Sonic Arts Network is a UK-based organisation,
established in 1979, that aims to enable both audiences and
practitioners to engage with the art of sound through a programme
of festivals, events, commissions and education projects. Its
honorary patron is
Karlheinz
Stockhausen.
Sonic Arts Network’s activities separate into three main areas:
- Activities – Events, regular festivals such as Cut and Splice and Expo, tours and commissions.
- Education – national education project Sonic Postcards, artist workshops and
talks.
- Network – Sonic Arts Network is a membership organisation that
acts as a hub of information, opportunities and publications for
the UK sonic arts scene.
Activities
Every year, Sonic Arts Network produces a number of nationwide
commissions and projects in partnership with funding agencies,
sponsors, broadcasters and venues. The aim of these activities is
to bring some of the best new and existing work by sound artists
from around the world to the UK. Sonic Arts Network’s main
forthcoming activities include: Cut and Splice, Expo Plymouth 2007,
Beach Singularity and its most recent commission, Vacant
Space.
Cut and Splice
Cut and Splice is a festival of experimental electronic music that
brings together international artists to premiere new work or
recreate seminal historical pieces.
The event has previously featured Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, Yasunao Tone and Ars Electronica
Prize-winner Eliane
Radigue. Some of the artists featured in Cut and
Splice Acousmonium 2006 at the ICA
included Russell
Haswell, John Wall, Hecker,
Michel Chion, Christian Zanési, Philip Jeck, Carl Michael von Hausswolff,
Zbigniew Karkowski and Hans-Joachim Roedelius.
Expo Festival
Since 1997, the Expo Festival is the playground of the
experimental music and
sound art scene in the UK. Free and open to the
public, the event mobilises a national network of artists and
engages with communities from all backgrounds – placing sonic art
and the people who make it, in direct contact with the
public.
Expo 2006
explored the inner, outer and public spaces of Manchester
. The festival included sound installations at
the Cornerhouse
by Berlin
based sound
art collective Staalplaat
Soundsystem who presented The Ultrasound of Therapy;
Bob Levene’s newly commissioned work
The Space Between – Experiments for Speakers and Helmut Lemke’s new work KLANGELN
7. There was also a performance by Norwegian
female electro/instrumental improv group SPUNK
and Birmingham
sound arts activists Dreams of Tall Buildings
performing the first graphic score in 40 years by Fluxus artist and founder of the band The United States of
America, Joseph Byrd.
Victoria Baths
, winner of BBC’s 2004
Restoration
competition, saw over 600 people attend a day of site-specific
happenings that utilised the spaces and acoustics of the listed
building with a programme of performances and
installations.
The focus
for Expo 2007 shifts to Plymouth
and the
South West of England where Expo will be presented in partnership
with the University of
Plymouth
's i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art
and Technology).
This weekend of performance, exhibition and presentation will take
place between 22-25 June 2007 across a variety of public venues in
Plymouth including a selection of outdoor performance spaces, club
spaces and an historic architectural space. Online works will also
be part of the activities.
Beach Singularity
Beach Singularity is a celebration of the British seaside. Set in
an afternoon, the piece involves hundreds of holidaymakers of all
ages in a bizarre and creative performance featuring a marching
band, interactive electronic sound, beach activities and sound
games. Supported by
Contemporary Music Network (CMN),
Beach Singularity will tour 3 seaside towns in August 2007.
Composed
and devised by Trevor Wishart, Beach
Singularity received its first performances on the beaches of
Morecambe
, Cleveleys
, St.
Annes
, and Southport
in the summer of 1977 as part of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations.
Commissions
Sonic Arts Network aims to support the development of both emerging
and established artists in the UK through a rolling programme of
commissions that in recent years has commissioned new work for
performance and installation across the UK from artists including
Kaffe Matthews,
Justin Bennett,
People Like Us,
Ergo Phizmiz, Dreams of Tall Buildings and
Bob Levene.
Education
Sonic Arts
Network undertook its first formal education project at the 1989
Huddersfield
Contemporary Music Festival with composer John Cage and has subsequently provided projects
for the South Bank
Centre
, The Science Museum
, Canary
Wharf
, Birmingham's Symphony Hall
and more. In 2000 Sonic Arts Network led the
education programme for Sonic Boom at
London’s Hayward
Gallery
.
Sonic postcards
The main branch of Sonic Arts Network’s current Education programme
is
Sonic postcards which aims to
explore and compare the local sound environments of young people
across the UK; the impact of sound on our lives; and the
possibilities for creativity through the interaction of these
sounds with the internet. 52 schools from across the UK took part
in its first year.
The project is aimed at pupils between the ages of 9-14 in primary,
secondary and special schools. Each project provides pupils with
the opportunity to record and gather sounds to use as the basis of
their sonic postcards. The pupils become sound designers by
composing and structuring their own sonic postcards which are
emailed to other schools that have participated in the project. All
the sonic postcards are then uploaded to the Sonic postcards
website.
Network
Sonic Arts Network is a membership organisation with over 600
members. This community of artists, organisations and the wider
public with an interest in
sound art and
experimental music is served by
the Sonic Arts Network through a combination of online services,
performance, exhibition and educational opportunities and a range
of specially curated CDs and newsletters.
CD series
These guest-curated CD are released several times a year,
accompanying the aural element of the publication is a richly
produced booklet that often underpins and contextualises the themes
explored on the CD.
Previous
issues have been curated by Nicolas
Collins, editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal and Chair of
the Department of Sound at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago
, who developed a theme based around silence.
Kenny Goldsmith, a writer, poet
and founder of
UbuWeb, who trawled his
archives to create a compilation of sound poetry. Japanese
performance artist,
Junko Wada curated a
deeply personal selection of music, produced by a process of
curation, performance and collaboration. Professor
Andrew Hugill explored the French absurdist
movement
’Pataphysics – a CD
which travels from unheard
Soft Machine
tracks,
Marcel Duchamp and
Gavin Bryars and through to
Frank Zappa’s former lover,
Nigey Lennon and a piece of silence that
predates
John Cage by 70 years by
Alphonse Allais.
Ben Watson delivered a post-Allais
polemic through a disgruntled whiny from the Esemplasm.
Tim Steiner’s
Big Ears unearthed the
lost art of Radio broadcasting and
Irwin
Chusid, broadcaster and author of
Songs in the Key of
Z, delivered DIY and outsider nuggets.
The latest in the series is
The Topography of Chance by
Stewart Lee, comedian and writer of
Jerry Springer: The Opera.
The CD explores spoken word, music and sound that all include some
chance element in their creation.
Other International Electroacoustic Organisations
- ACMA —
Australasian Computer Music Association
- CIME/ICEM — Confédération Internationale de Musique
Electroacoustique / International Confederation of Electroacoustic
Music
- DeGeM —
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische Musik e.V.
(Germany)
- DIEM — Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music
- EMS — Elektroakustisk Musik i Sverige (Sweden)
- ICMA —
International Computer Music Association
- HELMCA —
Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (Greece)
- NEAR —
Netherlands Electro-Acoustic Repertoire Centre
- NOTAM —
Norsk nettverk for Teknologi, Akustikk og Musikk
- SEAMUS — Society
for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States
See also
External links
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