IMM Chronicle May 2012

 

Hybridised Rhythms
At the IMM, the Portuguese guitarist and music informatics expert João Martins introduces a system for agent-based rhythm composition developed for his doctoral thesis, and gives a brief introduction to the programming language Matlab. He discusses the causal relationships that, through exchanges and crossovers, lead from individual structures to rhythmic interplay within the ensemble. The event takes place on 15 May from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. (experimental laboratory, room A 2.31) in English, and is open to anyone who is interested.

A Tribute to Stevie Wonder
Under the title A Tribute to Stevie Wonder, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and the Voice Event present works from Stevie Wonder‘s double album Songs In The Key Of Life, arranged for choir and big band.
The planning, conception and installation of the sound system for the three concerts held in Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg im Breisgau is being handled by Hannes Mutter, a student of the Audio and Video Engineering program. IMM student Steffen Hofmann will be responsible for the lighting and the live recording at the venues.

Two bronzes at the AES Convention 2012
In the Student Recording Competition at this year’s AES-Convention in Budapest, the productions of IMM students Jochen Dannwolf and Christian Sander were each awarded a bronze prize. They competed successfully against productions by audio and sound engineering students from throughout Europe. In the Traditional Studio Recording category, Jochen Dannwolf presented the work Canarios for four guitars by the Machado Quartet. Christian Sander presented the music and sound design for an existing television advert in the category Sound for Visual Media, which he composed and produced within the framework of the artistic compulsory elective Advertising Music under IMM Professor Werner Roth. This involved the use of sound control room 2 at the IMM and the large sound studio at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf.

IMM BASECAMP: Felix Ensslin on Freedom and Aesthetics
The relationship between Lacan and Kant has often been analysed in the context of moral philosophy, and rightly so: Kant avec Sade. Another attempt is made here: to think about this connection on the basis of aesthetics. On 24 May at 5 p.m. (IMM Studio A 2.24) Prof. Dr. Felix Ensslin will examine whether, indirectly, Lacan's psychoanalysis can think productively this paradox of criticising transcendentalism while at the same time maintaining the connection to the ordinary, using aesthetic judgement.
Prof. Dr. Felix Ensslin holds the chair for aesthetics and art education at the Academy of Visual Arts, Stuttgart. He has implemented numerous exhibitions and theatre projects and is co-editor of the Subjektile series at Diaphanes Verlag and founding member of the pli-Psychoanalyse nach Lacan group in Munich, Hamburg, Paris and Stuttgart. He has published numerous contributions on subject theory and philosophy, on aesthetics and on contemporary art.



From the IMM majors

Major Music Production:
Digital audio production environments
In the course DAW basics run by IMM assistant professor Stephan Friedrich, the students deal with the theoretical fundamentals and practical application of modern digital audio production environments. Using examples from real production processes in the fields of serious and entertainment music production, audio play and film audio editing, the students will be studying both the most conventional tools for these tasks, and also their artistic and technically appropriate use.

Major Visual Music:
Quantum
On 10 February 2012, the visual music project Quantum by Florian Breuer was performed for the first time in Studio 1 at the IMM. Quantum stages Beethoven’s final Sonata No. 32 in C minor in an audiovisual concert for piano and projector. The sonata was played by Frank Märkel. The projected images underline the dramatic aspect of the piece and deal with the thoughts behind the composition. The content of the projected images was specially developed by Florian Breuer through analysis of the score, and is projected live onto the concert grand.
The work was supervised by Andreas Kolinski and Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling within the framework of the Visual Music 2 final exam.

 

 

IMM Chronicle April 2012

 

Cooperation with the Center for Visual Music
For the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media, President Prof. Raimund Wippermann and for the Center for Visual Music (CVM) in Los Angeles, director Cindy Keefer signed a cooperation agreement.
The Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to Visual Music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is committed to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and artwork. CVM's archives house the world's largest collection of resources on Visual Music, including the papers of Oskar Fischinger.
The archive holds collections of artists whose careers reflect unique aspects of cinema. Among these artists are Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Charles Dockum, Jules Engel, Hy Hirsh, Mary Ellen Bute and James Whitney; numerous contemporary artists; and the original research collection and archives of film historian Dr. William Moritz, encompassing his 35+ years of research on Visual Music, Fischinger and Avant-Garde Cinema.
The major Visual Music at the Robert Schumann School's Institute For Music And Media (IMM) on the other hand is unique in Germany and was established by IMM Professor Dr Heike Sperling. She also runs the nonprofit online archive for Visual Music.
This is the first cooperation the Center for Visual Music signed with a German academy.

FullDome Awards 2012
Within the framework of this year’s FullDome Festival at the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, IMM Professor Manfred Waffender has been invited to serve as a member of the five-person jury. Together with Claudia Tronnier (ZDF), Dr Peter Popp (Softmachine), Benedikt Otto (MDR), Manuela Meyer (TU Berlin), Thomas W. Kraupe (Hamburg Planetarium) and Michaela Honauer (Bauhaus University), he will be deciding who gets the Fulldome Awards on 28 April. At the 6th FullDome Festival, professional, independent and student productions will be shown in various categories. They give an insight into the world of full-dome projection and the state of development in this young medium. From 8 to 12 May 2012, the public will be able to come and enjoy this fascinating immersive experience, evaluate the latest productions, and learn a little about the technology and perspectives during workshops.

IMM BASECAMP: Kai Blankenberg on mastering
On 26 April at 5 p.m. (IMM Studio A 2.24), Kai Blankenberg explains the possibilities, the necessities, and even the limits of mastering. Kai Blankenberg has been working in sound studios for 20 years, and for 12 of those has been concentrating on mastering. In the process, he has mastered albums for Silbermond, Sportfreunde Stiller, Beatsteaks, Guano Apes, Juli, BAP, Kim Wilde, Konstantin Wecker and Revolverheld, amongst others. Since 2004, he has been the owner of the renowned Skyline Tonfabrik.

Computer Music Journal: Live Coding
It has been almost ten years since the first ‘changing grammars’ Live Coding conference and the founding of TOPLAP. Together with Alex McLean and Nick Collins, IMM Professor Julian Rohrhuber is now producing a special edition of the Computer Music Journal on the subject of Live Coding. They invite you to contribute to this discussion with papers relating to the wide field of improvisation and composition using computer languages.

AES Convention 2012
The 132nd convention of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) will be held this year from 26　to 29 April in Budapest. A number of IMM students will be participating in the lectures, workshops and competitions for sound engineers, musicians and scientists.

Cosi fan tutte on live stream
Kaling Khouw, graduate of the Audio and Video Engineering program, is conducting the final performance of Mozart’s opera Cosi fan tutte on 25 April at the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media in Düsseldorf, which is organised in cooperation with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Kaling Khouw is currently studying Orchestral Conducting at the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media, and can be heard at many concerts during the 2011/12 season as a scholarship holder with the Bergische Symphoniker symphony orchestra.
On Friday and Saturday, the opera can be viewed as a live stream on the homepage of the Robert Schumann School of Music and Media in Düsseldorf. The recording will take place under the leadership of Jonathan Lang (director) and Florian Breuer (sound mixer), and will be undertaken by a large team of IMM students. This will involve the use of the recently refurbished Partikasaal sound control room and the IMM video broadcasting van.
The sound recording will be supervised by IMM Professor Dagmar Birwe, and the video recording by IMM Professor Manfred Waffender.

Echo Jazz 2012
With his production entitled Rooms restored, André Nendza has won the Echo Jazz 2012 in the Instrumentalist of the Year, national, bass category. The executive producer of this album was IMM assistant professor Philipp van Endert. This production was also released on his label, JazzSick Records.

Sounds of Europe
Sounds of Europe is an internet platform supported by the European Community, which deals with the growing interest in field recording within the fields of music, fine arts and scientific research. Institutions, projects and artists are described in an ongoing blog, which is run each month by a member of a different European country. A recent contribution from the German label gruenrekorder introduces IMM Professor Manfred Waffender. Alongside his own work, the article presents recent works by four students from the Music and Media program.
Johannes van Bebbern, Babett Niclas, Raffael Seyfried and Patrick Arnold provided excerpts from their logbooks. The Logbook of the Senses is a kind of diary in which students of the basic module in Sensory Education use text, images and sound to document and shape their sensory impressions, observations, reflections, experiences and experiments over a period of two semesters.　

John Cage Weeks 2012
Together with the composer and conductor Roland Techet, IMM Student Florian Zeeh is working on a composition based on Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The piece is produced for one speech artist (Isabeela Beumer), one speaker, and four electronic channels. In addition to the algorithmic composition, Florian Zeeh is also responsible for the live electronic elements.　The concert will take place on 3 November at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy.

Automatic, dynamic keystone correction for projectors
Within the framework of his diploma thesis, Tom Orr, a student in the Audio and Video Engineering program, is implementing a system for the automatic, dynamic keystone correction of projectors. The objective is to develop a software application that analyses the position of the projector relative to the projection surface using a Microsoft Kinect Sensor. The projector image can then be distorted in real time such that a rectangular image can be seen at all times, irrespective of the angle of projection. Applications in fields such as presentation or mobile projection systems are conceivable here; however the idea reaches far into the artistic arena, creating new creative opportunities on theatre stages or for installations.
Amongst other things, the implementation utilises functions of the Computer Vision Library OpenCV, which was incorporated into the programming environment MaxMSP/Jitter especially for this project. The project is supervised by Professor Dr Günther Witte from the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and IMM assistant professor Florian Boddin.

Nomination for backup_festival
Cycles by Julian Scherle, created within the framework of the major Visual Music under IMM professor Dr Heike Sperling and IMM assistant professor Andreas Kolinski, has been nominated for the backup_festival.
Julian Scherle will spend the next semester in Los Angeles with composer Klaus Badelt, who amongst other things was responsible for the soundtracks of Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator, Constantine and many other film music scores.

Revue OU research project
IMM assistant professor Marc Matter supervises the major Music and Text at the IMM. In 2012, he is working as a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where he is doing research on Revue OU, an artists’ magazine from the 1960s that brought together text and sound in experimental ways.



From the IMM majors

Major Classical Music Recording:
Fixing up the old broadcasting van
After the expensive and time-consuming professional renovation of the IMM’s current broadcasting van, Julian Klapp and Martin Stommel have now developed a concept that will also allow the old broadcasting van to be used for mixing recordings again. Its implementation will soon be finished. Furthermore, it is being planned within the university to relocate the no-longer roadworthy vehicle within the campus, and to link it up to the Partikasaal or the chamber music hall. This would give students the opportunity to undertake concert recordings from as early as their first term of study.

Major Media Composition:
Monsieur Noir and the new sound
As a project for their final exam in the Media Composition 2 course under IMM professor Andreas Grimm and IMM assistant professor Olaf Mierau, a number of students have chosen to re-record the sound track for the animated film Monsieur Noir und die Monster aus dem Keller [Monsieur Noir and the Monsters from the Basement]. The film, which amongst other things was entered in the European Talent Awards 2011 competition, tells the story of little Jacques, and how he gets over his fear of the – ultimately imaginary – monsters in the dark basement.
New music and new sound design were mostly produced in teams of two. The interplay of the various subsections in sound post-production is a focal point of the major.

Major Music Production:
Battery Drumkit
In the course Computer-assisted Music Production 2, IMM assistant professor Timo Bader will be taking samples of an acoustic drum kit with the summer term students using multi-mic technology, in order to create a Battery Drumkit. This drumkit will then initially be used to improve the students’ programming of acoustic drumbeats. The samples will then be distorted through extensive editing and mixing with electronic drum sounds to produce hybrid samples, which will be converted into drum loops.

Major Music Informatics:
Between natural law and artistic causality
This semester, the major Music Informatics will be focusing on the theme of Causality. Initially, this will be about creating experiments in which causality becomes audible.　Virtual and real cause-and-effect relationships, mixed causality chains, spooky remote effects, invented nature, and happy coincidence will all play a role. But what is causality, anyway? To answer this question, students will read classical texts from philosophy, cultural studies and scientific theory.
In cooperation with the University of the Arts Bremen, the Berlin University of the Arts, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, a multilocal installation will be created with the title The Way Things May Go. All seminars are open to guests who want to get actively involved in the work.

Major Music and Audiovisuel Media:
Multi-camera work
For the teaching staff in the major Music and Audiovisual Media (Volker Anding, Honorary Professor Ulla Barthold, Graduate Engineer Florian Boddin, Wolfgang Schukrafft and Professor Manfred Waffender), the focus of the summer term’s activity will be on multi-camera work using the broadcasting van. Alongside practical exercises, such as recording the three BASECAMP lectures, there will also be a thorough preparation of the content of episode two of the music programme music@studio1, which is to be produced in November.

Major Music and Media Management:
The copyright holder
Within the framework of the Music and Media Law 2 course, the students are first of all intensively engaging with the rights of the copyright holder. Alongside the question of joint creations of multiple artists, there are also questions relating to the acquisition of pre-existing works or parts of works, and their adaptation. There will also be a comprehensive discussion of the limitations of copyright law. Joint participation in the C'n'B Convention is also planned for June 2012 within the framework of the c/o pop festival in Cologne.

Major Music und Text:
Acoustic literature, sound poetry, text-sound compositions
A block seminar on Acoustic literature, sound poetry and text-sound compositions in acoustic art is being held from 18 to 20 April. The seminar is being conducted together with students from the Heinrich Heine University, and is being run within the framework of the Resonanzraeume cooperation project. It is open for visitors; interested students can register directly with IMM assistant professor Marc Matter.

Major Visual Music:
Visual Music Tools
The genre of Visual Music opens up the world of audiovisual media beyond classical narrative forms. Altered technology and perceptual habits are creating new approaches. Nowadays, increasing numbers of interactive productions are being designed and staged to incorporate the audience, making them part of the event. These new narrative forms have led to the emergence of new, independent professional paths.
In the Visual Music Tools course run by Tristan Thönnissen, productions from the music and events industry will be analysed, and the tools presented that are now available for multimedia productions, or which will dictate the market within the near future.