Ritwik Banerji: Timbral Navigation and Dancing in Virtual Space

Rich in variation across musical culture and history, spatial and kinetic metaphors have frequently been key discursive frames for understanding musical structure. So what happens if we attempt to take them quite literally and exploit them as the basis for composition or improvisation? In this talk, I describe my work in a project to take such metaphors quite seriously through the development of a variety of interactive audiovisual works that directly translate spectral audio features into parameters for navigating and dancing in virtual space. By creating a path towards a more intuitive understanding of the necessarily opaque conceptual toolkit of spectral analysis, this design methodology presents a potential solution to the classic compositional problem of notating timbre without specification of particular playing techniques.

Banerji will also perform the same evening, April 4, at 7:30 pm in Stark Opera Studio, in collaboration with the Center for New Music.

Ritwik Banerji is an experimental ethnographer, interactive media artist, and improviser. He is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Iowa State University. His scholarship appears in Jazz and Culture, Anthropology in Action, Jazz Perspectives, The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, and Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, among other venues. As an artist, Banerji has presented installations and live performances of his improvised and composed work at the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, Khoj International Artist Studios (New Delhi), Experimental Intermedia (New York), MOXSonic, and Ausland (Berlin). He has worked with a broad range of collaborators, including Tony Malaby, JayVe Montgomery, Ben Lamar Gay, Liz Allbee, Theresa Wong, Tritha Sinha, Paula Matthusen, and Axel Dörner, among others.

This event is free and open to the public.

View the program here: https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/node/943882