Anglia Ruskin University

CoDE affiliates Dr Tom Hall (Music and Performing Arts) and Dr Katy Price (English, Communication, Film and Media) had reason to celebrate recently after a successful joint performance in an underground water tower in Berlin, as part of a concert for the 2010 SuperCollider Symposium '{SOUNDING CODE}'. Their composition, "Under the Yoke", was selected from among many international entries, and was the largest ensemble piece in the concert, scored for narrator, flute, trombone, electric guitar, percussion and multichannel sound. It was performed by the composers and members of ensemble unitedberlin. Adapting collaborative interdisciplinary techniques, Katy wrote the text for the composition, and Tom the music.

"Under the Yoke" combines both contemporary poetry and algorithmically composed instrumental parts based on a single 18th Century Luddite folk-song, accompanied by laptop 8-channel melodic synthesis and playback of recordings of sounds from the natural and industrial worlds. The piece sonifies, at different historical and aesthetic distances, the textual, statistical and musical remnants of 200 year old Luddite events in the UK and is a multi-layered reflection on what can be considered the natural and the technological.

The "Kleiner Wasserspeicher" concerts were notable for an evocative (if rather chilly) atmosphere and large sense of space and history, aspects which were embraced by Tom and Katy's joint work. The conference was also notable for the presence of another ALSS academic, Dr Richard Hoadley (Music and Performing Arts), who presented a paper entitled "Implementation and Development of Interfaces for Music Generation and Performance through Analysis of Improvised Movement", which discussed his recent CoDE-sponsored research.


Back to CoDE news archive