Uploaded August 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Lauren Sarah Hayes: Figurine-Operated String (2012) for piano and live electronics
laurensarahhayes.com
electricspring.co.uk
Electric Spring is an annual festival of sonic exploration of cutting-edge practice in electronic music. The five-day programme of concerts, installations and symposia brings together a collection of people from diverse musical backgrounds to share their knowledge and perform music. The festival is curated by the Music and Music Technology staff of the University of Huddersfield.
/// Credits
Performed by Lauren Sarah Hayes at Electric Spring, 21 February 2019, Phipps Recital Hall, University of Huddersfield.
Audio recorded by Alex Harker
Video recorded by Sam Gillies
Edited by David Velez
/// Program Note
This piece is inspired by Matthew Barney’s early Drawing Restraint (1987–) series, where the artist attempts to create drawings around a studio, whilst physically restrained by self-imposed barriers. My own music explores the use of physical forces and resistance within electronic music performance. In this piece the pianist—the figurine—plays both with the strings of the piano as well as struggling against the wires connected to her hands, which resist her movements. The other wires involved in the piece are the patch chords of the Buchla 200 on which the electronic part was conceived, at the Elektronmusikstudion, in Stockholm, in late 2011.
/// Bio
Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish musician and sound artist who builds and performs with hybrid analogue/digital instruments. She is a “positively ferocious improvisor” (Cycling ‘74), her music refusing to sit nicely between free improv, experimental pop, techno, and noise. Over the last decade she has developed and honed a deliberately challenging and unpredictable performance system that explores the relationships between bodies, sound, environments, and technology. The Wire described her most recent album MANIPULATION (pan y rosas discos) as “skittering melodies and clip-clopping rhythms suggesting a mischievous intelligence emerging from this web of wires”. She is a member of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Lauren Sarah Hayes: Figurine-Operated String (2012) for piano and live electronics
laurensarahhayes.com
electricspring.co.uk
Electric Spring is an annual festival of sonic exploration of cutting-edge practice in electronic music. The five-day programme of concerts, installations and symposia brings together a collection of people from diverse musical backgrounds to share their knowledge and perform music. The festival is curated by the Music and Music Technology staff of the University of Huddersfield.
/// Credits
Performed by Lauren Sarah Hayes at Electric Spring, 21 February 2019, Phipps Recital Hall, University of Huddersfield.
Audio recorded by Alex Harker
Video recorded by Sam Gillies
Edited by David Velez
/// Program Note
This piece is inspired by Matthew Barney’s early Drawing Restraint (1987–) series, where the artist attempts to create drawings around a studio, whilst physically restrained by self-imposed barriers. My own music explores the use of physical forces and resistance within electronic music performance. In this piece the pianist—the figurine—plays both with the strings of the piano as well as struggling against the wires connected to her hands, which resist her movements. The other wires involved in the piece are the patch chords of the Buchla 200 on which the electronic part was conceived, at the Elektronmusikstudion, in Stockholm, in late 2011.
/// Bio
Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish musician and sound artist who builds and performs with hybrid analogue/digital instruments. She is a “positively ferocious improvisor” (Cycling ‘74), her music refusing to sit nicely between free improv, experimental pop, techno, and noise. Over the last decade she has developed and honed a deliberately challenging and unpredictable performance system that explores the relationships between bodies, sound, environments, and technology. The Wire described her most recent album MANIPULATION (pan y rosas discos) as “skittering melodies and clip-clopping rhythms suggesting a mischievous intelligence emerging from this web of wires”. She is a member of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
![Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 [24.11.2017]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hU0C1K96mv8/mqdefault.jpg "Tim Rutherford-Johnson: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 [24.11.2017]
Music journalist and critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson discusses his acclaimed book Music After The Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989. Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall.
Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.
Presented as part of hcmf// 2017.
https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/
https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520283152
http://www.cerenem.org/")
![Miller Puckette: Designing electronic music instruments [28.03.2017]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jzSDCwfeC2E/mqdefault.jpg "Miller Puckette: Designing electronic music instruments [28.03.2017]
Visiting Researcher Miller Puckette discusses his approach to designing electronic music instruments, and modelling instrumental behaviour, in Pure Data at CeReNeMs Creative Coding Lab.
http://msp.ucsd.edu/
https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cerenem/projects/creativecodinglab/
http://www.cerenem.org/
Of the many roles that computer and electronic technology can play in music making (production tool, composers assistant, improvising partner, and so on), the one that I think is giving rise to the most interesting new music today is that of the musical instrument. This could encompass both the use of electronics to enhance the sonic or other possibilities afforded by an existing instrument or developing a new musical interface (and starting from scratch learning to play the thing). Its instrumental behaviour could take the form of directly mapping performance gestures into parameters of sound generation or, alternatively, affect the fate of an existing sound stream. Using two recent instrument designs of my own as examples, in this talk Ill try to shed light on where I see new possibilities to explore and what design principles Ive arrived at in my own attempts.")
