation and to identify their family groups. They are the only animals we know of that have clan-specific percussive sounds. This precise and cultural way of using sound suggests that these whales have a complex and nuanced social life that humans can barely understand. We knew nothing about this when we hunted them to near extermination for their oil and ambergris.

When sung deep enough under the ocean’s surface, Blue whale songs can travel thousands of miles across oceans in less than an hour.

Bowhead whales sing lilting, simple songs like the bowing of a cello back and forth. They chant as they migrate under the ice. Their sounds suggest ancient time, a slow movement that could outlast human civilization.

a chuva, talvez // la pluie, peut-être (WP)
Giuseppe Pisano

This piece emerged from some recordings Pisano made in Madeira, where he was trying to record the exact moment when a rainstorm would start. The rainstorm never really started, but other things happened during that time, which eventually became the background for a deeper reflection on field recording, tourism, intentionality and the purposefulness of our actions.

In fact, this piece consists of the music that will be played in the concert, as well as the short essay “In Praise of the Unimpressive”. This can be read while listening to the sounds, or before, or after, or whenever it suits the listener. It must be said that the experience of the piece cannot be considered complete if one part is accessed without the other, and that the text, although not functional to the musical performance, is constitutive of the piece on the same level as the sound.

Drift studies (Clouds) (WP)
Trond Lossius

The work examines techniques of composition and sound design to create extended and ambiguous masses of sound in motion through spaces, inspired by ambient and atmospheric thinking. Site sounds construct the backdrop for more abstract layers of sound that may conjure associations of fog, or clouds drifting over an open sky.

Pool of oblivion (WP)
Gunn Tove Grønsberg og Rune van Deurs

A world of waste that we have long forgotten.
Things are destroyed and can arise anew.
A boisterous dance of constructive destruction

Cover Art: Brian Cliff Olguin / NODE for Ultima