
Resident students (PiGro RESIDENCIES)
Season 2021-22
Jacopo Cenni (1995) is a new media artist, composer, and live performer. His artistic research interests focus on the investigation of body gestures in relation with electronic music and the ecosystem approach to composition. HUNT is a sound theatre work that addresses the archetypal theme of humanity’s Search for Knowledge. In particular, this work investigates the degree of control that humanity has over the complexity of the world it lives in: Knowledge, represented by a set of twelve incandescent light bulbs, is influenced and modulated by the performer in real time, using interfaces that gradually become more intimate and aware. The relationship with technology is crucial within this work: the instruments used by the performer are not limited to their technical function, but also have an explicit symbolic meaning. The path through the stages of exploration, virtuous control, and obsession coincides with the shape of the work. HUNT is a production by Biennale di Venezia and CIMM, Centro di Informatica Musicale Multimediale, achieved with the contribution of Tempo Reale’s PiGro residency program.
F. A. Bonporti Music Conservatory of Trento, Electronic Music School
Second level academic diploma thesis, Electronic Music and New Technologies Biennium, title: HUNT – Sound Theatre
Supervisors: Federico Ortica, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi
Autumn session, academic year 2021-2022
Daniele Carcassi is a musician, performer, improviser, and experimental sound artist. His productions are a blend of analogue synthesizers, digital processing, pre-existing music, and soundscapes.
Within Tempo Reale’s Pig.Ro residency, he has developed NUOVA TERRA, a sound installation for three totem poles of loudspeakers. In anthropology, the totem is considered a natural or supernatural entity; in certain North American cultures, tree trunks are carved and decorated so as to depict a series of superimposed totems, forming “columns” known as totem poles. For the sake of brevity, the totem poles will also be referred to here as “totems”. Considering each individual loudspeaker as a single entity, by piling them up we will obtain columns of speakers which the artist has symbolically named totems, in direct relation with the totem poles of Indigenous Nations. NUOVA TERRA (New Earth) is formed of three totem poles arranged at the edges of an imaginary triangle. Each totem pole is composed of six loudspeakers of various types, and communicates with its own language, expressed by a specific sound material. The three totems talk to each other, constantly seeking a point of contact, a way to unite, and to construct a common, flexible language that will allow them to evolve into a more complete and complex system.
G.B. Martini Conservatory of Music, Bologna, School of Electronic Music, 2nd Level Academic Diploma thesis, two-year Sound Design Course.
Title: Sound Art e Musica Acusmatica, spazio, fruizione e connessione tra queste due pratiche (Sound Art and Acousmatic Music, space, fruition, and connection between these two activities)
Supervisor: Simonluca Laitempergher
Summer session, academic year 2021/2022
“Asindeto (Asyndeton) is a contemporary dance and electronic sound performance written starting from the linguistic meaning of rhetorical devices, allowing to create coordinated paratactic sentences without the use of conjunction elements. As a both metaphorical and concrete guide for the definition of the relationship between sound body and movement, this idea has led to the drafting of a narrative structure for the simultaneous composition of the musical and physical score, and to the construction of a mixed multichannel system for the diffusion of sound, made of self-built and particularly “colourful” loudspeakers, full-range loudspeakers, and exciter speakers applied to everyday objects made of various materials. The 26-channel audio diffusion system also acts as scenery, prearranging the audience’s fruition and allowing an asymmetric sound spatialisation that can dialogue with the representation’s architectural context.”
Francesco Morlacchi Music Conservatory of Perugia, New Musical Technologies and Languages department, 2nd Level Academic Diploma Thesis in Electronic Music, specializing in composition.
Title: Asindeto, Composizione elettroacustica per una performance di danza e costruzione di un sistema misto di diffusione sonora a 24 voci. (Asyndeton, electroacoustic composition for dance performance and construction of a mixed 24-voice audio diffusion system
Supervisor: Simone Pappalardo
Winter session, academic year 2020/2021
“Retroazione (Feedback) is a multimedia performance written for trumpet, live electronics, and audio-reactive graphics. Retroactive feedback is defined as a dynamic system’s capacity to take into account that system’s results to modify the characteristics of the system itself. The phenomenon is therefore based on a loopback process that transforms the output into a new input, a characteristic that allows a simple system to generate complex results. In this same way, the work is articulated around feedback processes that can be both intrinsic to the single language being used and also able to make vision and sound communicate. Through the interaction between instrument, graphics, and electronics, the intention is to create an immersive environment where temporal cognition is altered. All elements contribute to this purpose: from the visual element, which uses chaotic functions for the generation of geometric patterns, to the sonic output where the instrument’s sound is processed, re-offered, and used to modify the behaviour of the processing itself. This work is originated by a breath, an action that has been chosen as the main thematic element, and from which the entire performance has been articulated, up to the conclusion that occurs through that same breath.”
Luigi Cherubini Music Conservatory of Florence, School of Electronic Music, 2nd Level Academic Diploma Thesis, two-year Music and New Technologies course
Title: Retroazione, performance multimediale (Retroazione, multimedia performance)
Supervisor: Prof. Damiano Meacci
Winter session, academic year 2020/2021
“Carena (Hull) is a multichannel and interactive sound installation dealing with the theme of the sonic landscape. In a nautical context, the hull is the part of the boat that remains underwater, beneath the waterline. This is the so-called live work, the most delicate and sensitive section; in contact with the water, it naturally amplifies the lapping and every slightest sound or creak coming from the boat itself or from the surrounding environment, like an actual sounding board. This work wishes to be the artistic restitution of an investigation on a sonic landscape chosen and explored specifically using a sailing boat. Carena is definitely a sound installation in its own right, but is also the witness and container of a previous study, which is conveyed, transmitted, and returned through it. Expectation, surprise, inertia, quiet, stillness, or chaos are all aspects on which Carena’s concept is based.”
G.B. Martini Conservatory of Music, Bologna, School of Electronic Music, 2nd Level Academic Diploma thesis, two-year Sound Design course
Title: Soundscape e sound art, suono e spazio nei contesti installativi (Soundscape and sound art, sound and space in installation contexts)
Supervisor: Prof. Francesco Giomi
Winter session, Academic Year 2020/2021
“Electroacoustic music composer and drummer Alessio Mastrolillo lays the foundation of his musical experience in soul and blues.
During his Conservatory studies, he delved into themes related to the sound space through Ambisonic, which come into being in two electroacoustic musical compositions named “Trippin’ on the edge of time” and “Emptiness of the Hanging”. The latter was partially composed in Studio A of Tempo Reale, during the 2021 PiGro residency. This work also originated a new IT tool: an Ambisonic decoder available to composers, allowing to use the sonic sphere in an even more complete manner. The decoder has been included in the Envelop For Live suite, the well-known collection of 3D audio plugins. This instrument allowed to create “Trippin’ on the edge of time”, also selected by ICMC 2021, and “Emptiness of the Hanging”, previewed at the Electric Sound 2022 festival. Finally, this research has also brought to the drafting of the Thesis “Ambisonic: a technology for music”, where the UHJ decoder’s development process is illustrated, along with a study of technical and compositional matters. Space as a compositional parameter is the composer’s central theme, and the research conducted during his studies does not end here, instead aiming to continue its search for new boundaries to be crossed, and new works to be created and heard.”
Niccolò Piccinni Music Conservatory of Bari, Electronic Music School, 2nd Level Academic Diploma Thesis, two-year Electronic Music course
Title: Ambisonic: a technology for music
Supervisor: Giuseppe Silvi
Winter session, academic year 2020/2021
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