- Camry Ivory • Coloratura – Hydrosonic Soundscapes • paintbrushes, water, electronics • 10
- Kate Olson • More Than A Backing Track: Let the Machine Decide • Chaotic Loops In a Saxophonist’s World • 20
- Eli Fieldsteel • Live Coded Improvisation • 20
- Seth Andrew Davis and Will Yager • Improvisation for electric guitar, double bass, and electronics • 20
- Total: 70
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Coloratura – Hydrosonic Soundscapes
paintbrushes, water, electronics
Camry Ivory
Hydrosonic Soundscapes merges color and sound via Coloratura, an instrument I designed that uses paintbrushes as MIDI controllers to create analog art and electronic music simultaneously. Inspired by suminagashi, the Japanese art of water marbling, I use water as my canvas, tapping brushes onto the surface to create floating rings of pigment. Each color produces a melodic note, while black and gray tones add percussion.
I use an analog overhead projector to cast the evolving patterns onto a screen, an homage to liquid light show artisans of the 1960s and 70s. As I perform, I sing into the water, using my breath to shape the design and embed my voice into the visual and musical composition. This fusion of sound and color creates an immersive, multi-sensory experience for the audiences that blends traditional technique with modern innovation.
Camry Ivory is a visual musician, artist, and inventor of Coloratura, an instrument that transforms paintbrushes into MIDI controllers to create electronic music and analog art simultaneously. Through interactive workshops and live performances, Camry blends color and sound, inviting viewers to challenge conventional notions of art and music. Her passion for using technology to express and explore humanity fuels her mission to reignite the innate spark of creativity within us all. As a featured performer and facilitator, Camry has collaborated with the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Kansas School for the Blind, and Hallmark. She was the 2024 Rita Blitt Interdisciplinary Artist Fellow at Washburn University’s Mulvane Art Museum, where she collaborated across departments to explore the intersection of art, music and technology.
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More Than A Backing Track: Let the Machine Decide
Chaotic Loops In a Saxophonist’s World
Kate Olson
This piece is an improvisation that uses Brian Eno’s Bloom and Bloom (10 Worlds) apps to create unexpected and varied sonic landscapes, which will become the backdrop for an improvisation on saxophone and electronics involving live looping and aleatoric elements.
Kate is an improviser and sonic experimenter currently residing in Seattle. She is interested in the intersection of improvisation and machines.
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Live Coded Improvisation
Eli Fieldsteel
Over the past several years, my creative practice has drifted away from deterministic music involving traditional notation and acoustic instruments, and moved toward music that is more improvisatory, algorithmic, and transient. There came a point when I realized that my discovery-oriented creative workflow (which I had been calling “composition”) was not actually that different from an improvised (albeit badly under-rehearsed) performance. In light of this realization, I’ve started taking the idea of laptop-as-instrument more seriously, setting aside time to practice, discover new ideas, develop and refine performance techniques, ignore perfectionist impulses, and generally try to become a more proficient live coder.
Eli Fieldsteel is a composer, music technologist, sound artist and creative coder. His work engages with the intersection between technology and live performance, focusing on human-computer improvisation, musically interactive systems, and sensor-driven music. He has a rich history of interdisciplinary collaboration, working closely with dancers, choreographers, lighting designers, architects, and visual media artists, resulting in a variety of unique instruments and site-specific installations and performances. He is the recipient of a 2018 Klingler Electroacoustic Residency at Bowling Green State University, the 2014 James E. Croft Grant for Young and Emerging Wind Band Composers, and first prize in the 2012 ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Competition. His music has been performed nationally and internationally by ensembles such as the Dallas Wind Symphony, the North Texas Symphony Orchestra, the Kawagoe Sohwa Wind Ensemble of Tokyo, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Wind Ensemble. Eli maintains an active teaching presence online through a well-trafficked series of YouTube video tutorials centered on the free and open-source SuperCollider audio programming language, and has also written a comprehensive tutorial and reference book titled SuperCollider for the Creative Musician: A Practical Guide, published under Oxford University Press.
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Improvisation for electric guitar, double bass, and electronics
Seth Andrew Davis, Will Yager
Will Yager & Seth Andrew Davis will be performing an improvisation for electric guitar, double bass, and electronics. This performance is the continuation of the duos work together coming off their debut record April 8th, 1969 that was released on Ox Cart New Music in 2024. The group focuses on group improvisation and the timbral transformation of Yager and Davis’ respective instrumentsWill Yager is a versatile bassist/improviser committed to experimental music, improvisation, and collaborating with living composers in the creation of new solo and chamber repertoire for the double bass. He is a founding member of the soprano/double bass duo LIGAMENT and improvising trio Wombat.
Seth Andrew Davis is a performer, composer, improviser, technologist, and educator from the Kansas City area. Davis is involved in the improvised music/free improvisation, experimental, and electronic music scenes in Kansas City. Davis’ music runs the gamut of compositions for orchestral and chamber ensembles, performances with free-jazz/free improvised music ensembles and large groups, solo performance, collaborations with dancers and video artists, and the design and collaboration of autonomous and interactive artificial life agents and 3D environments.