The Sonic Atelier #3 – A Conversation with Federico Albanese
(2025)
author(s): Francesca Guccione
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Federico Albanese, who reflects on his formation, his approach to integrating sound design and production into the act of writing, and his perspective on the transformations of today’s recording industry and streaming platforms. His insights shed light on central issues such as hybridity, authorship, and the value of craftsmanship in contemporary music-making.
Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging: Three Contexts for a Microtonal Prepared Piano
(2025)
author(s): Matt Choboter
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
Can an acoustic grand piano be sonically and conceptually reimagined so as to re-negotiate its foundational assumptions around tuning and timbre? Why should the piano continue to be so accustomed to only one tuning system? In contrast, how can “pure sounds” (ratios found in the harmonic series) co-exist with ethnically diverse microtonal tunings?
Spanning a period from 2020-2022, “Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging” explores a microtonal prepared piano in three artistic contexts. These include: a solo project called “Postcards of Nostalgia; a chamber ensemble consisting of saxophone trio, percussion and piano; and a “percussion ensemble with soprano saxophone called Juniper Fuse.
Dialoging with a newly invented tuning system, what emergent properties might we find when magnetic piano preparations are used to evoke specific timbral effects from Balinese Gamelan and Indian Karnatik music? Collectively, how can this expanded notion of “piano” merge with spatialization to facilitate interactive experiences for audiences? How might a process-oriented Jungian-inspired dream work communicate itself so as to distill and coalesce a fertile musical landscape?
Talking field: listening to the troubled site
(2017)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition examines my recent multi-channel sound composition 'Decomposing Landscape' (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous, and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field-recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognisable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialisation techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and a portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is, how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.
SEMAPHOR
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Gerriet K. Sharma, Susanne Fröhlich
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
“Semaphor” is a spatial sound-composition for two pioneering instruments, which are explored both practically and theoretically by the artists Susanne Fröhlich and Gerriet K. Sharma:
Helder Tenor recorder and the Icosahedral loudspeaker (IKO). If one understands both instruments as sound projectors, sound textures in sculpturally entangled states, spatially demarcated sound layers and scenographies can be composed and perceived in a way, scarcely producible in this ensemble constellation until now.
The piece attempts to discover the shared perceptual spectrum of both instruments in dialogue and thus to expand the aesthetic possibilities of spatial composition in the present.
This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Federico Albanese, who reflects on his formation, his approach to integrating sound design and production into the act of writing, and his perspective on the transformations of today’s recording industry and streaming platforms. His insights shed light on central issues such as hybridity, authorship, and the value of craftsmanship in contemporary music-making.open exposition comments (0)
“Semaphor” is a spatial sound-composition for two pioneering instruments, which are explored both practically and theoretically by the artists Susanne Fröhlich and Gerriet K. Sharma: Helder Tenor recorder and the Icosahedral loudspeaker (IKO). If one understands both instruments as sound projectors, sound textures in sculpturally entangled states, spatially demarcated sound layers and scenographies can be composed and perceived in a way, scarcely producible in this ensemble constellation until now. The piece attempts to discover the shared perceptual spectrum of both instruments in dialogue and thus to expand the aesthetic possibilities of spatial composition in the present.open exposition comments (0)