AquaSonic Blog: 2014

I must present to you our new strong team that now works on the last stages of finishing AquaSonic.
First Wayne Ashley from FuturePerfect Productions in New York.

Wayne Ashley is a program director, producer, and curator with thirteen years developing and implementing projects with nationally and internationally recognized artists and cultural institutions. He has directed and administrated programs at Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and CPR—Center for Performance Research. He has curated and organized multi-disciplinary conferences, online/offline exhibitions, symposia, and produced contemporary dance, music, theater, installation, and public art. He has helped to make artistic, financial, intellectual, and administrative links across disparate institutions and organizations through innovative programming. Currently he is the Founding Executive Producer of FuturePerfect, a New York-based production company.
Wayne Ashley about AquaSonic: The AquaSonic project raises critical questions about the future of live performance in the context of the increasing technologization of everyday life. FuturePerfect is impressed and challenged with Between Music's ability to coordinate disparate groups of people with multiple skill sets and disciplinary backgrounds. They represent an important collaborative model for combining art practice, scientific research and technological innovation. Both cultural and scientific centers are looking for new perceptual and experiential opportunities for their audiences, as well as new funding sources that lie outside conventional avenues. Between Music's work promises to fulfill both. – Wayne Ashley, 2014

Second: Preston Wilson, Consultant
Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin http://www.me.utexas.edu/~pswilson/Site/Home.html

Preston Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Acoustics and Dynamic Systems & Control programs of the Mechanical Engineering Department, and holds a joint appointment as Associate Research Professor at Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin. He joined the Cockrell School of Engineering faculty in August of 2003 after serving as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Boston University, where he studied sound propagation and scattering in bubbly liquids, and the acoustics of water-saturated marine sediments. Dr. Wilson is an Associate Editor with The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, serves as Chair of the ASA's Education in Acoustics Committee and is President of the Austin Regional Chapter of the Acoustical Society of America. His work has been published in Scientific American, Journal Of The Acoustical Society Of America and Journal Of Experimental Marine Biology And Ecology, and others. He is also an accomplished musician having played bass for seven years with his band Death Valley. Preston Wilson about AquaSonic: Musical acoustics has been an area of scholarly research for more than a century, but almost exclusively with regard to airborne applications. Between Music's new work AquaSonic opens up new opportunities to advance musical acoustics into the waterborne environment. In the past, advances in the understanding of musical acoustics have engendered artistic opportunities through the improvement of musical instruments. Exciting new opportunities await scholarly study of musical acoustics in the underwater environment with the proposed collaboration between me, FuturePerfect Productions and Between Music. As a professor of acoustics I am excited to be a part of this process. – Preston Wilson, 2014

Our instruments makers:

Andy Cavatorta, Software Developer, Inventor, Musical Roboticist, Composer http://andycavatorta.com/

Andy Cavatorta is an artist and composer based in Brooklyn, New York. After receiving his Masters Degree from the MIT Media Lab, he started on a yearlong collaboration with Icelandic singer Björk. This produced instruments known as the Gravity Harps, which featured in her Biophilia album and tour. He was selected by TED to receive a Lincoln prize in 2013. He used the prize to create a new instrument for TED’s TEDActive event. He also received commissions from Science Gallery in Dublin and MU Gallery in the Netherlands. Recently, he worked with Matthew Herbert on his new opera at the Royal Opera House, London. He has also received commercial commissions from Stella Artois and from electronic musician J.Views. He currently teaches design at Cooper Union University and creates new works in his Brooklyn workshop.

Andy about AquaSonic: The AquaSonic project fascinates me both technically and artistically. AquaSonic presents the challenge of creating evocative music in a medium that, technically speaking, does not even support sound. It requires us to reexamine vibration as a medium and how we create meaning with it. And what we learn will change how we think about sound and music. Artistically, this is also uncharted territory. Moving the musical experience underwater opens the rare opportunity to create an entirely new musical vocabulary. Everything sounds different, and the sounds carry a different meaning. What lies within us, latent and perhaps primordial, that can only be expressed with this music? Will we recognize these parts of ourselves when we meet them? – Andy Cavatorta 2014

Matt Nolan, Electronic Engineer and Cymbalsmith http://www.mattnolancustom.co

Matt Nolan has been playing drums since the age of 13 and has performed in the Kennedy Center, Barbican and the Royal Festival Hall. He holds a degree in Electronic Engineering, but in 2008 he left that career to start Matt Nolan Custom, a new business specializing in hand-crafted metal percussion instruments — cymbals, gongs, triangles, tuned bells and sculptural instruments. Some of his clients have included Bjork, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Massive Attack, Danny Elfman, King Crimson, Finnish National Opera, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Hungarian National Philharmonic, Stella Artois (the “Chalice Symphony” as part of a team led by Andy Cavatorta) and Forma Arts & Media (for composer Ed Carter – electromagnetically “bowed” bell plates). Nolan currently lives in Bath, UK.