PhD presentations & concert: Yann Coppier, Francesco Palmieri
21 February 2024
New PhD candidates Francesco Palmieri and Yann Coppier will introduce their creative work and research projects in the Black Room at IAC.
Francesco Palmieri: Imagining the body, profaning the space.
The allure of musical practice lies in the non-repetitiveness of the bodily experience of listening, in the multiplicity of possible listenings embedded in the unique shared space of the live performance. This is what constitutes the immanent content of the living sound: the openness to the multiple possibilities that only its irreducible being as a body allows. From these assumptions comes the aesthetic need for sound as a corporeal entity on which my artistic research and practice are founded.
With this presentation, Francesco’s aim is to share the aesthetic foundations underlying both his artistic practice and his doctoral project at Lund University ‘Redefining Contemporary Guitar Performance Practice through Spherical Amplification via S.T.OOGE’.
Abstract:
The use of amplification technologies is an integral part of contemporary guitar practice, given the dynamic limitations of the classical guitar and the inherent nature of the electric guitar. However, Amplification or reinforcement strategies via traditional loudspeakers pose significant musical challenges, such as the perceptual incompatibility between acoustic and electroacoustic sources and the loss of the bodily experience of listening to living sounds.
Implementing spherical amplification through outward-radiating spherical loudspeaker arrays in instrumental practice would allow overcoming these issues, opening up unprecedented musical possibilities. S.T.OOGE, constructed in collaboration with Giuseppe Silvi (LEAP Rome) in April 2023, represents our first prototype of a spherical loudspeaker specifically designed for guitar amplification.
This research aims to investigate the renewed performative scope and compositional insights offered by spherical amplification strategies via S.T.OOGE in contemporary guitar practice, in a continual dialectic exchange between artistic needs and technological drive.
Read more about Francesco Palmieri’s artistic research here.
Yann Coppier. PhD research project: “How to make the future unpredictable”
Predicting the future is easy in many ways. The real challenge is to make the future unpredictable. Now that is usually not the way one thinks about science, in which projection matters a lot. Yann Coppier is deeply interested in evaluating scientific developments towards that moment during which every paradigm changes, because someone, a person, a team or several teams collaborating, bring a new idea that rocks its whole own environment.
And then find out how to capture that into sound and music, through installations and compositions of varied forms. The result could be sculpted into blocks of white noise. It could be made of bombarded particles generating new material. It could be made for buildings, for worms, for distant moons of distant planets, or for neutrons as an audience in its quest to develop new possibles. And of course it is all that already, and way more.