Sonic Acts with Marcin Pietruszewski

2024-02-24

Sonic Acts explores, contextualises, and presents the most exciting new work by both established and emerging visual and sound artists. Expect an audiovisual rollercoaster: adventurous, experimental, innovative, and overwhelming.
During Sonic Acts, the festival for cutting-edge art, science, and technology, the Fokker organ becomes the canvas for Marcin Pietruszewski’s generative installation Distortion Product Lattice (Fokker QDTS Wavepackets). By combining a computer-controlled microtonal organ, digital sound synthesis, pluriphonic sound, and a choreography of light, the work produces both formal and auditory modulations. At 19:30, Marcin Pietruszewski will give a lecture-performance, activating the installation, which will remain accessible until midnight.

Tickets

Programme

several sound artists, among others:

Kassel Jaeger + Eléonore Huisse, guitar, electronics & film

Ï Î (Lukas De Clerck & Victor Guaita Igual) + Sarah Davachi, elektronica, altviool & aulos

Aho Ssan + Sevi Iko Domochevsky, electronics & visuals

Marcin Pietruszewski, electronics & Fokker organ

AXONTORR electronics, visuals

General Magic + Tina Frank, electronics & visuals

Hugo Esquinca + Russell Haswell, electronics

About Marcin Pietruszewski (in Engels)

A Polish composer and researcher, Marcin Pietruszewski is engaged in synthesis and composition with computers, exploring specific formal developments in the tradition of electroacoustic music and contemporary sound art. He works across composition, pluriphonic installations, and radio productions. Recurring themes in his practice include synthetic sound, algorithmic systems, and the integration of scientific formalisms as compositional materials. He has exhibited at Edinburgh’s West Court Gallery, Remote Viewing in Philadelphia, and the ICA in London, and has been commissioned by Sonic Acts/the Biennale di Musica, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, CTM Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, and Deutschlandradio Kultur. He collaborated with Anthea Caddy to create the installations Love Numbers (2023) and Auditory Scene Resynthesis as Cochlear Wavepackets (2021), with Jan St. Werner from the Mouse on Mars, is due to release NORMIFICATION on Presto!? Records in 2024 with Florian Hecker.

The Fokker organ housed in Muziekgebouw’s Recital Hall becomes a canvas for Marcin Pietruszewski’s generative installation, Distortion Product Lattice (Fokker QDTS Wavepackets), commissioned by Sonic Acts. Combining the computer-controlled microtonal organ, digital sound synthesis, pluriphonic sound, and light choreography, the work stages formal and auditory modulations. At 19:30, Marcin Pietruszewski will give a talk and performance, which will activate the installation that will run until midnight.

Designed and built between 1945 and 1950 by Adrian Fokker and Bernard J. A. Pels, the expansive organ has a 31-tone per octave and can be controlled via a MIDI protocol. The installation subjects the output of the instrument to digital signal analysis and re-synthesis, inducing distortion of tones, patterns, and textures.

The QDTS (Quadatric Difference Tone Spectra) algorithm utilised by Pietruszewski produces particular kinds of auditory distortion product (ADP), creating a new experimental approach to generating complex spectra. Thoroughly studied, ADPs are low-level sounds emitted from the inner ear’s cochlea in response to two closely spaced stimulating tones. The distortion also functions as an alternative spatial frame as the tones resonate in the head of the listener. Within Distortion Product Lattice (Fokker QDTS Wavepackets), this ‘in-head’ spatiality forms a dynamic counterpart to an extensive setup of the organ, intensifying, amplifying, and modulating the auditory, epistemic, and spatial contexts of this unique instrument.