32 Flavors and then some

Every Friday at 4pm is tea at the MIT Media Lab. Hosting rotates around different research groups. This week Necsys, the network admin folks, hosted, and apparently they have a reputation to hold up. Their entire space was decorated with lights and centerpieces. One guy made homemade chocolate milk, which he was hand serving to teagoers. There were cheeses, dips, breads, crackers, cookies, veggies, and oh so many different types of chocolate. At this tea I was invited by Barry Vercoe to a concert at Harvard later that evening. Knowing Barry, it was bound to be interesting, so we met up at 6 and drove to Harvard Square.

Following a fine Indian meal, we walked through Harvard Yard to the John Knowles Pain Concert Hall. The Harvard university Studio for Electroacoustic Music was presenting “H Y D R A – THE SOUND SPACE EXPERIENCE.” The smallish concert hall was pimped with 32 speakers, arranged in sets of 8 concentric circles around the central section of the hall. The performers (Hans Tutschku and his students of Music 167) sat at a large yamaha mixing console in the middle of the audience. The stage was empty and the performers were largely invisible unless one happened to be sitting right behind them, which we were, of course.

From the program:

“The Hydra loudspeaker orchestra is a sound projection system designed for the performance of electroacoustic music with or without the participation of instrumentalists. A loudspeaker orchestra consists of loudspeakers distributed throughout a performance space used for the spatial diffusion of an electroacoustic work. Hydra is comprised of 32 loudspeakers placed all around the concert hall, distributed both horizontally and vertically, in order to prvide a wide range of sound planes and perspectives. Two control interfaces with 32 faders create the possibility to control in real time the individual loudspeakers, or groups of them, which are especially configured for each work performed. Harvard’s electroacoustic music resources are concentrated in the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition (HUSEAC) located in Paine Hall, at the Harvard university Music Department. The HUSEAC facilities are open to graduate composition students and those enrolled in electroacoustic music seminars.”

The first half of the concert consisted of 9 pieces by students. The undergrad students had composed their pieces in stereo but were then diffusing them into the 32 channel system in real time. The grad students had composed for 32 channels. The reason Barry was particularly interested in attending, aside from knowing Hans, was that one of his students was performing. Anna Huang, whose desk I’m occupying while she spends the year at Harvard, performed her piece. It’s still a bit up in the air whether she’ll come back to MIT in the spring. If she does, I may be out of a desk at the highly space-constrained Lab. This is interesting because I may also be out of my loft apartment, as my landlords are trying to sell it in April. April is also when the second half of my NASA funding gets applied. I could easily be out of a job, a desk, and a place to live come April. But I digress into the uncertainties of life.

Back to the concert…I wish I could describe the difference in sound between this setup and, say, a surround set up in a movie theater. You’d think it might be similar since the rooms are the same and movie foley and soundtracks are designed to give a feeling of being inside the sound. But it was totally different. It was like being inside a giant 3-D HD sound hologram or something. All of the compositions were using non-pitched sound samples, and after two and a half hours of this, my musical brain was dying to hear the more traditional elements of music (pitch, harmonic progression, rhythm) on this system. It wasn’t to be, though.

The second half of the concert was a 43 minute piece by Iannis Xenakis called la Legende d’Eer. The original piece was written for 8 channels and looped on a 32 channel speaker system in an installation space in Paris that people walked through. Hans Tutschku created a mix to simulate for this seated audience the experience of walking through the original space. It was painful at first, but then mesmerizing. The 43 minutes went by much faster than I thought it would.

The benefit of going to a concert like this with Barry is that he knows EVERYONE, so everything comes with bonus backstories. Xenakis was a friend of his, as is Hans. I wish I had more for you guys, but all I have are these kind of lame iPhone pictures of the hall.