MA Digital Music and Sound Arts
We proudly present this year’s MA DMSA Final Projects, and we are impressed how our students responded to this year’s challenges with tenacity, resilience and adaptability to produce a wide range of advanced and exciting body of works.
The MA DMSA course programme features this year a broad range of subjects including re-imagining space and materials, noticing the small things, exploring and experimenting, provoking debate and testing assumptions. The impressive range and depth of their final projects is testament and result of a sustained and inspired practice-based research enquiry within their chosen field, rigorous peer dialogues and their ambition.
The final project works focusing on innovative ways to explore and expanding the boundaries of sound and music and related new emerging fields resulting in the wide range of creative outcomes, which reflects the explorative and experimental spirit of the course programme.
This year’s Final Project results featuring:
Adam Martin – experimental audio-visual composition Attention Deficit Deluge as a three-part composition that utilises plunderphonic techniques to create an audio-visual representation of the recognised types of attention deficit disorder.
Alan (Bob) Smith – a large scale immersive audio-visual interactive installation ICU made from a networked collection of interactive devices and custom software that renders data from the faces of the audience and their movements – 14 speakers and 3 screens surround the visitor with sound, light and images. A giant screen with abstract data towers over the visitor. An interactive scenario is projected on two screens that flank a camera reading the visitor’s facial expression. The left screen encourages the visitor to move while sharing their emotion. The right screen projects the extracted data of the visitor and reveals associated images and classifications. The system exposes the classifications that allow this machine to understand what it sees. Sound is used to reveal these secretive processes; to create an experiential reflection of the workings of this technology.
Andrea Hladikova – an interactive fashion brand concept Manami which incorporates using upcycled garments and NFC technology that is attached to every unique piece. This concept began as a response to the superficiality and anonymity of the fashion industry. There is a growing consciousness regarding the impact of endless consumption of clothing on our planet. “I am creating an experience that carries a lot of personal and authentic elements, letting the viewer go further and think about those items differently”. Manami addresses issues of sustainability and addresses issues mass production, identity and the consumer paradigm through a personalised audio-visual enhanced interactive fashion concept.
Owain Gwyn – Parallel Realms is an audio-visual project driven by a strong desire to reveal the hidden beauty and overlooked mysteries of the natural world in front of us. The creative process consists of collecting visual material from the natural world and to respond and experiment to this through audio-visual explorations. The work aims to portray the importance of mycelial networks and to ultimately raise awareness of the current environmental crisis. Moving images reveal the intricate textures and patterns formed in natural materials from the environment such as fungus, moss, rock, and wood. “By manipulating this material and combining it with sound, the beauty of these often overlooked intricacies and patterns are hoped to be rediscovered by the viewer by creating a different and new perspectives”.
Chris Sciacca – integrated Soundscapes: Brighton is a series of location recordings composed in the style of montage, highlighting pairs of opposites that exist in the sonic environment. The work seeks to synthesize the spheres of sound that make up the unified field of environmental sound: biophony, geophony, and anthrophony. Through the juxtaposition and superimposition of the sound sources, the resulting variations embody a surrealistic, multivalent perspective of space and place.
The MA DMSA staff team is proud to present to you the results of your talented and hard-working students and we hope you enjoy exploring the wide-ranging final projects.