A generative implementation of the famous and amazing THX deep note, where random voices convene on a major chord. I added extra overtones to make it sound like a G.F. Haas piece. With a multi-dimensional oscilloscope to represent the sound in coloured lines. Unique each time you run it! Implemented using WebAudio (actually the first experiment I ever made with WebAudio, a couple of years ago), and animated using the built-in FFT analysis from WebAudio, coupled with HTML Canvas (just did this part yesterday). Because there are a huge number of oscillators + all the FFTs, it's quite heavy...so it sounds prettier on a computer. I'm sure it would be possible to make a much more efficient version but I was more interested in trying out the visualisation this week than optimising the audio code!

Try it a few times! You can also layer multiple renditions on top of one another, as long as the computer can handle it!

Three unique viola / string improvisers join forces since Cleek is in the country (this gig is a long time coming). After a set from the trio, audience members are welcome to join in an informal improv jam.

Performers: Cleek Schrey, Joanna Mattrey, Sebastian Adams

DATE: 24.08.24
TIME: Doors - 7.00pm / Start - 7.30pm
VENUE: Unit 44 (Kirkos)
TICKETS: FREE, donations welcome (and will go directly to the musicians) — No booking required
DURATION: c. 40 minutes (+ improv jam)

Excerpts from Reality was written for a Crash Ensemble performance held in UCD, and draws on text from Reality Hunger, a text which is itself made from found text (hence the piece ties in to Stolen Music). In my piece, text drawn from the book is depicted on a video screen as clouds of particles arranged into the text which dissolve gradually and rearrange as music notation (which is algorithmically derived from the text). The video screen serves as a score for the performers, who are expected to interpret the overall visual and semiotic impression (notation, text, colours, movement) and use it as a source for improvisation. As the score is also improvised (by the composer, using an interface which allows selection of specific passages of text as well as control of various visual parameters and the algorithm used for translating into notation), a complex feedback loop between composer, performers and video arises: agency becomes distributed across the performers and composer in a way which is difficult to unravel. As such, it is an attempt to place the composer in the midst of performers as a fellow improviser.

Hawk Cliff (also known as the Vico Baths) is probably the most beautiful and peaceful place to swim in Dublin (unless the water is too rough or there are jellyfish around..). I was given an assignment to combine field recordings with home-made synthesiser sounds, and decided to use the sea as a soundtrack. I decided to use my music to complement the soundtrack, rather than the other way around, so my contribution is quite minimal! Thanks to Mark Horgan, for moral support and judicious help with choosing a spot to record from. (Boring technical programme note below)

Nestled beneath Vico Road, where the rich and famous of Dublin lock themselves away from the public, Hawk Cliff is a place of splendid isolation. Men go there, not only to bathe, but to lose themselves to solitude, lulled into meditation by the lapping of the ocean.
To accompany the sound of Hawk Cliff without interrupting its natural rhythm meant stripping back my approach to composition virtually to nothing. There are five different synthesisers, all very simple. Each has three oscillators phased and tuned differently and, at most, a comb filter or ring modulator to add interest to the sound. The pitches used by each synthesiser expand outwards in a kind of Christmas tree formation, with each moving by a different interval. Essentially, each synthesiser builds a chord of a specific stacked interval. They each add pitches at different rates, albeit all too slowly for a discernable beat to come through. Each synthesiser begins its chord from a different note, working by a descending circle of fourths (C,G,D,A,E...). An external ring modulator working equally on all five synthesisers is the only further processing.
By applying a somewhat serial approach to the composition, I reduce the impression my own musical personality leaves on the piece. I thought this was the right way to create a work about somewhere where people go to leave their individuality behind. Rather than becoming lost in thought, the patrons of Hawk Cliff become temporarily lost from thought, and simply exist.

Stolen Music was originally conceived for my final project as part of the IRCAM Cursus, but it is also an ongoing musical world-building project composed of websites, audio collages, acts of piracy etc.

The basic aim of the project is to explore two main ideas that matter to me:

Examining the boundaries of a "piece" of music: questioning the idea of the sole author and finding ways to subvert the linear, sectional timeline of a typical musical performance
Presenting an argument that all musical material should be fair game for all people to work with, regardless of who owns it under current copyright law.

This project owes a huge debt to Claudia Jane Scroccaro, the other teachers at IRCAM, and my colleagues from my course who let me mess with their music. Much more info is available on the dedicated website.

Presented here in a web installation version that locks the viewer to the specific moment from the performance corresponding to the current time of day.

Traffic Piece was created as a goodbye to Unit 44, a venue Kirkos ran which was heavily impacted by traffic sound. It ran from rush hour in the morning to rush hour at night. I got the idea for this piece during a beautiful saxophone performance by Josten Myburgh where his barely audible multiphonics fought for attention with the traffic outside in a way that really captivated me. After four years watching the traffic pass Unit 44, I thought sitting down and really listening to it would be the perfect way to say goodbye to the venue.

A bunch of the performers who contributed a lot to Unit 44 played a 14-hour long score (working in shifts) made from a full week of security cam footage of the street outside Unit 44, while they and the audience also watched the traffic in real life.

These different time cycles (moment to moment, rush hour to rush hour, Monday to Sunday) will mingle with pitch material derived from the resonances of Unit 44 itself to influence a ritualistic performance which is fully about the specific place that Unit 44 is and has been, and about the way the outside world has spilled into it.

The piece finished with a guided improvisation using the traffic as a score, open to all.

06:30 - 08:10 Shift 1: Sebastian Adams and Tom Roseingrave
08:10 - 8:30: traffic only
08:30 - 10:10: Shift 2: David Bremner and Sharon Phelan
10:10 - 10:30: traffic only
10:30 - 12:30: Shift 3: Aonghus McEvoy, Susan Geaney, David Lacey, Nick Roth
12:10 - 12:30: traffic only
12:30 - 14:10: Beethoven Freeze: Sebastian Adams and Robert Coleman
14.10 - 14.30: traffic only
14:30 - 16:10: Shift 5: Kevin Free and Jane Hackett
16:10 - 16:30: traffic only
16:30 - 18:00: in nomine: Sebastian Adams, Hannah Miller, Caitríona O'Mahony
18:00 - 18:30: traffic only
18:30 until the traffic ceases: Shift 7: open improv jam (all welcome)

Joan Somers Donnelly made a parallel performance taking notes on the passing traffic almost all day

Solves a problem I found no ready-made solution for:
Finds all instances of r, receive and receive~ objects in a Max patch. This can be very useful if you are trying to document your patch, particularly if you communicate with receives using messages to Max. Can also help to troubleshoot redundant receives and inconsistent naming patterns.

To use, simply upload your patch and receive a list of all the receives in the patch

Or, as it's basically the same code, find all subpatchers in a patch

This software is licensed with The Unlicense and can be used freely. Max patches will be processed on your local machine and not uploaded to any servers.

A huge selection of digital radio stations from Ireland and France are randomised, and you can go back in time (by playing them slower: the longer you listen to it like this, the further away you are from the real-time radio stream) or forwards in time: unlike a real radio station, digital radio often relies on file streams - so even when something hasn't happened yet you can often fast-forward through them.

Three radios are set up at the very beginning of the piece but playing only silence. Each is tuned to a different radio station. The radios are set up in a line with a space between them, with the viola player standing in the fourth position in the line.

The three radio stations correspond to the frequencies of three low-powered radio transmitters placed in the venue. Each is connected to a channel of the multi-channel playback device.

A microphone is unobtrusively placed in the space and begins recording when the viola player starts playing.

After a certain amount of time, the first radio starts playing back the recording.

After two more periods of time, the remaining radios also join in, so a canon accumulates.

So far, I've only performed this once and the performance officially "failed" - because I forgot to sit beside the microphone, meaning it only picked up a very, very quiet signal. Once I realised, I was forced to play very quietly to compete with it (which then made the later parts of the canon even more quiet), The YouTube clip here is from that performance - it was somehow a nice effect even though my idea didn't work at all

I think the piece has legs though!

made at the request of Dan Callanan for Department of Energy's Ambient Harvest (Landscape Mixtape). Track 25 on the mixtape

Made from Bill Whelan's soundtrack from Dancing at Lughnasa using MuBu for audio-descriptor-based concatenative audio synthesis.

The linked website includes documentation, a web-based score and much more detailed information about the piece.

The Singing Hollow sculpture in St Audoen's Park invites visitors to put their heads into a hole inside a rock. It creates an acoustic transformation reminiscent of the feeling of sanctuary from the outside world that comes when you walk into a church. This inspired this live sound installation: organ plays inside the church, musicians play in the grounds, and church bells bridge both worlds, all playing parts that are both independent and interdependent.

In the original performance, the piece is designed for four outdoor instruments, six church bells (each one rung by an individual) and an organ. It was specifically written for St Audoen’s Church of Ireland, which is an incredibly old church.

Using dance, video collage, DIY radio transmitters and portable radios, composer, viola player and artistic director Sebastian Adams and dance artist and choreographer Cindy Cummings navigate the spiritual legacy of Radio Caroline in a live, improvisational, experimental documentary. Radio Caroline was founded by an Irish businessman in order to circumvent the BBC’s broadcast monopoly and refusal to play modern pop music. The solution: a radio station in international waters. It became a beacon for pirates everywhere, a kick in the face to the copyright system, but also a money-making venture motivated more by opportunism than by ideology. As the old systems for policing and managing intellectual property and freedom of speech collapse around us, the voices of pirates are nowadays attempting not only to wrest media from the grips of their owners, but also to fight against new apparatus for mass surveillance.

The CAMPAIGN FOR FREE MUSIC believes that there is no justification for claiming ownership over art. We have created this website as a means to educate artists and the public about how they can dedicate their work to the public domain, and why this could be better for everyone.
Currently, the site is a work in progress.... but we hope that we are already helping you to reconsider the perceived primacy of material, and re-evaluate their notions of ownership and even authorship when it comes to music (and intellectual property generally).

Three radios are set up at the very beginning of the piece but playing only silence. Each is tuned to a different radio station. The radios are set up in a line with a space between them, with the viola player standing in the fourth position in the line.

The three radio stations correspond to the frequencies of three low-powered radio transmitters placed in the venue. Each is connected to a channel of the multi-channel playback device.

A microphone is unobtrusively placed in the space and begins recording when the viola player starts playing.

After a certain amount of time, the first radio starts playing back the recording.

After two more periods of time, the remaining radios also join in, so a canon accumulates.

So far, I've only performed this once and the performance officially "failed" - because I forgot to sit beside the microphone, meaning it only picked up a very, very quiet signal. Once I realised, I was forced to play very quietly to compete with it (which then made the later parts of the canon even more quiet), The YouTube clip here is from that performance - it was somehow a nice effect even though my idea didn't work at all

I think the piece has legs though!

Inspired by an idea of Anaïs Fontanges, this is a web page that emulates ghost-hunting radio scanners as used by paranormal investigators. This idea sparked a period of fanatacism about radio and particularly about how the weird romance of the ephemerality radio somehow holds on even when you carry it into the digital domain (where the ephemerality is a little bit faked...)

It basically cycles randomly through a range of French and Irish web radio stations, with white noise faking a transition between stations! But sure the REAL ghost boxes are fakes too, aren't they....>>??????

A string quartet dress in wet suits, sitting on chairs on the dry sea-bed in Dublin Bay. They perform a theme and variations (improvised from a set of instructions) as the tide begins to rush in around them. The performance ends for each musician only when the water reaches their neck, making it a durational piece reliant on the speed of the tide. Afterwards, the saturated instruments will be retrieved and the composer will attempt to save them by leaving them to dry naturally. This process will also be recorded and shown on this website. Unsalvageable parts will be repaired using driftwood, and the piece will be performed again next year.

Using MuBu, I chopped up I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For into a dense collage of tiny fragments which I improvised with in Max/Spat/MuBu and then pieced together in Reaper.

I made this for the Chaire Supersonique project i did in collaboration with IRCAM and the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Big nod to Negativland here!

Not a piece, but a way to reproduce an old-fashioned record collection using Spotify.

I miss my old CD collection and also the alphabetical lists of albums/artists which helped me decide what I would like to listen to - rather than relying on the algorithm which seems to insist that Mitski is the same genre as every sad woman with a guitar

The record collection app lets you add albums to your collection. They are then added to a playlist on your Spotify account, but also displayed with the album art on the web app so you can see them all and remember what you might like to listen today.

I find it useful to help me remember what I used to listen to a long time ago, which is very difficult with anything algorithm-based.

The app works, but its not fast, and it's not pretty. Let me know if you're using it, I'd be really interested to hear what you think!

An instrument for playing with samples from freesound.org, with a set of accompanying text scores that can be used to process your performance of this. Suitable for performance in a group using mobile phones as loudspeakers.

A typist transcribes texts contained in a Fluxkit into musical notation, which is displayed to performers (and audience). The music notation, along with the typed text, is then used as a framework for improvising by a group of performers. 



To play this piece, you also need to get or make a Fluxkit. A Fluxkit is a collection of event scores stored in a container (e.g. Water Yam by George Brecht). I made the piece with the Fluxkits Kirkos created in 2016 in mind, and used one of these to play the premiere. If you don’t have access to a Fluxkit, you could make one, for example by cutting up parts of the Fluxus Workbook (freely available online e.g. on the Monoskop website) and placing them in a box.

The first performance of this piece was played by Lina Andonovska, Hannah Miller, Adam Collins and Yseult Cooper Stockdale (as Kirkos) on 25.06.24 as part of an Irish Composers’ Collective concert in Unit 44, Dublin. I was the typist for the performance.

The software used for this performance (ChatMusic) is currently only available by request. Please get in touch if you're interested.

Circum is an experiment in creating a silent, animated score: the visual element is supposed to be visible both to the performers and the audience and it acts as the entire "text" for the performers. For the musicians, the video inspires them to create sound, generating a feedback loop where their actions are affected both by the video and the sonic choices they have already made. For the audience, however, sound and sight unfold simultaneously. Circum is also my first attempt as an Irish artist to get into the world of James Joyce - probably the most important Irish artist? My transitions, which sit between pieces focused on specific episodes of Ulysses, transverse the entire text (backwards) in several ways, treating Bloomsday like Groundhog Day. The animated score is made of text transformed algorithmically into music notation, both displayed using particle systems