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
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.
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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