Autonomous Sounds
a sound art performative installation by FM
featuring David Dunn
Thursday, December 3, 2009 and
Friday, December 4, 2009
Carl Fisher Clubhouse Complex
2100 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach
in collaboration with SoBe Institute of the Arts and
Miami Beach Senior High
In Autonomous Sounds Frozen Music will use a variety of unique audio systems to activate and explore the acoustics of the location as an extended electronic music event. As its central process, the performers exchange and alter sounds generated from a set of autonomous hyper-chaotic analog audio circuits. These systems result from the dynamical attributes of coupled chaotic attractors interacting in a high-dimensional phase space. Various circuit parameters determine a range of instabilities and structural couplings that allow novel self-organizing behaviors to emerge. While the circuits exist as closed autonomous entities, their sounds emerge as a type of “conversation” that is allowed to continuously drift through an infinitude of changes. The performers engage with these autonomously generated patterns and use them to create an inexhaustible variety of new auditory events. Ultimately the performance is not only an acoustic exploration of space but also a demonstration of how human interaction with machines can simulate essential processes in nature.
The 2009-10 season of presentations by Frozen Music have been sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
FM presentations in Miami Beach are also made possible with support from City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council.
The Birth of Frozen Music
FM
Gustavo Matamoros – David Dunn – Rene Barge
Frozen Music is an artist research collective and experimental music ensemble that designs and realizes interdisciplinary music in response to the acoustical characteristics of a given site. It focuses upon the making of otherwise inaudible phenomena audible in science, nature and architecture. Each performance is a kind of acoustical “tuning” or redrawing of the existing aural landscape through direct sound generation and amplification.
FM is a unique vehicle for the development and implementation of a novel kind of extended electroacoustic music presentation, at times lasting up to 16 hours. Its members use new and custom-designed audio technology to engage audiences in activations of indoor and outdoor spaces that promote an aural perception of the world. Rather than a traditional ensemble—where each musician contributes a single voice to a collective—FM arises from a confluence of sonic activation strategies where each performer engages with their own autonomous audio gestalt and unique instrumentation to simultaneously occupy and stimulate the same acoustic environment.
FM germinated from ideas explored in the Subtropics 20 exhibition SOUND at The Bass Museum of Art in March 2009. Similar to current discourse in the art world concerning the concept of art as a research activity, FM takes this notion seriously and attempts to transcend mere theoreticism by focused efforts to combine both aesthetic and scientific insights, thereby creating experiential understandings and descriptions of reality based in aural perception.
