EARZOOM Sonic Arts Festival 2013 12th – 15th. October 2013, Ljubljana, Slovenia
After its extraordinary program expansion within the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in 2012, the EarZoom Sonic Arts Festival is returning to its usual scale for its 5th edition. Like in previous years, the goal of EarZoom is again to confront the general public with the diversity of this seemingly niche musical discipline, which has been rather neglected by the Slovenian academic landscape, as well as, enabling a brief insight into its complex entanglement of musical and technical knowledge.
A special focus of this year’s edition is a concept of performing and composing called live coding. It is a special approach where the musician is writing computer code in real-time (live on stage), which is continuously being transformed into music. During the performance, the code is projected on a big screen, which enables the spectator to better understand the causal relationship between the music and the composer/musician’s ideas and actions. It fosters a better understanding of the composers thinking process as well as the different interaction methods with the computer, as a contemporary musical instrument.
October 14th, is entirely devoted to the live coding practice and was curated by the British composer and researcher Alex McLean. Alex is one of the initiators of the event series called Algorave (algorave.com), through which a new kind of experimental dance-music culture is emerging. The music is based on algorithmically generated repetitive musical structures, resulting from live written computer code. Algorave is simply defined as “humans dancing to algorithms”. Besides the performances, the festival will also offer a workshop and a series of lecture presentations, outlining the concepts and techniques behind the featured artworks.
Miha Ciglar, festival director