- Jeff Kaiser/Alexandria Smith
Cleaner Data at a Larger Scale
(12 mins) (8) - Stephen David Beck
Cape Town Starlet
(9 mins) (2) - Cecilia Suhr
Floating Across Realms
(8 mins) (2) - Tina Tallon
excision no. 2: they didn’t know we were seeds
(11 mins) (2) - Eric Honour
Skelloch
(8 mins) (17) - (50 mins) (33)
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Jeff Kaiser and Alexandria Smith
Cleaner Data at a Larger Scale
Building on Kaiser’s composition, Improvising Machine #7325: Inside My Trumpet, Again, Cleaner Data at a Larger Scale places the audience inside two trumpets, exploring the instrument’s interior sonic world through an immersive human–machine improvisation system. The work is built from two extensive, individually built sample libraries (Kaiser and Smith built them) captured by placing microphones deep within the instrument. These samples document the mechanical sounds and actions of trumpet performance without the instrument being played traditionally—collections of the sound of valves descending, springs releasing, air being compressed and released by slides, valve caps loosening, spit-valve gurgles, and a range of non-tonal lip, air, and tongue sounds produced through the mouthpiece and leadpipe.
Fifty-six autonomous virtual agents (“robots”), authored by the Kaiser in Max/MSP and hosted in Ableton Live, inhabit a 360-degree ambisonic field surrounding the audience. Each agent draws from its own subset of the sample libraries and listens to the live trumpets’ performance in real time. Their behaviors fluctuate between responsive and indifferent, generating shifting environments that range from highly chaotic to unexpectedly calm. As a result, the improvising performers become entangled with a machine ensemble that both reflects and subverts the human gestures, creating a continuously changing dialogue between human and technological agents.
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Stephen David Beck, composer
Eric Mandat, clarinet
Cape Town Starlet
for treble wind instrument and electronics
During a 2024 sabbatical trip to Cape T own, South Africa, we found a Red-Winged Starling that had roosted in the fire escape of our hotel room. It woke us up every morning with a beautiful yet haunting melody. I recorded the call on our last day there and used it as the basis and inspiration for this piece. e title is a simple pun on the bird’s name, as the bird seemed to say “look at me, look at me” over and over.
Musically, the instrumental material consists exclusively of fragments from a transcription of the Red-Winged Starling’s call. The call is divided into three sections: the first is the main “contact” call, as the bird is trying to get the attention of a potential mate or searching for food; the second is a response call; and the final is an alarm call. The soloist presents all
three sections in different orders and, at times, can play any of the calls in random order. The electronics take the original bird call recordings and use granular signal processing to pull and stretch the sounds into smaller bits that are then recombined to create new sounds. At several points, the soloist is asked to improvise with these new sounds as if they are chirping with their digital counterpart.
The electronics also uses a live recording of the soloist and transforms those sounds in a dialog with the digital bird transformations. Which sound is which? That is for the listener to figure out.
Stephen David Beck (b. 1959) teaches music composition and electroacoustic music at Louisiana State University, where he is the Derryl & Helen Haymon Professor of Music. He received his PhD in music composition and theory from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied with Henri Lazarof, Elaine Barkin, Paul Reale, Alden Ashforth, and Roger Bourland. In 1985, he studied computer music at IRCAM with the support of an Annette Kade/Fulbright Fellowship and joined the faculty at LSU in 1988. Since 2003, he has held a joint faculty position at the Center for Computation & T echnology, where he established the Cultural Computing group and led the development of the PhD program in Experimental Music & Digital Media.
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Cecilia Suhr
Floating Across Realms
Floating Across Realms is an electroacoustic live performance that evokes the sensation of wandering at the threshold of life and death—passing through multiple realms before finally crossing over to the other world, accompanied by the radiant sound of choirs. The work explores the unstable borders between the tangible and the ethereal, the abstract and the concrete, conjuring an atmosphere both dense and mysterious, charged with the tension of crossing into the unknown. These elements create a liminal space where my own pre-recorded vocal improvisation, captured as the composer, returns in dialogue with my live structured piano improvisation, expanded in real time through live electronic processing and audiovisual interaction in real time. The performance unfolds as an organic conversation between sound and image, where colors, motion, and texture dynamically respond to the evolving sonic landscape. The improvisations move fluidly—sometimes fragile, sometimes turbulent—as if tracing echoes through a tunnel that is at once hollow and vast. Whispers dissolve into choir-like harmonies, and in this convergence of sound and image, the crossing itself becomes palpable: a fragile threshold between weight and weightlessness, presence and release.
Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia artist, multimedia composer, and researcher whose work bridges music, visual art, performance, and technology. A multi-instrumentalist (violin, cello, voice, piano, and bamboo flute) and painter, she creates immersive performances that merge acoustic improvisation, live electronics, and visual expression into cohesive, interdisciplinary experiences. Her creative practice and research explore the intersections of sound, image, and embodiment—often engaging themes that examine tensions, paradoxes, and boundaries between opposing forces and concepts. She has received honors spanning music, art, research, and interactive media, including recognition from the International Alliance for Women in Music (Pauline Oliveros Award), the MacArthur Foundation (DML Grant), The American Prize, the Global Music Awards, and the Broadcast Education Association (BEA), among others. Her music and intermedia works have been featured internationally at major festivals and conferences such as ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, Mise-En Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou, Performing Media Art Festival, Splice, Mantis, TENOR, ACMC, EMM, SCI, BEAST Feast, MoXsonic, and many more. She is the author of Social Media and Music (Peter Lang, 2012) and Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities (MIT Press, 2014), and serves as a Full Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Arts at Miami University Regionals.
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Tina Tallon
excision no. 2: they didn’t know we were seeds
viola and live electronics
“what didn’t you do to bury me
but you forgot that I was a seed”
-Dinos Christianopoulos, The Body and the Wormwood (1978)
excision no. 2 takes the concept of a seed and the roots that it grows as a point of departure, using both sonic representations of roots pushing through soil and spectral processes that metaphorically represent growth to create a performance system that ultimately questions the performer’s embodied relationship to their instrument using a transducer strapped to the back of the viola. Due to the fragile and awkward nature of some of the performance techniques involved (in particular, bowing beyond the bout and close to the scroll), the physical vibrations from the transducer are strong enough to impact the ability of the performer to control the bow, leading to unintentional sonic outputs and ultimately questioning the agency of the performer within the cybernetic feedback loop.
Winner of the 2022 Rome Prize in Music Composition, Tina Tallon is a composer, creative technologist, historian, and engineer whose work grapples with questions of identity, agency, and power as constructed and performed in our increasingly technologically-mediated world. Her concert music and interactive installations have been widely performed and presented by ensembles such as the LA Philharmonic New Music Group, Ensemble Intercontemporain, wildUp, and Talea in venues ranging from some of the world’s most celebrated concert halls to ancient Roman aqueducts, the Venice Biennale, the Large Hadron Collider, major motion pictures, and leading AI conferences like NeurIPS. She has received numerous awards from organizations such as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, MIT, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and ASCAP. In addition to regular appearances at conferences, festivals, and symposia, her work has been featured in outlets such as the New Yorker, NYT, NPR, NBC, and Politico. A passionate educator, Dr. Tallon is Assistant Professor of AI and Music Composition at The Ohio State University, and is committed to supporting young artists and engineers as they find their voices and dream up ways for their creative endeavors to make the world a better place.
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Eric Honour
Skelloch
for live electronics
Devoted to exploring and furthering the intersections of music and technology, Eric Honour’s work as a composer and saxophonist has been featured in numerous international conferences and festivals like ICMC, SEAMUS, MUSLAB, Sonorities, EMM, NYCEMF, and others. A member of the Athens Saxophone Quartet, he performs regularly in Europe and the United States, and has presented lectures and masterclasses at many leading institutions.
Honour’s music has been described as “fast, frenetic, and fiendishly difficult” and performed around the world by such notable artists as Quintet Attacca, Shanna Pranaitis, Stephan Vermeersch, Elisabeth Stimpert, the Thelema Trio, and Quartetto Musicattuale. His work as a composer has been recognized in many competitions, published by Roncorp, and recorded on the Capstone, Ravello, and Innova labels. Professor of music, Chair of the School of Visual and Performing Arts, and director of the Center for Music Technology at the University of Central Missouri, his work as an audio engineer and producer appears on the Innova, Centaur, Ravello, Irritable Hedgehog, Weighter, Orpheus Classical Music, Everview, North Star Appli, and E.M.E. Action labels, as well as on numerous independent releases.