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Industry Workshops
Industry workshop & training 1
Omnisphere – Spectrasonics’ new flagship Virtual Instrument
WED 22 14.45-17.45 | RR7
Time + Space, UK
Several years in development, Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere has redefined the virtual analogue synthesiser since its release in 2008.
In this industry workshop, composer and sound designer Gregg Fisher, Central’s Senior Lecturer in theatre sound design joins Ian McKenzie from Time and Space, Omnisphere’s UK distributor, for an extensive demonstration of, and practical training in, this powerful sound-designer’s tool.
Industry workshop & training 2
Ableton Live 8.0: Demo and Introduction
THUR 23 9.30-11.30 | RR7
Ableton Live 8.0: Advanced Techniques (cont)
14.30–16.00 | RR7
Martin Delaney
Ableton Live is a professional loop-based software music sequencer for Mac OS and Windows. The latest major release of Live, Version 8, was released in April 2009.
Martin Delaney is a Certified Ableton Live Trainer and has been using and teaching it since version 1.5. During that time he's taught Live to musicians, DJs, primary school kids, teenagers, prisoners, and psychiatric patients. Martin writes the Ableton Live Tips & Tricks series of books for PC Publishing, produces the popular Ableton Live 101 training movies for MacProVideo, and writes the monthly Live tutorials for the magazine Future Music.
Most recently Martin has been to Norway, running a short Live course for music students at the University Of Agder, in Kristiansand. Martin specialises in helping artists prepare for live shows and is a performer and VJ in his own right, channelling this performance experience into his training work.
Industry workshop & training 3
SFX 6.0
FRI 24 11.45-16.30 | RR7
Stage Research USA
SFX is the leading live entertainment sound playback software application. The typical venue for SFX is theatre but it is also used by theme parks, magicians, and other related venues that require the playback of music and sound effects. SFX puts the art back into sound design: instead of worrying about technological limitations, you can now create rich sound designs that can be reliably played back during each performance!
In this hands-on workshop and training session, professionals from Stage Research, the company behind SFX will guide you through the features and functionality of the latest 6.0 release.
With SFX, you can playback multiple sound effects at the same time and can even send them to many different outputs: imagine playing a train cue that steams across the stage from stage right to stage left while also playing rain in the back of the house and then at some point also playing a telephone ringing that was based off an actor's cue – all cues overlap, are independent, easy to setup and even simpler to playback.
Workshops
Workshop 1 - Archetypal Voices
WED 22 16.30-18.00 | Performance Studio 1
Eran Natan
Influenced by voice practitioners including Frankie Armstrong, Guy Datnell (Voice-Motion) and Margaret Pikes (following the Roy Hart approach), Eric Natan will be leading Wednesday's participatory workshop on voice exploration.
Natan is a qualified dramatherapist who runs many voice workshops across London including the Sesame dramatherapy seasonal school, a guest workshop on Central's MA dramatherapy program and monthly open Voice Laboratory workshops.
As this is a particpatory workshop, do ensure that you are wearing loose clothing that is comfortable and suitable for movement.
Workshop 2 - Futurism Updated: working with sound sculptures
THUR 23 9.30-11.30 | Embassy Theatre
Derek Shiel
Following the Futurism 100 exhibition that celebrates the centenary of Italian Futurism, which took place between January and April at the Estorick Collection in Highbury, sculptor Derek Shiel leads this workshop on working with sound sculptures.
He is the maker of the sound sculptures and Artistic Director of his ensemble Sculpted Sound, performing at art galleries, music festivals, theatres and on UK radio and television.
He is currently developing several of his sound sculptures to be exhibited in the sculpture garden at the Monnow Valley Arts Centre, Herefordshire.
www.sculptedsound.com
Workshop 3 - Rorschach Audio and the Theatre of Noise
THUR 23 9.30-11.30 Performance Studio 1
Joe Banks
In December 2008, Joe Banks and Mark Pilkington prepared a number of showcase acoustic experiments for Disinformation as part of an exhibition at The Gallery, part of Goldsmiths, University of London's Student Union, Rorschach Audio.
A work-in-progress devoted to exploring the psychology of hearing, Rorschach Audio uncovered (amongst other findings) an anomaly in the history of art revealing how, within the fractured sound-worlds of military radio communications, wartime intelligence work with sound influenced arguably the most important work of visual art theory ever published – Gombrich's Art and Illusion.
Rather than trying to reproduce existing psychoacoustics experiments, Banks' showcases attempt to explore something closer to the aesthetics or to non-objective and perceptually impressionistic representations of these auditory landscapes.
Workshop 4 - Introductory workshop to Roy Hart
THUR 23 9.30-11.30 | Performance Studio 2
John Wild
An introduction to the voice work explored and developed by Roy Hart. The work of the Roy Hart Theatre is based on the pioneering research of Alfred Wolfsohn, who became an innovative and radical voice teacher after World War I. Wolfsohn believed we only use a fraction of our vocal powers. He developed an approach to liberating the voice, based on exploring its physical and emotional roots. Roy Hart, Wolfsohn’s pupil, continued his work and researches, forming an experimental theatre group in France.
This workshop aims to introduce exercises that explore the whole range of the voice and the interdisciplinary links between this voice work and body work, acting skills and musical sensibility.
Participants will work as a group, in pairs and on an individual basis; and should wear loose clothing and be prepared to work barefoot.
Workshop 5 - Ear Bodies
THUR 23 12.00-13.30 New Studio
Fabrizio Manco
The workshop will explore aspects of awareness bearing upon the finding and experiencing of different senses of immersive dwelling. Acoustics and the ear body have an incommensurable multitude of ways of interacting with our embodiment, processes reliant upon perception. Yet, the sonic environment, its affecting and transversing of our bodies, is always active in spite of our awareness – like solar wind, sound pervades our bodies, as both an autonomous phenomenon and as a result of ecological interrelations between environments.
This experimental workshop will enable an insight into sonic perceptual and ecological relationships. Exercises will focus attention on body orientation and movement trajectories guided by the soundscape and walking. Through different tasks, parameters and meditational exercises the workshop will explore site-specific sonic space environments within Central, a sharper concentration and focus, listening embodied movement; and stillness and the use of drawing in spatial-auditory terms.
Workshop 6 - Psychoacoustics and Perception - An Audiences' Experience
FRI 24 11.45-13.15 | New Studio
Gareth Fry & Carolyn Downing
Sound Designers Gareth Fry and Carolyn Downing look at the practical applications of discoveries in neuroscience and psychology, looking at how we hear the world and how this can be exploited in sound design. And if neuroscience isn't enough for you, this workshop also features magic tricks. How's about that then?
Residencies
Respondent
WED 22 18.10 | Embassy Theatre
THUR 23 17.40 | Embassy Theatre
FRI 24 17.00 | Embassy Theatre
Bruce R. Smith; Facilitator: Ross Brown
Looking back - or perhaps we should say listening back – on each day's events we are pleased to welcome Bruce R. Smith.
Dean’s Professor of English at the University of Southern California (USC), Smith is also Professor in USC's School of Theatre. He is the author of five books on Shakespeare and early modern culture, most recently Phenomenal Shakespeare, published by Wiley-Blackwell.
Smith advises his students not to overthink Shakespeare and to respond to the text with the body as well as the mind.
He is sure to bring his fascinating insight to the diverse activities that come together to make Theatre Noise.
Meet the Artists 1
FRI 24 15.10 | Experimental Lighting Studio
Rowena Easton, [SEL] Live, standnotamazed
Facilitator: Lynne Kendrick
Join resident alumni companies [SEL] Live and standnotamazed for a discussion of their residencies and meet Eva Maria Gauss who has been recording The Discourse, an acoustic-performative composition about Theatre Noise.
Meet the Artists 2
FRI 24 15.10 | Movement Room
Live and recorded voice - Yvon Bonenfant
Yvon Bonenfant will be explaining his Live and recorded voice residency while Daniël Ploeger will be on hand to discuss his work Sensor Suit / Speaker Suit.
danielploeger.org
yvonbonenfant.com
Residency 1
Live and Recorded Extended Voice
WED-FRI various times | Movement Room
Yvon Bonenfant
Yvon brings a version of his work-in-progress piece Beacons, developed into a live installation-style piece for Theatre Noise. Using video projection, about 150 motorway cone lights, recorded extended voice media, and live extended voice performance, Yvon will explore the conversion of materials from performance documentation into a living installation environment with a final live-component showing.
This will both feed into the further development of the theatrical version of the piece and provide fodder for artistic and scholarly debate about the roles sound – and in this particular case, extended (and sometimes aesthetically confrontational, or noisome sound) – might sketch out for new forms of sound-based, membrane stimulating, sensory architectural dramaturgies.
Residency 2 - The Discourse on Noise and Voice
WED-FRI various times | Sound Studio
Eva Maria Gauss
As observer, listener and participant of the conference, Gauss will collect voices and statements about the voice and noise in theatre. She is interested in the crossing of narrative structures of theatre and argumentation structures in theoretical discourse and experimenting with this in an aesthetic format.
The scenography will be a panel, the discussion will be visualised, presented in a metaphor and audible from dictaphones. Gauss will make a short piece about whose voices were raised, who spoke, what theorems appeared, which views were present. In a physical choreography and a composition of voices, words and sentences, this will be her compendium of the conference. Playing with theoretical positions she will present in choreography, what linguists might analyse in conversation as a process of turn-taking – silence and hidden words might be present – and also the pauses we use when we need to find words to express our thoughts or our non-linguistical sounds in communication.
Residency 3 - Sensor Suit / Speaker Suit
WED-FRI various times | RR8
Daniël Ploeger
The project Sensor Suit / Speaker Suit is concerned with finding ways to stimulate an observer's experience of digital mediation through the use of different methods of sound recording, processing and projection in a theatrical context. For this purpose, a transparent plastic suit equipped with humidity and temperature sensors and a loudspeaker has been developed.
The main objective of the project is to develop a new way to use sound to thematise the physicality of the human body in relation to digital technologies.
The insulating suit will cause rapid physical exhaustion in the performer. This will facilitate the perception of physical change of the body over a relatively short period of (performance) time and improve the conditions for the sensors to measure data on the body's condition. Thus, the relative fragility of the human body in relation to the applied technological devices is thematised in context of digital sensory prosthetics.
During this residency, Ploeger intends to experiment with different approaches to sonic presentation of physical properties registered by the sensors inside the suit.
Every day participants will be asked to give feedback on their experience. Thus, a practice-based research process that develops in response to feedback from a critical audience will be established.
Residencies 4 & 5
SEL] Live / standnotamazed
Check notice board for venue and times
Alumni companies [SEL] Live and standnotamazed have been awarded residencies with the CETT (Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre) in 2009-10. This is part of an initiative to incubate and support emergent innovative companies. Both present bespoke work at Theatre Noise.
[SEL] Live and standnotamazed will be discussing their work in the Experimental Lighting Studio on Friday at 15.10.