Concert — KONTEJNER

Fractures - for laptop ensemble | Cárthach Ó Nuanáin, Eric Browne, Brian Sheehan, Aoife Claffey and Juan Francisco Martinez

Fractures (2025) draws on three distinct strands of research brought together in collective practice-based performance: a Granular-Markov hybrid synthesis system that generates slowly evolving textures guided by autonomous AI processes; a spectral sonification tool that warps and destabilises speech and sound through chaotic transformations; and a wearable gesture system using body-worn motion sensors, translating the physical movements of performers into expressive control of granular and chaotic synthesis. The technical details of these tools are described in a separate article in the SMC proceedings.
  Thematically, Fractures engages with climate instability, technological mediation, and the often opaque systems that shape human experience. A processed excerpt from climate scientist Johan Rockström's address on planetary tipping points serves as both source material and metaphor: its intelligibility gradually surrendering to spectral distortion, enacting the very collapse it describes. The work builds through contrasting collections of sound objects - sustained tonal fields set against percussive, noise-based textures - toward a climactic breakdown of feedback and chaos, before dissipating into an AI-driven granular re-textualisation of Uilleann pipe recordings. Accompanying visuals are by artist Aoife Claffey.

The MtULE are Eric Browne, Cárthach Ó Nuanáin, Brian Sheehan with Aoife Claffey and Juan Francisco Martinez. It was formed in 2025 to allow separate paths of research inquiry to be embodied together in live improvised performance, through the medium of laptop orchestra. Currently members are exploring a Granular-Markov hybrid synthesis system that generates slowly evolving textures guided by autonomous AI processes; a sonification tool that allows the spectrographic process to heard and manipulated in real time; and a wearable gesture system using body-worn motion sensors, translating the physical movements of performers into expressive control of granular and chaotic synthesis.

Magma – for violin and electronics | Joao Pedro Oliveira

Magma for violin and electronics uses as basis several resonances between the violin and the electronic sounds. The color of the violin timbre is changed, transformed and expanded by the electronics, enlarging the instrument sound into a surrounding mass, constantly changing. The volcanic magma also transforms over time going through shades of red, yellow, grey, until it reaches black, always in a constant tension and plastic mutation. This work was commissioned by Festival Dias de Música Eletroacústica and by Seia Conservatory (Portugal).

João Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He studied organ performance, composition, and architecture in Lisbon. He completed a Ph.D. in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. He has received over 70 international prizes and awards for his works, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Bourges Magisterium Prize, and the Giga-Hertz Special Award, Fromm Foundation, among others.

www.jpoliveira.com

/nin/ - for violin and electronics | Dimitris Papageorgiou

/nin/—from the Greek ‘νυν’ (nun), meaning ‘now, at this time’—is an ongoing performance-research project exploring the practice of free improvisation for solo violin and bespoke live electronics. The project examines improvisation both as a relational performance practice and as a research method that is enacted as sound. In performance, the violinist interacts with an adaptive and generative live electronics environment that augments and extends the acoustic instrument while also producing moments of resistance, surprise, and indeterminacy. This environment combines DAFX-led processing (via controller interfaces) with two interacting components adapted from T/ensor/~ (v0.5), a prototype system in Max integrating machine listening, adaptive DSP, and generative processes. Developed in a funded artistic research study titled ‘Improvisation Technologies and Creative Machines: The Performer–Instrument Relational Milieu’, T/ensor/~ explores the intersection of improvisation, digital augmentation, and machine agency. Each performance of /nin/ becomes a site of enquiry into how forms of interplay and relational configurations are constituted in and through the present moment. Violin actions and techniques, including shifts in density, pacing, and silence, help to articulate performance-research questions in real time, with musical form emerging through a negotiated coupling: approaching, testing, yielding to, or resisting a sound/gesture, while the electronics move between responsive augmentation, temporal/timbral displacement, and autonomous behaviours that can persist, withdraw, fall silent, or remain latent. As such, /nin/ is not framed as a ‘work’ or a ‘composition’. Rather, it denotes a broader ‘improvisation-as-research’ conceptual framework that invites a mindful inhabiting of the ‘now’ as a performative present in its unfolding, and a [performer–instrument–machine] relational setting that points towards the practice of ‘syn-schediasmos’ [syn- (σύν, ‘with’) + schediázo (σχεδιάζω): ‘to draw’]: a co-drawing in sound between people, instruments, and technologies, shaping the improvised journey in ‘with-ness’.

Dimitris Papageorgiou is a violinist/improviser, composer, and Lecturer in Music at Edinburgh Napier University. His work explores free improvisation, contemporary music notation, and interactive music systems. As a violinist/improviser, he approaches the improvised musical act as a research method, guided by attentive listening and by the physical experience of following the instrument’s affordances and responses. His compositions span instrumental and electroacoustic music, with a particular focus in recent years on electro-instrumental settings and the generation of notational environments that draw on his solo violin improvisation practice. www.dimitrispapageorgiou.com

Metafonie 7 – for stereo tape | Francesco Galante

Metafonie 7 is the most recent chapter of a research launched in 1993 regarding the use of
 FM synthesis to create complex sound morphologies evoking late-twentieth-century
 pseudo-orchestral archetypes. Through a "hall of mirrors" approach, electronics are used to rediscover the essence of that era's instrumental experimentation.
 Key elements of the work:
  FM synthesis: techniques to maximize perceptual ambiguity.
  Algorithmic generation: a semi-automatic Csound system that cyclically produces
 coherent, self-regenerating sound structures.
  Pseudo-instrumental morphology: shaping FM sound according to Gestalt principles.
 The piece was assembled in a multitrack environment.
 Metafonie 7 is dedicated to the Italian composer Giorgio Nottoli on the occasion of his
 eightieth birthday.

Italian composer, researcher and essayist in electroacoustic music. His artistic focus is on psychoacoustics applied to various expressive fields of music. He edited books such as Metafonie, Musica Espansa, and Listening again to Gesang der Jünglinge. His music is performed across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. From 1998 to 2000, he organized for Teatro alla Scala in Milan the electroacoustic concert series Metafonie and the international symposium Music/Technologies, tomorrow.

Solo for Computer & Feedback | Remmy Canedo

Solo for Computer & Feedback interrogates the interplay between physical acoustics, algorithmic structures, and performer agency. Reinterpreting process-driven minimalism, the work utilizes two suspended microphones oscillating above loudspeakers to generate emergent acoustic feedback. Route-processed via a custom Pure Data framework, the incoming signals undergo continuous spectral and spatial deformation by a computer performer. Guided by a virtual score that algorithmically subdivides performance time into 28 proportional sections, the piece exemplifies multiform electroacoustic composition — wherein structural evolution remains non-deterministic, evolving uniquely through room acoustics, pendular dynamics, and real-time intervention.

Remmy Canedo is a composer and computer music designer focusing on real-time electronics, live algorithmic composition, and multiform interactive systems. Educated at the University of Chile, Musikhochschule Stuttgart, and IRCAM Paris, his work explores human–machine interplay, acoustic feedback networks, and dynamic virtual scoring. His output bridges experimental signal processing and generative media frameworks, navigating non-deterministic performance structures.

Extemporización Espacial " La guitarra como Dispositivo de Espacialización – for electric guitar and multichannel audio | Natán Ide

Extemporización Espacial (2025), for electric guitar and live electronics, transforms the guitar from a sound source into a spatialization device. The performer’s gestures, orientations, and bodily movements shape not only timbre, but also the trajectories of sound within an immersive listening environment. Built as a real-time practice of extemporization, the piece explores instability, uncertainty, and the tension between control and drift. Through an interactive system of signal, processing, and spatialization, each gesture becomes a spatial decision, treating space itself as an expressive musical material.

Natán Ide is a Chilean musician, sound artist, and acoustic engineer. He holds a Master's degree in Acoustics and Vibrations from Universidad Austral de Chile and a Master's degree in Music from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts. His artistic and research practice explores the relationships between sound, gesture, spatialization, and interactive technologies, with a focus on experimental music and electric guitar performance.