About the Program
The Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, is one of the most inaccessible places to humans on earth. Hydrophones designed by John Hildebrand and the Whale Acoustics Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography were placed about 300 meters below the sea surface at a seafloor recording location 160 km north of Point Barrow, to capture the sound of ice and marine mammals throughout the year.
These sounds call for a different way of listening, challenging our temporal and spatial orientations. Our ocean is dynamic, unpredictable, and full of incredibly complex sounds —including sounds humans cannot perceive—and sounds that are vital for the survival of marine animals. Increasingly, these sounds are drowned out by anthropogenic noises including mining machineries and passing ships. Today, we can no longer presume any empathy with the ocean merely from the comfort and the fixed perspective of a beach chair: our oceans are in crisis.
Many marine mammals use echolocation to navigate in their living environment. We humans are not endowed to echolocate in the same way, but metaphorically, we do. The practice of sending out a “signal” and listening for its enriched “echoes” underlines musicking, reading, interpreting, and communication in general.
Six Seasons mirrors echolocation: “call” and “echo.” The “call” is the pre-recorded sounds that I describe as “the living score” that function as interactive modules; the “echo” is the improvising musicians’ creative response, intertwined with the original signal. Just as ice is the “living score” that the Inuit set their lives to, the musicians’ role is as much about listening as about responding creatively to the pre-recorded sounds with their instruments.
Our aural journey begins with the fragile sound of ice, recorded on October 15, 2015 thin ice that had just started forming merely three days earlier.
Six Seasons was commissioned by the Mivos Quartet. It was made possible by a generous grant from the Jebediah Foundation New Music Commissions.
—Lei Liang
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Calendar Credit: Nunavut Planning Commission, 2016 Draft Land Use Plan.
The Creative Team
Lei Liang, Composer / Artistic Director
Joshua Jones, Oceanographer / Principal Scientific Advisor
Theocharis Papatrechas, Audio Engineer / Sound Designer
Zachary Seldess, Audio Software Developer
Nicholas Solem, Sound Designer
Gabriel Zalles, Audio Engineer / Technical Director
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to John Hildebrand and the Whale Acoustics Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for providing bioacoustics data and technical support. The composer also wishes to thank the Qualcomm Institute (Calit2) and its Director Ramesh Rao, Dean of Arts and Humanities Cristina Della Coletta, Chair of the Music Department
Anthony Burr, Executive Director of ArtPower Jordan Peimer, as well as our incredible staff for all their support.
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About the Artists
Joshua Jones, Oceanographer / Principal Scientific Advisor
Joshua Jones has spent the last 27 years working on the ocean, studying marine mammals and their environment around the world through listening underwater. Jones received his Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the UC San Diego where he directs the Arctic marine mammal research program in the Scripps Whale Acoustics Laboratory. Josh has developed an international collaboration of non-governmental and Arctic coastal community organizations to study effects of changing ocean conditions and increasing human activities on Arctic marine mammals. His current research focuses on impacts of increasing shipping on Arctic whales and seals. This work is conducted in partnership with Inuit and under the guidance of community organizations and regional government in the Canadian Arctic.
From 2004–14, Josh directed and produced the interactive exhibit, Whales: Voices in the Sea, which has been installed in nine US public aquariums. He also developed the SeaTech program at SIO, a research internship and technology training program based in Sitka Alaska, where primarily Alaska Native youth conduct research into marine mammals. Josh is a licensed captain. He has worked in all the world’s oceans, and has continued to work annually as a charter fishing and wilderness guide in southeast Alaska since 1995. Josh is the scientific advisor to our Arctic project. He provided bioacoustics data and relevant information about the data to our sound team.
Lei Liang, Composer / Artistic Director
Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the winner of the Rome Prize, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto for saxophone and orchestra, Xiaoxiang, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. His ten portrait discs are released on Naxos, New World, Mode, BMOP/sound, Albany and Bridge Records. As a scholar and conservationist of cultural traditions, he has edited and co-edited five books and editions, and published more than forty articles.
From 2013–16, Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute/ Calit2 where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine cultural heritage through combining scientific research and advanced technology. He returned to the Institute as its first Research Artist-in-Residence in 2018.
Lei Liang’s recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America's complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs.
Lei Liang is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. His catalogue of more than a hundred works is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York). www.lei-liang.com
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Theocharis Papatrechas, Audio Engineer / Sound Designer
Originally from Greece, Theocharis Papatrechas is a composer, sound & data artist based in San Diego, CA. Currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Qualcomm Institute of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), his work converges research on environmental and data sciences with audiovisual arts, and focuses on developing unconventional, multi-modal data rendering techniques with particular interest in sonification of extreme events.
Other notable appointments he has held include at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley.
Theocharis holds a Ph.D. in music composition from UC San Diego. Other leading institutions he studied at include the Eastman School of Music, IRCAM and Sibelius Academy.
Taking inspiration from the ambient sound world of underwater and terrestrial environments, his creative practice draws upon sound profiles and natural settings we can only imagine. By bringing such environments to the surface, his work invites the listener to become immersed in artistic renditions of sounds unheard.
His music has been released by ArsPublica. His scores are published by Babel Scores. Lastly, Theocharis serves as the Artistic Director of the ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week, a summer music festival whose mission is to bring together emerging artists of diverse backgrounds to create, learn, share, and collaborate.
Theocharis’s main contributions to Six Seasons include using audio software for downsampling, normalization, and noise reduction. www.theocharis-papatrechas.com
Zachary Seldess, Audio Software Developer
Zachary Seldess, a Chicago native now living in San Diego, is an inventor, creative coder and musician. Zachary's professional and creative work covers a wide variety of audio-related topics, including new applications in microphone and speaker array beamforming, the design of tools and techniques for large-scale graphics-driven spatial sound, software and algorithms for efficient and generalizable psychoacoustic modeling, and many other projects loosely centered around the enhanced sending and receiving of audible expression.
Zachary has collaborated with artists in many mediums including theater, dance, film, and poetry. He has presented interactive installations at Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe Germany, Siggraph Asia 2009 in Yokohama Japan, and Gallery Aferro in Newark New Jersey. Other projects include sound design and programming for New York-based dancer Johari Mayfield; and design of real-time multi-channel audio and video performance software for video artist Hisao Ihara. Zachary has also programmed for artists Mari Kimura, Lillian Ball, Rashaad Newsome, Cory Arcangel, Patrick Clancy, Miguel Frasconi, Rebecca Cherry, Mem1, Tobaron Waxman, Shana Moulton, and others.
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Zachary is CTO and Chief Architect at BoomCloud360 Inc., based out of Encinitas, California.
Among the important software
Zachary developed is MIAP which was used for multichannel sound spatialization in several collaborations with Lei Liang, including Hearing Landscapes and Six Seasons.
Nicholas Solem, Sound Designer
Nicholas Solem is an electronic musician, audio engineer, and audio software developer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is currently a computer music Ph.D. candidate at University of California San Diego. Recently, his research has focused on training artificial neural networks to map psychoacoustical measurements to sound waveforms, which are then further harnessed in more elementary forms of synthesis, such as wavetable and granular. The goal of this work is to generate continuous multidimensional timbre spaces from ordinary audio files, which may then be used as the basis of novel digital instruments. He is also interested in primitive, forgotten, reappropriative, and 'heretical' sound synthesis methods. He holds a Masters of Music in music technology from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the College of Wooster. In Six Seasons, Nicholas aided the team in sound design and post-production of Arctic sound materials to achieve pristine sonic results.
Gabriel Zalles Ballivian, Audio Engineer / Technical Director
Gabriel Zalles Ballivian is a Bolivian student living in San Diego and attending UC San Diego, where he is working towards a Ph.D. in computer music. He is an audio engineer specializing in the field of immersive audio, specifically ambisonics. His research has been published in AES (Audio Engineering Society) and his music has been performed at the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC) and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), among others. In Six Seasons, Gabriel designed a MAX/ MSP patch which encodes each surround sound audio file into ambisonics, allowing the piece to be played back in any sound system using the IRCAM Spat Package—the patch is controlled by a MIDI controller which also allows the computer performer to record, solo, mute, modify reverb parameters and mix the soundscapes created from the hydrophone recordings; additionally, the patch allows the musicians' signals to be delayed and spatialized, a feature inspired by Rand Steiger, which further alludes to the metaphor of echolocation recurring in this work.
Mivos Quartet
The Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing works of contemporary composers and presenting diverse new music to international audiences. Since the quartet's beginning in 2008 they have performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers representing a wide aesthetic range of contemporary composition. Highlights during the 2022–23 season will include performances and residencies at Walker Arts Center with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Ambrose Akinmusire, UPenn, ECLAT Festival (DE), Columbia University, Peak Performances with Mary Halvorson, and the announcement of a new album of Steve Reich string quartets.
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Mivos is invested in commissioning, premiering, and growing the repertoire of new music for string quartet, striving for rich collaborations with composers over extended periods of time. Recently, Mivos has collaborated on new works with Jeffrey Mumford (LA Philharmonic/Library of Congress), Michaela Catranis (Fondation Royaumont), Chikako Morishita (rainy days festival), George Lewis (ECLAT Festival Commission), Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Eric Wubbels (CMA Commission), Kate Soper, Scott Wollschleger, Patrick Higgins (Zs), and poet/musician Saul Williams. For this work and the continuation of it, the quartet was the recipient of the 2019 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Prize for Interpreters of Contemporary Music.
Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is committed to working with guest artists exploring multi-media projects and performing improvised music. Mivos has worked closely with artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant (Ogresse), Ambrose Akinmusire (Origami Harvest), Ned Rothenberg, Timucin Sahin, Nate Wooley, and most recently guitarist, composer and 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Mary Halvorson.
Mivos has performed to critical acclaim on prestigious series such as Noon to Midnight (USA), Lucerne Festival (CH), Jazz at Lincoln Center (USA), the New York Phil Biennial (USA), Wien Modern (AT), the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (DE), rainy days festival (LU), Asphalt Festival (DE), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (CN), Música de Agora na Bahia (Brazil), Aldeburgh Music (UK), and Lo Spririto della musica di Venezia (IT).
In addition to their performance season, Mivos is committed to the education of young composers and string players, and is regularly the quartet in residence at the Creative Musicians Retreat at the Walden School (USA) and the Valencia International Performance Academy and Festival (ES). The quartet has conducted workshops at Columbia University, Harvard University, Boston University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Duke University, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai Conservatory (China), University Malaya (Malaysia), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Hong Kong Art Center, and MIAM University in Istanbul (Turkey) among others. Along with their work at educational institutions, Mivos grants the Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize, a yearly award to support the work of emerging and mid-career composers residing in the USA, and the I-Creation prize, a competition for composers of Chinese descent worldwide.
The members of Mivos are violinists Olivia De Prato and Maya Bennardo, violist Victor Lowrie Tafoya, and cellist Tyler J. Borden. Mivos operates as a non-profit organization dedicated to performing, commissioning, and collaborating on music being written today.
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