ACMC 2019

Theme: Seeing the inaudible, hearing the invisible Date: July 23-27 2019 Where: Monash University, Melbourne

I will be presenting a paper on Hyperrealism in Electroacoustic Music with Stuart James. I will also be presenting a piece called returning home that deals with some of the techniques I shall propose.

Listen here

returning home brings together disparate places captured in field recordings from various locations in Perth, Western Australia. Drawing from the contemporary trends of 'hypnagogic pop' and 'hauntology' that exploit nostalgia through appealing to one's memories of the past through the use of cultural artefacts, the piece combines digital synthesis with sounds recorded using a condenser mic, coil mic and hydrophone.

Noah Creshevsky (2005) defines hyperreal music as an ''electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment ('realism'), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive ('hyper')'', whilst Barry Truax (2012) suggests a possible form of soundscape composition that “is the creation of a purely imaginary or virtual world, one that arguably aligns with the concept of the ‘hyperreal’. Probing the intersection of these definitions by using familiar found sounds, articulate synthetic gestures, the electromagnetic sound of logging into social media and lo-fi production techniques such as noise, crackle and saturation, returning home explores the possibility of hyperreal music.