We invite the CIRMMT community to participate in a joint RA1/RA4 workshop on the role technology plays in all aspects of the creation and dissemination of music. This workshop will feature presentations from invited guests as well as lightning talks and a roundtable discussion.
Description
With invited guests Dafna Naphtali, Hans Tammen, and Dr. Althea SullyCole, we will explore systems (electric, acoustic, compositional, or otherwise) around the creation and performance of music.
While we often discuss “music technology” as a single concept, the friction between the musician and the technologist is an area that requires more exploration. Do musicians embrace the capabilities technology grants them to formulate their artistic vision and convey their musical message? Does the technology adequately serve the music, or is it a solution looking for a problem? Are musicians open to working with experimental technologies they may not understand?
We ask that participants answer these questions with their own experiences, so that we may better communicate with each other.
Call for proposals
We invite members of the community to register as an attendee or for 5-minute lightning talks on their approach to incorporating technology into their practice as musicians or to working with musicians as developers of technology.
Please fill this MS form to register as an attendee or presenter. The deadline to register is March 28, 2025. Presenters will be notified by March 31, 2025.
Roundtable event
The workshop will conclude with a round table discussion on the topic of technology’s role in the creation, performance, and capture of music. We invite CIRMMT members, collaborators, and the wider community to participate in this discussion.
Preliminary Schedule
1:00pm: Welcome and introduction
1:05–1:35pm: Althea SullyCole
1:35–2:35pm: Dafna Naphtali and Hans Tammen
2:35–2:45pm: Break
2:45–3:30pm: Lightning talks (Presenters to be announced on March 31, 2025)
3:30pm: Roundtable introduction by Martha de Francisco
3:35–4:30pm: Roundtable discussion
Biographies
Dafna Naphtali
Dafna Naphtali is an electronic-musician/singer/guitarist who composes/improvises/performs experimental, interactive electroacoustic music, drawing on a wide-ranging musical background in free jazz, noise, contemporary classical, rock and near-eastern music and using her custom Max/MSP programming, for live sound processing and multichannel sound. Dafna is a Visiting Professor at NYU Music Technology, teaching electronic music performance, and is part-time faculty at New School. She is working on a book “Live Sound Processing and Improvisation” for Taylor & Francis.
Dafna was a 2023 Guggenheim fellow in Music Composition, and has received generous past support from New York Foundation for the Arts (’22, ‘13, ‘01), Brooklyn Arts Council, New York Council on the Arts (’99, ’18), American Composers Forum and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others.
Hans Tammen
Hans Tammen is just another worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities. He likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. This flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).
Hans has received grants and commissions from NewMusicUSA, Chamber Music America, MAPFund, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, American Music Center, New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA), New York Foundation For The Arts (NYFA), American Composers Forum and Goethe Institute w/ Foreign Affairs Office, among others. He was deputy director at Harvesworks Digital Media Arts (2001-2014), and currently teaches as adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts, Hunter College and New York University.
Althea SullyCole
Althea SullyCole is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and ethnomusicologist originally from New York City, but currently based in Montreal, QC, where she is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. Althea holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Althea studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed West African harp, under korists Yacouba Sissoko and Edou Manga. She spent 3 years studying the instrument in Dakar, Senegal. In addition to her solo work, she has worked with Billy Harper, Billy Bang, Fred Ho, Sahad Sarr, Daara J Family, LaFrae Sci, Lisette Santiago, Joseph Daley, Craig Harris and father Bill Cole (in his Untempered Ensemble), among others, and given performances at Royal Albert Hall in the U.K., Teatro Manzoni in Italy, and the Apollo Theatre and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the U.S., among over venues.