Corona times

After spending a month at home, NMH decided to open the building for the students graduating this year. Having an opportunity to work in the studio has never felt so nice... 

I continued composing the vocal ensemble piece, which I finished today. 

Besides, I am getting into Jitter and I have created my first audiovisual piece that I will include in my portfolio. 

I will spend these days preparing the score for the ensemble piece and then I am ready for the final exam! 

APRIL 2020

Make Waves Festival 

Unfortunately the festival has to be postponed to December, but we are happy to release our first promo video! 

Mixtur Festival, Spatial Music Symposium, Intonal Festival, ICMC

Allotropy is selected for Mixture festival (Spain), Spatial Music Symposium (Germany), Intonal festival and ICMC2020 (Chile). All three events are now postponed due to the spread of COVID-19. I have also got an offer to be a Notam affiliated artist to perform at the Intonal festival this year, which I could not accept because of Making Waves festival in Tbilisi, but turns out these two are also postponed with the same reason.

 

IAC and EMS residencies

My projects are also selected for residencies at EMS and IAC in Malmö. The project I am going to work on in Malmö will be premiered at the end of residency. 

Vårfest 

Festival VårFest, organised by VOXLab is rescheduled in August. Both Kristin Norderval and Ruth Mayer are interested in spatializing their performances for the festival, so I am going to make a patch for that and perform at the concert. My new piece for vocal ensemble and Ambisonics is also going to be premiered at the festival.

MARCH 2020

Lyden av - Interactive Musical Playground

The project has been selected by the committee of Lyden av Musikkhøgskolen festival, so Balint Laczko and I have been working on the project and being almost done when due to COVID-19 the festival has been cancelled.

The project idea is to create an interactive musical space where participants can compose, spatialize and live-process sound over an 8-channel speaker array using their smartphones. The soundscape will be based on material recorded from all around  the area of the installation, in this case - Oslo S central station. The installation will be up and running all day, and anyone interested can join in and play as a solo or as part of a group (up to around 10 people at a time). All one needs to start playing is to connect to our wifi network and visit a webpage in the browser. 

Participants will be able to use their smartphones to control the location, movement and musical parameters of sounds with arm gestures drawn in the air, as well as by interacting with a graphical user interface on the screen. The system will also build up a musical environment reacting to their earlier drawings. 

Choir rehearsals

This month I have attended a VOXlab meeting, organised by Kristin Norderval, where I had a chance to present my project about vocal ensemble and Ambisonics and offer the group members to participate, if interested. After a week from that meeting I had confirmations from 8 professional singers and composers, including: Kristin, Ruth Mayer, Kristin Bolstad and Bendik Sells.

The first rehearsal was supposed to happen during the Alexander Trembley visit at NMH, on 24 of March, which has also been cancelled due to COVID.

Now the only plan to submit the piece is to make a mock-up version.

Tunnel Recordings 

I have been planning to record the tunnel next to where I live, near Bjølsen for a while. This week I have borrowed SPS200 for 3 days and spent several hours in the tunnel during the night, recording myself singing and sounds played back from a bluetooth speaker. The reverb in there sounds amazing! 

FEBRUARY 2020

NMH concert #5 - Trevor Wishart

At the end of his week-long masterclass, a concert with Trevor Wishart's music took place at Levinsalen. I was offered to either diffuse one of his pieces or to present mine. I decided to diffuse a stereo version of my Perihelion, which in the end did not sound as good in stereo as it does in multichannel setup. But the concert was very special, having Wishart presenting his music. I heard some of his works I have not heard before and once again I was very inspired with what I heard. 

Making Waves, Project week #2

In the second week I had two lectures and used both of them to explain higher order ambisonics and cover the IEM plugins. We also had a close look at Reaper, as this is the software that is not taught at the Conservatoire. Some of the students shared their first ever multichannel works, which they are going to continue working to premiere at the festival in April. 

Nymusikk EAM concert

Nymusikk organised the first multichannel music concert this year. Most of the group members presented their work, 6 works in total. The concert took place at the small concert venue at Bruket, which surprisingly sounded perfect for electroacoustic music. The hall was full and all of the seats were occupied, which made the concert very special and the atmosphere very nice. 

JANUARY 2020

Music video, Tbilisi

A friend of mine, visual artist and director Leo Decristoforo was visiting Tbilisi this year, shooting a final footage for a documentary he is currently working on. Since he had all the equipment with him, we decided to shoot a video in the old parts of the city. I have made soundscape recordings of the places we were shooting at, and I am going to put the audio/video material together as a audiovisual piece later on. 

Workshop - Andrew Hill

Andrew hill was visiting Oslo as part of the research program his is part of. We had group and individual composition workshops with him. He was a very good teacher, and he had several very useful comments about my finished and work-in-progress pieces. 

Workshop - Trevor Wishart

Wishart's workshop was something I have been waiting for since I first learned he would be visiting us for a concert and lectures. His Vox 5 was the very first electroacoustic music piece I heard, which was the reason why I later dug into acousmatic music. 

The group lectures we heard were similar to the ones publicly available on YouTube, but the individual class was a very special experience. Besides listening to my works, we discussed general topics as well, such as giving titles to pieces, finding working poetic ideas behind technically advanced projects etc. 

DECEMBER 2019

CECIA premiere at Sonic Experiments: Telematics, ZKM 

The presentation of the CECIA project outcome was planned in ZKM, Karlsruhe, during the festival Sonic Experiments, Telematics. On my way to Georgia I traveled to Karlsruhe to attend the festival. 

After the conference presentation the resulting piece was supposed to be played in stereo in Kubus hall, but I decided to diffuse it as there was a fantastic speaker setup in the hall. Although I didn't have enough time to rehearse, I think the diffusion worked pretty well. 

NOVEMBER 2019

The Evergreen State College concert, US

One of the participants of the Spatial Music Workshop in Virginia Tech last summer was a composition teacher from Evergreen College - Arun Chandra, who after listening to my Hurria at Cube Fest asked if I would be interested in having it played at a concert in the college. The piece was presented together with other pieces from the festival, which Arun selected himself.

NMH concert #4 - Electro Dream Space

Another NMH concert planned in November 2019 was a sound diffusion concert which I decided to compose a new piece for. Composing in stereo after all of the pieces I have done in Ambisonics turned out to be a simpler task and so I finished the piece in 2 weeks. 

The performance went pretty well taking into consideration that this was the first time for me to diffuse my piece. The title of the piece is Allotropy. 

Spatialization Techniques Workshop, NOTAM

I have been offered to conduct a 2-day workshop for Notam, IAC and EMS representatives during the Nordic Network meeting week at Notam. Day 1 was mostly focused on basic theory of VBAP and Ambisonics which stimulated a lot of questions among the workshop participants, some of which I never thought about myself. After moving to the studio to look at the sound examples, the theory became clearer. We spent Day 2 outside, making soundfield recordings with two different microphones, which we later cross-tested and discussed in the studio during the listening session.

OCTOBER 2019

Making Waves project week #1 

We traveled to Tbilisi for the first Making Waves project week. Although the number of students who applied for the project was much smaller than we expected, the ones attending were very much engaged in the workshops. We had 6 group lectures and 7 individual tutorials that week, following with a feedback session where, based on students needs, we made plans for the project week #2.

Transitions concert series, CCRMA - Concert #2

After the last concert at CCRMA, the organizers emailed me to send them a new piece when finished for their next concert. This time FLUX was presented in the concert. 

SEPTEMBER 2019

ULTIMA festival 

Luckily, ULTIMA festival initiated arranging a concert for NMH students this year, where I had a chance to present my FLUX in a 4-channel setup. The concert took place at Sentralen, but the speakers festival provided me with (my piece was the only acousmatic one in the program) were useless. I was thinking about cancelling my performance but I realized that would affect the entire concert program. Because of that reason, I decided to perform the piece. I realized that I should always make sure if the tech rider has been taken care of properly and I will be provided with the equipment I asked for, nevertheless, it felt great to be part of such an exciting festival program.

CECIA - Collaborative Electroacoustic Composition with Intelligent Agents, ZKM

In September project CECIA started which I applied and got selected for, among 95 applicants. This was a project that involved 5 composers and an AI as a 6th composer in the group. The idea was to compose 30 seconds of music every week, by using material we have all gathered before the project start, as well as the material generated by AI. The AI didn’t give the results I expected, but other than that, it was interesting to be able to open up project files of other composers and see their workflow. 

AUGUST 2019

Spatial Music Workshop and Residency, Virginia Tech, US

Virginia Tech arranges annual spatial music workshops that take place every summer in the studios of the campus. The project involves daily workshops in the Cube theater where the selected artists are meeting with the invited scientists and artists working in the field. Besides, there are certain hours of studio time given to every participant to work on their projects, presented at the end of the week. 

I have applied with my newly started piece - Perihelion. The application has been selected and I have been invited to travel to the US. 

Thanks to the funding I received from Creative Georgia, I have spent a week in Virginia Tech, together with 6 other selected artists from around the world.

CUBE fest 2019, Virginia Tech, US

CUBE Fest is an annual event taking place in Virginia Tech, a week before the Spatial Music Workshop. Hurria was the piece I applied with, which got selected for the festival program. I have attended a 3-day festival and listened to nearly 50 pieces, mostly from American composers. Two different venues were chosen for the concerts, the Perform studio with a 24.4 speaker array and Cube studio with a 144.8 speaker array and 360 degree video projection. Besides new works, spatialized versions of Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Concerts album as well as The Beatles's White Album was also in the program. 

MAY 2019

EMS residency, Stockholm

In February EMS (Stokholm Electromusicstudion) had a call for artist residency.

I have sent in an application, which EMS approved and invited me to spend a week in one of their multichannel studios in May. I worked 6-8 hours a day, which was the most intense artistic work I have ever done before. As a result, at the end of the residency I had 4 minutes of my new piece - Perihelion. 

Besides, I had a chance to meet with several inspiring artists and spend evenings listening and discussing our work.

Beast Feast festival, Birmingham

In May we had another study trip to Birmingham where we got a chance to listen to British electroacoustic composers’ pieces performed at the BEAST FEAST festival. I have also applied for the call with my work which has not been selected. Therefore I was especially interested in the pieces to be presented in the festival program. Surprisingly, the better part of the pieces presented did not meet my expectations, though there were several very inspiring works as well.

Making Waves - Laying the Groundwork for the Future of Music Technology in Tbilisi

Inspired by the results of the Music Technology Week project in February, I together with Mike McCormick and Giuseppe Pisano started to write a bigger scale project which would involve educational part as well as a 2-day international experimental electroacoustic music festival in Tbilisi. The project idea was pretty interesting and promising, which is why NMH and CEMPE got involved and secured a funding for us. 

The project offers 3 modules: 

- Spatialization techniques (Mariam) 

- Supercollider (Mike) 

- Field recording and sound ecology (Giuseppe) 

taught over three project weeks. As a result, newly composed pieces from the attending students, as well as us and a guest artist from Norway will be presented in a 2-day festival in April 2020. 

The project takes off in October.

Application results for memberships 

This month I have become a member of TONO and my applications have been accepted in both Nymusikks komponistgruppe and Komponistforeningen 

APRIL 2019

Blue Rinse festival, Bergen

In April I was invited to participate in the Blue Rinse festival taking place in Bergen on April 5th. There were several artists performing live in the same space, where an opening of an exhibition was also happening. Since I have never played live before, I took this as a chance to spend time on my instrument which I would play live with. Although there was not so much time left until the performance, I managed to put together a patch, which I've been using a lot since then.

Intonal Festival, IAC, Malmo

In April Giuseppe Pisano and Mads Kjelgaard started to put together a concert program for the Intonal Festival, taking place in Malmo. IAC had set up a system for stereo diffusion, therefore only stereo pieces were asked to contribute. I sent in a stereo version of FLUX, which Giuseppe diffused over a 24 loudspeaker array.

FEBRUARY 2019

Music Technology Week in Tbilisi

Coming back from Tbilisi, after Christmas vacation, I had an idea to arrange a week-long project, where I together with fellow students/composers - Mike McCormick and Giuseppe Pisano would have an opportunity to share our experience with the TSC students. The Academy agreed to cover our travel expenses which made the project happen.

Throughout the week we had 6 lectures and 2 concerts, from which one was the very first multichannel music concerts in Tbilisi.

NMH concert #2

February 7th was our second NMH concert, where I presented the Ambisonics version of Hurria, which has also been played at CCRMA. 

NMH concert #3

On February 28th we had another concert at NMH, where we presented our new works on a 18.2 speaker array. After the Stockholm experience, I have been working on all of the “mistakes” I have made in terms of spatialization in FLUX. This time the listening experience was very different after taking the piece from the studio to the concert hall.

DECEMBER 2018

Max teaching in the Tbilisi State Conservatoire

In 2011 a long-term project called “Modernising Higher Music Education in Tbilisi State Conservatoire” began as a collaboration between Tbilisi State Conservatoire and the Norwegian Academy of Music. One of the most important goals of the project was to establish a music technology studio and a department in TSC. Time to time teachers from Norway are invited to conduct lectures in the music technology field. This year I was also involved in the program as a teacher to give a crash course in MAX MSP. This was a very challenging task for me as I myself am not an everyday user of it. Based on students’ feedback the course turned out to be very interesting and very well explained. This was, indeed, a very big achievement for me.

NOVEMBER 2018

November Space, Stockholm

In November we participated in the festival and conference November Space, taking place at the Music Academy of Stockholm. Other than having a chance to listen to several interesting and informative lectures and meeting with students from two other academies - Graz and KMH, I had a chance to try out the Ambisonics dome with my first ever originally Ambisonics piece - FLUX. This was a very nice and at the same time disappointing experience as I realized how unexpectedly bad results one can get when playing a  multichannel piece in a different environment and setup, than the studio where it has been composed. 

OCTOBER 2018

Lillestrom high school - lecture about spatial music 

In October I was offered to conduct a 2-hour lecture about Music Technology in Lillestrom high school where my audience was a group of teenagers. I have talked about the field generally, with emphasis on spatial composition. Besides, we had a look at various musical projects where technology has a leading role.
After the lecture we had a nice discussion about the project ideas the students are going to implement in the near future. 

Transitions concert series, CCRMA

CCRMA arranges annual concert series that take place in their multichannel music hall, where Ambisonic works are programmed. Although there is no official call for works, I have been informed that the organisers were searching for new pieces for the program.

The Ambisonics version of my earlier 8-channel piece Hurria was just finished, so I sent it in. The piece was selected and performed at the concert.

NMH concert #1 

In October Karlheinz Essl was visiting NMH. During the week we had several group lectures with him, where he  talked about his compositional techniques, showed us instruments he built for his own performance.  At the end of the week we have all presented our pieces together with Karlheinz in the Levinsalen, NMH. In this concert I have played an Ambisonic version of my earlier stereo piece, Coincidence.

SEPTEMBER 2018

Close Encounters Tbilisi Contemporary Music Festival

Founded in 2005 by Georgian pianist Tamriko Kordzaia, the festival Close Encounters has annually offered the audience various types of old, contemporary and experimental music as well as brought together professional and fledgling musicians both from Georgia and Switzerland. This year I have been offered to have my piece in the program. Although I could not attend the concert, the festival managed to play Hurria in 4-channel speaker system.

Advanced Ambisonics Course with Joe Anderson

NOTAM has arranged a week-long workshop in advanced Ambisonics lead by Joseph Anderson. It was an intense course covering theoretical aspects of the technique, recording and listening sessions as well as software tools for Ambisonics. At the same time it was a very good chance to meet with people working in the field.