Visiting Assistant Professor and TIMARA faculty Eli Stine had an exciting, profitable summer! We’d like to showcase some of his bustle, because it is world-class. Here’s a montage of his artistic activities, in no order.
This past summer, Eli developed the software, hardware, and music of a “sound tunnel,” which was installed at the Sideways festival in Helsinki, Finland that was attended by 25,000 people. Proximity sensors and software modified the tunnel’s sounds according to the changing positions of the tunnelgoers, allowing them to make music by moving through a tunnel. The project was sponsored by the speaker manufacturer Genelec, who will be donating speakers for version 2.0 to tour around Europe. Titled “MUT-AT1-0NS,” the tunnel. Watch this video if you’d like to hear a turtleneck speak more on the tunnel.
Eli’s sound work spices the virtual reality installation The Infinite Library. Led by the Goethe Institute, the project is a collaboration between an array of interdisciplinary academics and artists, and has been shown internationally across Europe and in India.
Quote: “The Infinite Library seeks to embed human stories within a much grander narrative, one which includes the birth of our planet and the evolution of all life forms.”
The experience is set in a virtual cave in which there are pools. When participants interact with the pools they glimpse some portion of eternal knowledge. The experience is accompanied by Eli’s keen and subtle, complementary sound design. The project also includes music by Ryan Lester ’12.
The Invisible Kelp Forest is a collaboration between Eli, science fiction writer Melody Jue, marine biologist Jacob Cram, and dancer-polyglot Anya Yermakova. They will produce between them a spatialized electroacoustic composition and a piece of speculative fiction. Funding is provided by the Ocean Memory Project, “a collaborative network of researchers from across the Sciences, Arts and Humanities dedicated to exploring the intersection of Ocean and Memory, and advancing Ocean Memory as a new field of scholarship and creative expression.”
In August, for the Time:Spans festival in NYC, Eli performed live electronics alongside master bassoonist and fellow Oberlin professor Dana Jessen. The piece was called Seismologic and is composed by George Lewis. From the program notes: “Seismologic is the third work in The Recombinant Trilogy, a set of compositions for solo instrument and electronics that use interactive digital delays, spatialization, and timbre transformation to transform the acoustic sounds of the instrument into multiple digitally created sonic personalities that follow diverse yet intersecting spatial trajectories.” This is the latest performance in a series of collaborations, the next most recent being a joint recital given back in spring 2022.
Eli’s composition, “Where Water Meets Memory,” has made him a finalist in the Metamorphoses Festival acousmatic music competition. He will be traveling to Brussels this fall break to hear the judges’ final decisions.
From us in TIMARA we wish you (Eli) only Good Vibes and Unqualified Successes, whichever is most appropriate to the particular occasion.
“It’s been exciting to be involved in a variety of collaborative projects in the past that involve electronic music and sound design in wildly different ways and impact different audiences in many different areas around the world.”
~ Eli Stine
GB
