Installation by Felipe Otondo

6th - 14th June 12pm-2pm, 6:30pm-8pm
Price Code: E(FREE)

Global accent (2008)

Accents contain information about a person's linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and they can be seen as footprints of displacement in today's globalised world. This work explores the beauty and musicality of accents of people from across the globe in the form of an installation.

The work is based on speech recordings of non-native speakers of English, made by Steven H. Weinberger at the George Mason University in the United States. These recordings have been used as the raw material for the installation which has been devised using the sculptures in the grounds of the Early Music Centre in York as sound sources.

Beacons of Sound

Sunday 8th June 2008, 1pm
Price Code: D(£5/£3)

Gavin Osborn | Flute/Electronics
Heather Bamforth | 'Cello/Electronics

This performance has at its heart the living sounds of York, with three pieces exploring how sound functions as a central part of our relationship with the city. York Soundwalk allows us to travel through the city - along the walls, by the river, through the station, a pair of binaural microphones supplying the 'ears' for an entire audience; York Resonances investigates the acoustic 'souls' of specific York structures or buildings.

These pieces - specific to York and developed especially for this concert - are balanced out by two shorter instrumental works. Ariel Music mixes flute, cello, and live electronic transformation; Recycled for Sound explores the potential for rubbish (crisp packets, bottles, packaging and other everyday detritus) to gain new life as musical instruments - sound sources (or 'found-sounds') - providing the raw material that is also transformed with live electronics.

Beacons of Sound will be creating all works live - whether sounds are sourced from instruments, found-sounds, or pre-recorded material, the weaving of the sounds and their electronic transformations into pieces is made live and in real-time, maintaining the excitement and risk of live performance in the computer-music age.

B.E.A.S.T

Sunday 8th June 2008, 7:30pm
Price Code: C(£8/£6)

BEAST - Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre

BEAST is an internationally renowned multichannel sound diffusion system offering an immersive listening experience for electroacoustic music. Performers 'sculpt' the spatial, dynamic and dramatic implications of the music in real-time by carefully controlling the balance between various loudspeakers in the multichannel setup - allowing the possibility of creating a large variety of sonic images with which to bring each piece alive in the space.

In this concert, BEAST present a programme of some of the most recent stereo and eight-channel electroacoustic works by Birmingham and York based composers. The latest output from internationally acclaimed composers Trevor Wishart and Jonty Harrison feature; Harrison conjuring an unsettling sub-marine world in Undertow, whilst Angel continues Wishart's preoccupation with the human voice. Alongside these are pieces by current members of BEAST and three new works by composers living in York. Scott Wilson's Gotlandic Miscellanea takes a totally different approach to exploiting the capabilities of a multichannel system, generating a unique audio output for each available speaker

A rare opportunity to hear BEAST in York and in the intimate setting of the National Centre for Early Music.

BEAST is the multi-channel concert sound system of the University of Birmingham's Electroacoustic Music Studios. Founded in 1982 by the Director of the Studios, Jonty Harrison, BEAST has performed extensively in the UK and other parts of Europe over the last 25 years. The system varies in size and configuration from concert to concert, depending on the venue, consisting of up to around one hundred loudspeakers in its largest form. For more information see: http://www.ea-studios.bham.ac.uk/.