International Computer Music Conference features Faculty and Students

Composition Faculty and Doctoral Candidates featured at International Computer Music Conference

Members of the UC Santa Barbara Composition Program were featured at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Santiago, Chile from July 25-31, 2021. Hosted by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the conference took place in a completely virtual format, and opened with a keynote address by UC Santa Barbara Corwin Chair of Composition, Professor João Pedro Oliveira, titled “Visual Music: Connecting Image and Sound. Some Considerations.” In the opening concert, Oliveira’s pieces Kontrol (percussion and electronics) and Tesseract (visual music) were part of the program. Along with Oliveira, Professor Emeritus Clarence Barlow and doctoral candidates Raphael Radna and Stewart Engart had their works featured in the conference. The virtual Listening Rooms include works by UC Santa Barbara composers, including Barlow’s Coronialus, Engart’s Sublimation, and Radna’s strung.

Radna and Oliveira also presented a paper, titled “Space Control: A New Software Application for Intuitive Sound Spatialization,” which introduces Space Control, a forthcoming software application by Radna and Oliveira enabling the realization and mixture of spatial gestures for electronic music composition. The software aims to provide an intuitive graphical interface for defining and combining spatial sound movements of arbitrary number and complexity within a user-defined loudspeaker arrangement, emphasizing precision, versatility, and ease of use. Space Control will be released later this year.

The ICMC is the preeminent annual gathering for computer music practitioners from around the world. Its unique interweaving of professional paper presentations and concerts of new computer music, refereed by ICMA-approved international panels, creates a vital synthesis of science, technology, and the art of music.

Clarence Barlow

Stewart Engart

Raphael Radna

Pictured from top: João Pedro Oliveira, Clarence Barlow, Stewart Engart, and Raphael Radna