EKK:LoFi Sounds in HiFi Spaces/Ryan Welsh

Are you ever a tourist in your own city? This is me in the carillon at the Museum of Man.

I am a Ph.D. student in music composition at UCSD. I graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2008 and have been in San Diego ever since. I work frequently in the community teaching music and instrumental ensembles in the border city between Tijuana and San Diego.

Interests

I have few emergent interests at the moment - text, the ethereal, music for non-musicians/education.

The first is in the use of text in the creation of music. The influence of a text is used both in sung music and instrumental music for structure, sonic material and other associative influence. Often the text is unintelligible, but the meaning is still present in the result.

<flashmp3 id="1">emergences.mp3</flashmp3>

My second interest would be in environments or materials that are somehow vanishing, ungraspable or purely experiential. To this aim, I have been thinking about the intangibility of time, timbre and light.

<flashmp3 id="2">SHORE GRASS MIX 1.mp3</flashmp3>

Lastly, I have been interested in developing means of composing for non-musicians and beginning musicians, melding the transformative experience of performance with education. The following video is a construction of nursery rhymes that, as currently notated, could be presented to any level of reading performer, and a successful performance worked out.

<videoflash type="youtube">8o4tVy2KjYU|500|280</videoflash>

The lighting here is a bit heavy handed, but begins to show some of my particular interests. In addition, I am "staging" a performance of "9 Settings of Celan" by Harrison Birtwistle on April 16. I hope to have some video to post up here from that.

My collaboration interest

I have little computer programming experience and have tended to work in strictly acoustic settings. As such, I am interested in composing, improvising, experimenting with ways of interpreting performance to control lighting. This would be in strictly composed scenarios, as well as improvised settings, installations using ambient noise to control lighting, possible theatrical application and dramatic concert performance. The silence, ease and flexibility of the new LED light fixtures here at CalIT2 is remarkable.

Project Idea

I am working to recruit a few improvisers and performers to our class. This could be fun to create interactive and responsive settings to improvised music and then to develop a possible notated piece for instrument and lighting.

I am working with a cellist here, and we could use any amount of information from live performance or prerecorded information. We've used gyroscopes attached to the bow arm, or perhaps breath or other information. It could be nice to play with how the light illuminates the performer, how she can "perform the lighting" and interact with some prerecorded samples as well.

Another idea would involve sending some kind of "ambient" information from Germany to here to control our lighting experience. We could illuminate space, pieces of cloth, people's faces, shadows, sculptures, artworks, etc.

Platforms

In order of preference... Pen and Paper (LoFi enough?) Mac OSx iOS 6 Sibelius JackTrip Pd Max