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Lucy Strauss




INFORMATION:

 about ︎

 publications ︎

 contact ︎


PROJECT/PRACTICE ARCHIVE:

 realm of tensors & spruce ︎

I have recently been found here:
︎ Göteborg
︎ London
︎ Cape Town




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Lucy Strauss is a musician and researcher. Her work spans viola performance, intra-active system design and machine learning with audio and bioelectric signals, and first-person design methodologies. This practice research spans the space between human-centered and more-than-human computing approaches. Through these approaches, new technologies simultaneously extend creative practice and bring us closer to the living world we inhabit.

Lucy is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts & Computational Technology at Goldsmiths (University of London), funded through a CHASE fellowship. This year, she is also an Artist in Residence at the Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at the University of Johannesburg. She has performed improvised and experimental music at Pony Books (Gothenburg), the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Mixtophonics Festival, 8EAST Cultural Center & NOW Society (Vancouver), De Tanker (Amsterdam), Hundred Years Gallery (London), and the Theatre Arts Admin Collective (Cape Town). She also enjoys contributing to interdisciplinary collaborations with fellow artists. Notably, she was the interaction designer for Denise Onen’s sounding the body as a sight at The Oscillations Exhibition 2024 (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). Also notably, Lucy has coded, composed and played for installations by artist Mia Thom at Everard Read Gallery, Act of Brutal Curation Gallery, and Eclectica Contemporary (Cape Town), as well as the 2022 Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain (Dakar). Lucy has presented workshops on composition (University of British Columbia), improvisation (Canadian Viola Society) and interactive music technology (Bowed Electrons Festival & Symposium).

Lucy’s practice has taken shape through training and supervision at the University of Cape Town (BMus in Composition); University of British Columbia (MMus in Viola Performance, funded through an Oppenheimer Memorial Trust scholarship); and mentorship at the MusicDance021 Performance Residency. The exchange with NOW Society musicians has also been highly impactful for Lucy’s improvisation practice, during her time as a musician partner at 8EAST.
photo by Mia Thom

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Upcoming: Realm of Tensors and Spruce


Cape Town | 15 December 2024

Realm of Tensors and Spruce is a new music project created and performed by Lucy Strauss. The project explores and extends the sonic possibilities of the viola with live acoustic playing, electroacoustics, and DIY machine learning models trained on datasets of Lucy's own playing. With this palette of practices, she builds and transforms soundworlds entirely from viola audio. The resulting performance melds between improvised and composed structures.

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This work will be presented at Theatre Arts first in a performance setting, then as an interactive sound installation. This affords audience members the chance to explore and influence a soundworld generated in real-time with bespoke neural audio synthesis.

Between the performance and the installation, there will be a Q&A session and a short interval

Spruce: a species of tonewood commonly used to make violas

Tensor: a data structure used in machine learning frameworks

Realm: an allusion to Lucy's compositional approach of building soundworlds; and the to latent (or hidden) space within the machine learning models used in this project. Lucy has implemented these models in such a way that they are entirely interactive and responsive to input, so that humans always remain in the loop towards a human-centred computing practice.

This event at Theatre Arts is the premiere of the interactive installation component of Realm of Tensors and Spruce. The performance component was premiered in October 2024 at Pony Books in Gothenburg, Sweden. Lucy will present the project again at Goldsmiths, University of London in early 2025. She also looks forward to sharing this music with the upcoming release of her debut album.

Past: Realm of Tensors and Spruce Premiere @ Pony Books GBG


Here is a ragtag assemblage of documentation from the Pony Books performance:



The elevator pitch for this project is that every single sound comes from the viola, from the acoustic sounds in the concert space, to electroacoustic process, to neural synthesis.

 
The promotional material for the concert made a lot more sense than my ramblings. Aside from the usual digital places, the concert information was shared on an actual piece of paper for people to find in the bookshop leading up to the event: 



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Amass



Amass is an interactive electroacoustic work for viola and computer that I composed and performed for its premiere at the Bowed Electrons Festival & Symposium. All electroacoustic material comes from the sound of my viola and I interact with the material by improvising on viola, using the Wave ring by Genki Instruments for gesture tracking. The system design utilizes Python, Wekinator and Max MSP. The composition draws from an action-sound approach to explore the sonic possibilities of the viola through an amassment of deconstructed sounds. I used embodied design strategies to bring Amass to life, and gave a 40 minute presentation at the Bowed Electrons festival on the Research through Design process. 

click HERE to watch the presentation.



If you want to know more, stop by the Project Blog page on this website.

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Night Swim

Check out my ︎Project Blog page on this website for some behind the scenes content on the making of Night Swim.



Night Swim is a sight-specific installation work by Mia Thom in collaboration with Lucy Strauss and Clare Patrick. The installation was premiered at the Art of Brutal Curation gallery (Cape Town, August - September 2021) and was selected for installation at the Everard Read gallery group show (Cape Town, December 2021). 



Plunging participants into a monochromatic, blue environment, this experimental installation comprises of three large scale sculptures which function as speakers to lie on. Composed and coded by Lucy Strauss, these forms emit a soundscape of strings, room tone and voice, transformed by geophyscial data from the South Atlantic ocean.
The sonic materials of the soundscape comprise audio captured from broken violin, viola, cello and contrabass strings; composed fragments for voice and viola based on the acoustic modes of the installation space; and viola improvisations. The collected acoustic materials are placed in an environment constructed from geophysical data from the South Atlantic ocean. Machine learning algorithms in Wekinator trigger the collected audio materials and perform transformations in the time and frequency domain, in accordance with ocean’s fluctuations and developments in time.



Night Swim also utilizes Latent Timbre Synthesis (LTS), a new audio synthesis method using Deep Learning. We used LTS to interpolate between the timbres of the raw sonic materials, and set the interpolation curve according to fluctuations in the ocean data. This curve determines how much each sound has an effect on the resulting synthesized sound. A person experiencing Night Swim will hear the raw sonic materials, as well as synthesized audio that lies somewhere between these materials. For example, one could hear a sound that exists somewhere between two different human voices; a human voice and a viola; or a viola and a broken bass string.