Installationen förenar ljudmiljöer från Kiruna med berättelser om lyssnarupplevelser hämtade från intervjuer med Kirunabor. Naturupplevelser, buller från rivningsarbete och samtal om karaktäristiska ljud i stadens miljö och historia utgör återkommande ämnen.

Music of the Indeterminate Place is a collaborative composition by the TCP/Indeterminate Place quartet with networked hyperorgans. The members of the quartet perform from four locations, housing unique instruments: three different pipe organs and a bell tower in a town hall square. All instruments can be remotely controlled and the quartet interacts with them in several ways, none of which involve playing a conventional keyboard. The different locations are connected via the internet so that high-quality audio and data can be exchanged in real time, making it possible for the quartet to perform together while in different places.

In this piece, the quartet explores the qualities of the network through a new interaction design. Latency, network feedback, interconnectivity matrices, and other specificities of the network are reconfigured throughout the performance to form a music that is everywhere and nowhere: the Music of the Indeterminate Place.

This audio paper seeks to understand the agency of sounds and instruments in designing intra-actions between humans and their environment. It further explores how different mediating technologies influence the ways professional musicians experience place through sound. In addition to the core research group, members of the contemporary music ensemble Norrbotten NEO participated in these site-specific explorations, which were devised as part of the ecological urban sound art project Invisible Sounds. Through a long-term collaborative artistic process, described in the audio paper, an hour-long composition titled Sounds by Water and Trees was produced (Hultqvist et al., 2024).

The mediation between humans and the environment was driven by audio technologies on site, utilising sensors, hydrophones, and surround sound microphone arrays, along with their deep entanglement with musical instruments. The interview materials and the original audio recordings have been further analysed by revisiting the multi-modal recordings and exploring the individual experiences of each participant through stimulated recall analysis (Östersjö et al., 2023). The audio paper expresses all these layers of signification while emphasising the individual experience expressed by the participating musicians. The project is characterised by recursive loops that flow continuously between subject and object, self and world, order and chaos in rhythmically cohering and complexifying patterns. We provide examples of how such complexifying patterns may emerge through a participatory and multidimensional engagement with sound in tandem with the mediation enabled by the technologies used.

In this chapter, we describe a series of studies related to our research on using gestural sonic objects in music analysis. These include developing a method for annotating the qualities of gestural sonic objects on multimodal recordings; ranking which features in a multimodal dataset are good predictors of basic qualities of gestural sonic objects using the Random Forests algorithm; and a supervised learning method for automated spotting designed to assist human annotators. The subject of our analyses is a performance of Fragmente2, a choreomusical composition based on the Japanese composer Makoto Shinohara’s solo piece for tenor recorder Fragmente (1968). To obtain the dataset, we carried out a multimodal recording of a full performance of the piece and obtained synchronised audio, video, motion, and electromyogram (EMG) data describing the body movements of the performers. We then added annotations on gestural sonic objects through dedicated qualitative analysis sessions. The task of annotating gestural sonic objects on the recordings of this performance has led to a meticulous examination of related theoretical concepts to establish a method applicable beyond this case study. This process of gestural sonic object annotation—like other qualitative approaches involving manual labelling of data—has proven to be very time-consuming. This motivated the exploration of data-driven, automated approaches to assist expert annotators.

Gaman að kynnast þér // Pleased to meet you! 

An encounter between two performers of the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect playing baroque instruments, two members of the Vietnamese group The Six Tones playing traditional Vietnamese instruments, and two musicians from the Intelligent Instruments Lab at University of Iceland. Each musician brings their individual instrumental skills and the performance practice of their instrument, and their cultural resonances, to a production based on the attentive listening characteristic of free improvisation, and the explorative approaches characteristic of experimentation with electronic media. The production was produced by Nordic Affect,  in collaboration with the ERC-funded Intelligent Instruments Lab. The concert was produced with funding from The Icelandic Ministry of Culture’s Music Fund and Reykjavík City. 

This portrait CD presents an opportunity to examine almost the full span of Isaksson’s career as a composer, through works composed between 1998 and 2022. The album features the guitarist Stefan Östersjö in three works, including Far (2011) for alto guitar and electronics, as well as Infiltrations (2022) for pipe organ, electric guitar and chamber ensemble. The earliest of these works is Fibres (2004), the creation of which became the beginning of the collaboration between Isaksson and Östersjö. This collaboration has entailed explorations of multi-stringed instruments like the 10-string guitar (in Fibres) and the 11-string alto guitar (in Far), as well as the timbral and dynamic range of the electric guitar in Infiltrations. 

This portrait album with compositions by Madeleine Isaksson is released on CD but is also available in Dolby Atmos as a digital download.