Uploaded October 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Musician, composer, and instrument builder Jean-François Laporte visited the Centre for Research in New Music to work with PGR composers Jakob Bragg, Lucio Tasca, and Anthony Stillabower in creating new work for the Babel Table.
The Babel Table is a compressed air “all-in-one” hybrid instrument with limitless possibilities. The Babel Table consists of two Bowls, a Pipe, eight Insects, several Vibrating Membranes and Divas, as well as a free latex electron. Each element has its own compressed air supply and is therefore independently controlled. In addition, a foot pedal sends an additional powerful jet of air into The Pipe to create articulation, including striking effects of attack and sforzando.
Jean-François led the first workshop on June 6-10, 2022 and exhibited the work at a concert performance at the end of the second workshop on October 24-28, 2022.
totemcontemporain.com/en/instruments/babel-table
research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cerenem
Musician, composer, and instrument builder Jean-François Laporte visited the Centre for Research in New Music to work with PGR composers Jakob Bragg, Lucio Tasca, and Anthony Stillabower in creating new work for the Babel Table.
The Babel Table is a compressed air “all-in-one” hybrid instrument with limitless possibilities. The Babel Table consists of two Bowls, a Pipe, eight Insects, several Vibrating Membranes and Divas, as well as a free latex electron. Each element has its own compressed air supply and is therefore independently controlled. In addition, a foot pedal sends an additional powerful jet of air into The Pipe to create articulation, including striking effects of attack and sforzando.
Jean-François led the first workshop on June 6-10, 2022 and exhibited the work at a concert performance at the end of the second workshop on October 24-28, 2022.
totemcontemporain.com/en/instruments/babel-table
research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cerenem
![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.")
