Performance of Beginnings and endings - Study I

During the academic year 2021/22 I have been given the opportunity to take a sabbatical leave to work on my research. I was invited to stay at the Insitute for Computer Sound and Music Technology (ICST) at the Zürcher Hochshule der Künste (ZHdK) during September through November. The primary output of my stay has been of an artistic kind, and I presented the result of this work November 28th at Konzertsaal 1 at the ZHdK. The work was an in-progress interactive dance work, Beginnings and Endings Study I, featuring Seh Yun Kim as the dancer/performer/choreographer. Kim has an impressive career as a dancer, being the principal/soloist dancer with the Dutch National Ballet, the Spanish national ballet (Compañía Nazional de Danza, Madrid), Universal Ballet (Korea), Zürich Ballet and more, and now pursues a career as a choreographer. My role has been to create the concept for the composition, record sound material, program sensor data communication and treatment, program sound interaction with playback and processing of sound material in response to sensor data, composition of fixed segments and spatialization of fixed and interactive parts. Kim has been a co-creator in the sense of giving me response and opinions of how the interaction has worked for her.

The work has had a special focus on how beginnings and endings could be used productively in the medium of interactive dance, but has also had an overall concept, which has been humans and their relationship to the environment and the other species with which we have shared the planet.

The sound material is primarily sampled and treated voice and metal sounds, where the former has been derived from the textual basis of the work; the latin species name of 21 species that have been extinct during different stages of our existence on the planet. These are often split into single syllables which are sung, spoken and whispered with many different durations, pitches and qualities. Some of the sound material is fully synthesized. This applies for the more environmental sounds, like wind, fire, and small animals in a forest.

In this context, that the work is interactive, implies that the dancer has control over how the sound material is played. In other words, she is both a musician and a dancer simultaneously. Even if this happens in different ways in the piece, she usually has the control of most direct aspects of the music, so both she and the audience gets a sense of correlation between music and movements. Other aspects of the music are bound to the nature of the sampled material, whereas other aspects are determined by a time line or the order of events. Some components of the piece, like the fixed introduction, wind and animal sounds have not been interactive.

The piece has been composed for 3D presentation, in this case using a 4th order ambisonics over a 23.4 channel speaker setup. Much of the testing and composition was done with a 29.4 speaker setup in ICST’s labor. Spatialization has not been a primary focus for the interaction, but was still important in the treatment of the different categories of sounds.

Additional credits

Voices: Anita Schuster, Leonie Wanger, Michael Schwarze, Naemi Haab, Elsbeth Legler Thomsen, Vera Rieger

Thanks to Simon Kötz and Tobias Gerber for help with sound recording. Many thanks to Peter Färber for generous help and assistance during the project, and to German Toro-Perez for inviting me to ICST and accomodating my work there.

## Academic papers

The following papers describe the work in more detail:

Bergsland, A.(2022) Dance phrase onsets and endings in an interactive dance study. In Proceedings of Audio Mostly, September 6-9, St.Pölten. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3561212.3561242.

Bergsland, A. (2022) Designing Interactive Sonifications for the Exploration Of Dance Phrase Edges. In Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference, SMC2022, June 7-12, St.Etienne, France. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6572982.