Xenoglossia/Leishmania is a structured audiovisual improvisation, featuring live electroacoustic music by Christopher Burns and interactive animations by Bill Hsu. Their musical and visual performances are highly interdependent, guided together not only through the actions of the performers, but also through automated real-time audio analysis and the exchange of networked data. Burns’ Xenoglossia audio software is designed to facilitate the creation of complex, densely layered music with an emphasis on trajectory and directionality. The performer initiates multiple simultaneous musical layers, each with distinct gestural and textural content, then controls their continuation and development. Hsu’s Leishmania is an interactive animation environment that visually resembles colonies of single-cell organisms evolving and “swimming” in a fluid substrate. Protean, organic-looking shapes emerge and evolve in the system in a highly unpredictable manner; the colonies alternately congeal into relatively well-defined forms, or disperse into chaos. Together, music and visuals produce a richly textured, complex and immersive experience.
William Hsu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at San Francisco State University. His current research interests are in high-performance processor and memory system architecture, performance evaluation, and interactive computer music. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois. Hsu works with electronics and real-time animation systems that have some of the live, tactile qualities of good human musicians playing acoustic instruments. His work mostly involves using gestural interfaces to control animation and sound synthesis, and real-time audio-visual systems that interact with human performers. http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/
Christopher Burns is a composer, improviser, and multimedia artist. His instrumental chamber works weave energetic gestures into densely layered surfaces. Polyphony and multiplicity also feature in his electroacoustic music, embodied in gritty, rough-hewn textures. As an improviser, Christopher combines an idiosyncratic approach to the electric guitar with a wide variety of custom software instruments. Across all of these disciplines, his work emphasizes directionality, layering and intercutting a variety of trajectories to create form. Christopher teaches music composition and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. http://sfsound.org/~cburns/
Charles Boone studied at the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, the University of Southern California, and San Francisco State College. Karl Schiske, Adolph Weiss, and Ernst Krenek were among his teachers. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Commissions as well as a two-year Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) artist-in-residency in Berlin. His works have been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as the Berlin, Avignon, and Ojai Festivals. Performers have included Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Michael Tilson Thomas, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Jan Williams, Bertram Turetzky, and Karl Kohn.
Monica Scott, cellist, has performed throughout the United States, in almost every European country, Argentina, Canada and South Korea, engaging audiences with her energetic, eloquent playing. Her wide stylistic range and interests span baroque and classical repertoire through avant-garde and improvised music. Currently she is active with sfSound, and with her duo martha & monica with pianist Hadley McCarroll. Their first CD was just released, featuring works by Beethoven, Carter, Poulenc and Boulanger. Monica holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam. A devoted teacher, Monica serves on the faculties of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Department, The Crowden School, and College Preparatory School, as well as maintaining an active private studio in Oakland. http://marthaandmonica.com/monica