peter traub » network

WoodEar receives funding from Turbulence.org and the NEA

peter — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:46:32 +0000

I’m excited to announce that my proposal for a new piece called ‘WoodEar’, has received a generous grant from Turbulence.org with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Turbulence.org previously funded my 2007 web-based piece, ItSpace.

WoodEar will use data from sensors and microphones embedded in a living tree to drive a physical and online sound installation, and will explore the musical and network mappings that can be created when a tree is considered as a resonant object.

In WoodEar I am not just interested in resonances within the trunk, but in a number of constantly-changing environmental factors that impact the tree’s life and are filtered through its body: light, external sound, wind, and temperature. In addition to a local site-specific installation, sound elements from the tree will be streamed to a website, allowing visitors to manipulate and mix the different musical streams via a browser-based interface. WoodEar will be completed in mid to late 2012.

My Remote Lecture to Wits

peter — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:35:42 +0000

On October 27th I gave a remote lecture to students in the Digital Arts program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. My parents both graduated from Wits and so I had a certain coming-full-circle feeling in giving the lecture there. We used a combination of Skype and native Mac screen sharing to do the talk. I remotely controlled the desktop of the Mac there to run Powerpoint and a Max/MSP example. The Youtube video here is the first of five in a playlist. Many thanks to artist and Wits faculty, Tegan Bristow, for arranging the lecture. From the ‘official’ description of the talk: “In this remote lecture Peter will talk about several of his recent pieces that focus on using physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces as compositional tools. The pieces span several mediums, from online installation to dance performance to site-specific physical installation. He will also discuss and demonstrate the tools, both software and hardware, that he used to create the works.”

Not to Scale: New Music for Hybrid Space

peter — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:34:54 +0000

On April 7th, 2010, I will premiere a new work performed by flutist Wayla Chambo – Passages and Recesses: for solo flute and hybrid space. This is the fourth piece in my dissertation series and is the result of a technical collaboration with Eric Montgomery, a recent graduate in computer science and music from UVA. Eric will also premiere a new piece for solo piano and hybrid space, called Sound Across Grounds, performed by pianist Benjamin Yobp.

Each piece will be performed from a different space – Eric’s from cavernous the Main Lounge of Newcomb Hall, and mine from the resonant upper stairwell of Old Cabell Hall. They will acoustically connect their respective spaces via the network with the Dome Room of the UVA Rotunda – a United Nations World Heritage Site and the architectural heart of the campus. The program will start at 12:50PM in the stairwell. There will be a fifteen minute break in-between pieces to allow listeners to change locations for Eric’s piece.

The event is the culmination of a project funded by a Double Hoo Grant, an award given out annually by the Center for Undergraduate Excellence at UVA to encourage collaborations between graduate and undergraduate students.

ground loops at PASIC ’09

peter — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:21:29 +0000

Mike Schutz performing ground loops at PASIC '09

My 2005 piece, ground loops: for solo percussion and internet feedback, got a really good performance by percussionist, Mike Schutz, at the PASIC 2009 Focus Day. After a few hitches during the sound check the night before, everything went fine during the performance and I was very happy with the way the piece turned out. The last half of the piece can vary significantly depending on the sounds contributed in the first half of the piece. The ‘tail’ of this performance was one of the better ones. Listen here to the unofficial recording (made with an Edirol R-09):