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Electroacoustic Gagaku Music
2011.07
Notes:
.Slow, The dragon that ascends dancing in the Sky. The voices echoing on the Earth. We are returning the bowl. . |
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Ambient
2011.02- Ongoing
An ongoing series of pieces, Insekt is born out of the composer's aesthetic fascination with cognitive relations between density, sleep, thresholds of musical perception and background noise... [ More/Listen ] Notes:
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stridulant insectivore . numb germs full of frozen micro daze . swarming insekts bound by a viscous blizzard . |
About the Insekt Series:
An ongoing series of pieces, Insekt is born out of the composer's aesthetic fascination with cognitive relations between density, sleep, thresholds of musical perception and background noise. Densely layered, and subtly crafted, these compositions offer simply too many details to one's perception and therefore result in fluid states of perception that undulate between deep listening and unconscious background noise subtraction. While creatively engaging with many sound events and extracting form from the dense wall of sound our cognition has a lazy tendency to simply shot itself off.
Recommended use: before sleep with headphones.
Dosage: start with one pieces at a time and gradually increase dosage until sleep is achieved.
Individual Pieces
1. teem
Acousmatic composition for an 8.1 surround setting
2. nim
Ambient composition for 8 speakers and 8 subwoofers
3. relaxSea
The third piece of the Insekt series, RelaxSea is a multi-layered composition incorporating live improvised woodwinds and realtime processing.
Vinny Golia: Improvised Piccolo and Soprano Sax
Navid Navab: Realtime audio proccessing (Max/MSP), Tape
Feb. 2011: at Agora as part of the Festival international Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques:5e édition
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Improvisations: Zheng, Sax, Voice, prepared player-Piano, Realtime Sound
recorded live @ Western Front, Vancouver, Jan 2012
Circle of Sleep is an overnight concert, a meditation on sleep and dreaming that’s also a marathon of cutting-edge Canadian electronic music.
[ More/Listen ] The event:
Circle of Sleep is an overnight concert, a meditation on sleep and dreaming that’s also a marathon of cutting-edge Canadian electronic music. Featuring nine artists from ambient music, new media, conceptual art, and improvisation, Circle of Sleep guides the audience through dream states from 10pm until dawn. Montreal’s Sandeep Bhagwati and Navid Navab are at the leading edge of research into performer-interactive digital art and the melding of composed and improvised music through technology. Navab has developed performance software that creates real-time ‘comprovisation’ with a live performer, dialoguing with the live musician’s ideas in polyphonic surround sound. Veteran local improvisers Coat Cooke (saxophone) and Mei Han (zheng) perform in this digital oracle’s Vancouver debut. As the night turns toward dawn, Circle of Sleep features artists from the ambient scene to draw the audience deeper into the immersive experience, maybe even into inspired dreaming. Navid Navab presents his own ambient ‘media alkemy,’ joined by Souns (Michael Red) (Friday) and Paul Elam aka Fieldhead (Saturday). Audience members should feel free to bring a pillow and sleeping bag and stay until the morning for more surprises! |
Mei Han: Zheng (Chinese Zither)
Coat Cooke: Saxophone
Cheryl l'Hirondelle (Waynohtêw): Voice and Cree text
Navid Navab: real-rime sound instruments + software driven prepared player piano
Software developed at Matralab (Concordia, Montreal) + IRCAM (Paris)
Jan 20 – Jan 21, 2012 @ 10:00pm-6:00am at Western Front, Vancouver
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Erhu and Realtime Sound Instruments
2012.04
Excerpts from a series of improvisations... [ More/Listen ] Notes:
Lan Tung: Erhu and Voice Navid Navab: real-time sound instruments (machine improvisation) Playing a dynamic role in the Canadian music scene, Lan Tung is an erhu performer, composer, producer, and administrator. Originally from Taiwan, she incorporates Chinese music with contemporary expressions in her works. LanTungMusic.com The following excerpts are live recordings that were made in the matralab blackBox. During the sessions, the performer's solo improvisations were captured in realtime, recombined (concatenated), transformed and projected back into the space. The experimental principal for the session was to explore machine-improvisation: a software environment learns in real-time typical features of a musician's style and plays along with him interactively, giving the flavours of a virtual co-improvisation. |
21h, June 19 2012, Mardi Spaghetti presents: Lan Tung, Navid Navab, and Lucio Menegon @ Le Cagibi, Montreal
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Soprano Saxophone and Realtime Processing
2011.10
Excerpts from a series of improvisations... [ More/Listen ] Notes:
Vinny Golia: Improvised Solo Soprano Sax Navid Navab: Machine Improvisation and Realtime Audio Processing (Max/MSP) A multi-woodwind performer, Vinny Golia's recordings have been consistently picked by critics and readers of music journals for their yearly "ten best" lists… For more info on Vinny visit VinnyGolia.com The following excerpts are live recordings that were made in the matralab blackBox. During the sessions, the performer's solo improvisations were captured in realtime, recombined (concatenated), transformed and projected back into the space. The experimental principal for the session was to explore machine-improvisation: a software environment learns in real-time typical features of a musician's style and plays along with him interactively, giving the flavours of a virtual co-improvisation. More on machine improvisation here. |
Sep. 2011: Matralab's BlackBox, Hexagram, Concordia
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Solo instruments and live electronics
2011.08 - ongoing
A series of etudes exploring realtime audio mosaicing with a solo improviser. [ More/Listen ] Notes:
Realtime orchestration or audio mosaicing using Corpus-based concatenative sound synthesis: Corpus-based concatenative sound synthesis uses a large collection of source sounds, segmented into grains or units, and a unit selection algorithm that finds the sequence of units that match best the sound or phrase to be synthesized. The selection is performed according to the descriptors of the units, which is a stream of characteristics extracted from the soloist. By modifying the algorithm and the source sounds on the fly, it is possible to move from predictable audio mosiacing to realtime orchestration or accompaniment.
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Audio Mosaicing Etude #1
for Improvised Bass Clarinet (Lori Freedman)and Realtime Audio-Mosiacing (Navid Navab).
Audio Mosaicing Etude #2
for Improvised Soprano Sax (Vinny Golia)and Realtime Audio-Mosiacing (Navid Navab).
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Voice and Live Processing
2011.06
Notes:
3 unique realizations/improvisations Anne-Marie Donovan: Voice Navid Navab: Digital Manipulations (Realtime Concatenative Synthesis and Room-effect Synthesis) June 29 2011 D. B. Clark Theatre, Montreal |
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Electroacoustic / Acousmatic Composition
2007.12
"Alchemy of Food" explores the transformation of food and circulation of cosmic energy with relation to the body, the self and our existential territories... [ More/Listen ] Program Notes:
"The ignorance of shit", an intensive human quality considered the ultimate definition of kitsch by Milan Kundera, prohibits the polite man from embracing shit as an essential part of life.
"Alchemy of Food, from cooking to shitting" explores the mutation of food and circulation of cosmic energy with relation to the body, the self and our existential territories. Physical and psychological thresholds, where embodied matter is disembodied and vice-versa, form intensive sensual gates which assure our survival as living entities. "Freud demonstrated that simple objects like milk and shit supported very complex existential Universes: orality, anality, weaving together ways of seeing, symptoms, fantasms... The Blocks of sensation of machinic orality detach a deterritorialised flesh from the body... Everything has to continually begin again from zero, at the point of chaosmic emergence." (Guattari, Chaosmosis) As a composition, Alchemy of Food investigates the permutation and transformation of symbolically charged sound. The focus, however, is not solely the symbolic qualities, but rather the morphological characteristics of the sound objects within the timber space and their evolution through out the micro, messo and macro temporal zones. |
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Electroacoustic Composition
2006.01
ClipClick I is an etude in extreme digital signal processing, elongation and sculpting. While being inspired by hypnotic rhythms of the minimalist movement and particularly "Music for 18 Musicians", ClickClicp I pulses it's way through time and slowly undulates from one spectra to another... [ More/Listen ] Notes:
This composition started out as an etude in extreme digital signal processing, elongation and sculpting. The one and only source sound used was a 0.25 sec long digital conversion error sound (a clipped click like sound!). Then without any layering or cut and pasting this one source was stretched and sculpted through various processes such phasing, synchronizing, filtering, delays and pitch bends, abused noise reduction and compression algorithms, gating and etc. |
Nov. 2008: Live Diffusion at the ÉuCuE Series XXIV, Concert no. 12, Feb 10 2006
A recording of the concert (live diffusion) can be found here
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Mixed Media, Setar and Live Electronics
2006.04
Improvised and processed persian Setar, Feedback, Synthesized Mariba and Dulcimer, processed Guitars... [ More/Listen ] Notes:
A light hearted microtonal improvisation on the Setar was captured with a lo-fi microphone while playing around with controlled feedback resonances. Later, a processed version of this recording was used as a background against which other live electronics/synthesis were improvised. |
2008.07
Type: Responsive Architecture | Generative/Responsive Sound Installation
Pneuma
2008.07Type: Responsive Architecture, Live DSP
Location / Context: Monopoli Gallery / 8th Manifestation International De Champ Libre, Montreal
Pneuma- Monopoli- background traffic layer: Street traffic is passing though a series of "tuned" comb filters with varying resonances, and also through a series of gliding filters. The amount of resonance and other processing varies from stable harmonic equilibrium to pure traffic depending on the activity of the clouds, underground water current, street traffic, and on people's interaction in the room.
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Musicvideo
April 2007untitled #Train is an audio-visual composition. It is an aesthetic commentary on the iPod culture and the collision of public and private listening spaces. It was presented as part of the "Audible Topographies" open house event, "exploring the terrain in which sound, the body and the built environment collide within a culture of listening." [... More ] untitled #Train is an audio-visual composition. It is an aesthetic commentary on the iPod culture and the collision of public and private listening spaces. It was presented as part of the "Audible Topographies" open house event, "exploring the terrain in which sound, the body and the built environment collide within a culture of listening." |
- Audible Topographies, April 2007, montreal
- Video: Jon Lebensold
- Composition/Music: Navid Navab