Output details

Toys. A multichannel electronic composition commissioned by ZKM.

Originality

Toys is a large-scale musical work commissioned by ZKM Institute for Music & Acoustics in Germany as a result for winning the 2010 Giga-Hertz Prize Award for electronic music. It was premiered at the opening of the 2011 Imatronic Festival in Karlsruhe following a two-month artistic residency at ZKM. It is a 24-channel electronic piece composed for the Klangdom, an audio spatialization instrument at ZKM made up of 48 speakers that surround the audience.

Rigour

It makes use of a custom-built software in order to construct rhythmic patterns from large collections of sound files and to describe a higher-level representation of musical structure. The software traces the peak amplitude of the sounds and spreads them accordingly in the three-dimensional speaker array. A linear relationship between the perceived volume of a sonic event and its spatial placement is established, bringing forward a more organic apperception of the sounds involved. Toys’ novelty relies on exploring an amplitude-based spatialisation technique as a tool for creating a 3 dimensional surround sound experience for the audience while demonstrating an alternative way to structure the sonic material in an organic fashion; it uses hundreds of audio snippets which are randomly sampled according to a series of predefined rhythmic patterns within the SuperCollider programing language.

Significance

The work has been widely disseminated: It has been performed in 9 different countries (U.K., France, Italy, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Cuba, U.S.A.) at international festivals and has received 3 international awards: Musica Nova (Czech Republic), Metamorphoses Competition (Belgium), Citta di Udine (Italy). It has been publicly released on Compact Disc by Musiques & Recherches and has been broadcasted by the National Radio (RAI 3, Italy).

A list of Awards and Performances with respective links can be found in the portfolio.