The Society for Electroacoustic Music in the US (SEAMUS) held its national conference in New York City this spring, with TIMARA students and faculty in attendance. Gabriel Baskin (’23), Oliver Harlan (’27), and Visiting Assistant Professor Christopher Poovey all participated in the event, presenting their own work and engaging with other artists in the electroacoustic music community.
SEAMUS is an organization that brings together some of the world’s leading composers of electroacoustic music, offering members a range of benefits including the opportunity to submit work for the national conference, publish research in the SEAMUS journal, and network with other composers. The conference itself featured a diverse mix of fixed media, mixed media, acousmatic, and experimental electroacoustic music, as well as installations and performances involving modified traditional instruments.
For Christopher Poovey, attending SEAMUS is always a chance to reconnect with colleagues and meet new artists. He presented his own work, “Inside a Mirage of Vertu,” which was created for fixed ambisonic media in an 8 channel format. He also had the opportunity to experience the work of other composers, including his former teacher and recent TIMARA guest Panayiotis Kokoras’s “Stone Age” for modified cello and electronics, S Whitey’s composition [/][]+|\/\ for ensemble, electronic, and video, and Becky Brown’s “Would you like to hear how we met? It’s a funny story,” a fixed video work that criticizes police violence through an absurd dating sim game. TIMARA first year Oliver Harlan presented ephemerate, an audiovisual piece that blends glitch and ambient soundscapes accompanied by abstract visuals created from filmed footage. Fourth year Gabriel Baskin presented s’shn, a fixed media piece composed February 2022.
As usual, the SEAMUS conference provided a valuable opportunity for TIMARA students and faculty to engage with the wider electroacoustic music community, share their own work, and learn from other composers and researchers in the field. It was a chance to discover new ideas and perspectives, as well as to network with other artists and explore opportunities for new collaborations.
