On Saturday, March 7 and Sunday, March 8, 2020, TIMARA continued its 50th anniversary celebrations with concerts featuring student and faculty work. At 3 pm on Saturday, the department hosted an Exquisite Electrophonics concert in Fairchild Chapel. The concert included live performances by current TIMARA students and friends as well as a large-scale, department-wide collaborative fixed media composition following the exquisite corpse model. TIMARA Professor Aurie Hsu organized the event and she reflected on the experience: “The TIMARA community came together to create a fifteen-minute collective composition featuring twenty-eight mini-compositions that spanned a wide range of sound worlds. We had all heard bits and pieces of the materials but not as the whole combined composition until the concert, so that was an exciting and fun fifteen minutes. We hope to have more opportunities to make these types of collective pieces in the future.”

On Sunday, TIMARA faculty continued the celebration with Sound in the Round, a concert in the new Wurtzel Theatre, featuring 24 channels of audio and a custom spatialization system designed by visiting TIMARA professor Eli Stine. Eli shared that, “Spatial audio technology allows for immersive experiences not possible with a traditional speaker setup. Through custom-built software I made, each of the faculty was able to express themselves using the system in different ways: through the projection of sound by performing using an interface, through spatial trajectories triggered live, and by routing the sound of live instruments through the system. The result was a concert that explored what experiencing ‘Sound in the Round’ is through many different artistic angles.”