Inspired by the performance tradition of Korean pansori and the sonic ritual practices of female Korean shamans (mudang), this polyvocal, multilayered electronic music piece considers the possibility of sonic interventions into and transformations of our collective, shared, and material spaces - both real and imagined. 

Correspondences is a computer music composition that acts as a translation of Charles Baudelaire's famous sonnet "Correspondances” from Les Fleurs du mal. My reading follows the poem’s structure and overall gesture, pivoting around certain formal elements, especially the white spaces separating the strophes and the expressive dash punctuating the first tercet. But form encloses meaning. The sonnet as a whole serves as the basis for a more extended meditation on time, memory, and the materiality of poetry itself: something both written and spoken, though often half-remembered, like a dream.

Correspondances — Charles Baudelaire

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

Correspondences — translation: Keith Waldrop    

Nature is a temple whose columns are alive
And sometimes issue disjointed messages.
We thread our way through a forest of symbols
That peer out, as if recognizing us.

Like long echoes from far away,
Merging into a deep dark unity,
Vast as night, vast as the light,
Smells and colors and sounds concur.

There are perfumes cool as children’s flesh,
Sweet as oboes, green like the prairie,
- And others corrupt, rich, overbearing,

With the expansiveness of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, spikenard, frankincense,
Singing ecstasy to the mind and to the senses.

Mark and Laura Cetilia met on March 30, 2003 at an experimental music festival in Los Angeles and began their shared endeavors into art and life, some of the results of which you will experience here tonight. With their group Mem1, immersive sound worlds arise as a seemingly effortless union of acoustic, analog, and digital practice, held together through a feedback loop of intensive listening and thoughtful response.

Bells, as integral components of the urban sonic landscape, both influence and are influenced by the cultures around them. European carillons, for example, are tuned to the Western 12-tone equal temperament scale, while bells from other regions, such as Asia and Eastern Europe, feature a variety of harmonic partial combinations, giving each bell a unique sound. 

In this work, I invite you to experience the sensation of being inside a large, vibrating bell, where its harmonic partials are reinforced and swinging around you. Specifically, you will be immersed in the sound of the “Bishop’s” bell from Grace Church in Providence, a bell that creates a phantom D pitch—an acoustic illusion where the listener perceives a pitch that isn’t physically present. Another bell featured in this work is a 16th-century Kyoto bell from Jeff Shore’s private collection in Providence, RI. Finally, you will experience a 5,765-pound bell from Holy Trinity Church in San Francisco, cast in 1888 at Findlansky’s Bell Foundry. This bell possesses a distinct acoustic phenomenon, with each listener perceiving its sound in a unique way. 

While music is often described as a universal language, my research reveals that our listening experiences can be deeply personal or even isolating, as though each of us speaks our own language. This work dissects the sound of each bell into its constituent parts, called partials. By deconstructing these complex sounds, I aim to reveal the "grammar" of these bells, allowing us to understand them on their own terms. To explore more about the acoustics and ambiguity of the final bell, I invite you to visit my research at chinilina.com/research, where you can listen to samples and examine additional data.

given to be heard nestles into the tensions of representation and the real in soundscape composition. It takes as its source material a selection of field recordings I made in the Gulf South between 2019 and 2024, particularly in and around New Orleans, LA—a region itself the site of profound social, political, and environmental tensions—a swampy ecological zone that, by its nature, exists in flux, “a trickster, ready to engulf the unwary in its muddy, suffocating embrace” (Vittoria Di Palma, "Wasteland"). It's complex and beautiful, a region where the borders between city, community, nature, and industry are porous, for better and worse. Through processing fabrications like resonant delays and impulse response reverberation, I hope to lift the listener out of a “simple” field recording document and into a more complicated negotiation of where the soundscape begins and ends.

Yvette Janine Jackson and Jessica Shand will perform excerpts from Left Behind, the first in a series of abstract radio operas themed around the environmental and socioeconomic impact of space tourism on local communities near launch sites. The original 50-minute composition was for my Radio Opera Workshop ensemble who gave the world premiere at the Venice Music Biennale and the U.S. premiere at the Gassmann Electronic Music Series at UC Irvine.

Bonnie Han Jones is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Music, focusing on composition. She is an improvising musician, poet, and educator working with electronic sound, spatial audio technologies, archives, and text. Her work explores noise, sonic identity, listening, and sound as knowledge. Her current project explores the archival materials of transnational Korean adoptees and is informed by feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, and the Black radical tradition. She holds an MFA from Bard College and has presented her work in the U.S. and abroad at venues such as National Sawdust, New York City; REDCAT, Los Angeles; ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; and HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Berlin, Germany. She has released albums with Erstwhile, Northern Spy, Olof Bright, and Another Timbre. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award and was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 2004.

Joseph Butch Rovan is a composer, performer, media artist, and instrument designer who has served on the faculty of the department of Music at Brown University since 2004. 

Rovan’s compositions have been performed all over the world, receiving early recognition in two of the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competitions as well as a first prize in the Berlin Transmediale Festival. His multipart installation "Let us imagine a straight line" was selected for the 14th WRO International Media Art Biennale in Poland. He has recorded on the Wergo, EMF, Circumvention, and SEAMUS labels.

The design of sensor hardware and wireless microcontroller systems for musical performance represents a central part of Rovan’s creative work, which has yielded two patents. Among his most recent projects are the TOSHI, a new conductor interface for orchestral synthesis, and a new accessible technology that allows non-sighted composers to program interactive computer music. His research has been featured in The Computer Music Journal, including in a special anthology presenting his custom GLOBE controller. A seminal essay written with Vincent Hayward was highly influential for the field of haptics, and a later piece on alternate controllers was included in Riley and Hunter’s “Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research,” published by Palgrave Macmillan. 

Earlier in his career, Rovan served as compositeur en recherche with the Real-Time Systems Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, and then as a faculty member at Florida State University and the University of North Texas, where he headed the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia. At Brown, he directed the Brown Arts Initiative from 2016-19, where he was instrumental in the design and planning of The Lindemann Performing Arts Center.

Founded in Los Angeles in 2003 and based in Providence RI since 2010, Mem1 seamlessly blends the sounds of cello and electronics to create a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. In their improvisation-based performances, Mark and Laura Cetilia’s uniquely subtle approach to extended cello technique and realtime modular synthesis patching results in the creation of a single voice rather than a duet between two individuals. Their music moves beyond melody, lyricism and traditional structural confines, revealing an organic evolution of sound that has been called “a perfect blend of harmony and cacophony” (Forced Exposure).

The Oxford University Press’ New Grove Dictionary of American Music describes Mem1 as “a unified cybernetic force, or complex cybernetic entity, comprised of two human artists plus their instruments and systems” whose “evolving, custom-built systems are as important an aspect of the duo’s achievements as their ever-innovative sound. Confounding the complexities inherent in human-machine and human-instrument relationship, Mem1 understands its music as a feedback loop between the past and present.”

Mem1 has toured extensively, performing at Café OTO (London), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn), Roulette (New York), the Laptopia Festival (Tel-Aviv), the Borealis Festival (Bergen), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, REDCAT / Disney Hall (Los Angeles), Electronic Church (Berlin), and Höjden Studios (Stockholm). They have taken part in residencies at Elektronmusikstudion EMS (Stockholm), Harvestworks (New York), STEIM (Amsterdam), O' (Milan), USF Verftet (Bergen), and SoundFjord (London). Throughout their career, they have collaborated with a variety of artists and musicians including the Penderecki String Quartet, Steve Roden, Stephen Vitiello, Frank Bretschneider, Jan Jelinek, Liora Belford, Kadet Kuhne, and Attila Faravelli. Together, Mem1 co-curates the record label Estuary Ltd. and are proud parents of one.

mem1.com | estuary-ltd.com

James May (b. 1994, Pittsburgh, PA) is a composer, improviser, teacher, and writer. His work explores unfurling, fragile spaces, generating unpredictable systems in which performers can dwell. He combines approaches such as improvisation environments, live electronics, notated scores, field recordings, extended vocal technique, and text, often inspired by the natural world or other art forms—especially film photography and literature. James is a member of Versipel New Music (New Orleans), has published writing in Sound American and RTÉ Culture, and was a 2024 Ucross Artist in Residence. He has collaborated on performances and recordings with Versipel, Apply Triangle, Hypercube, Chamber Choir Ireland and Paul Hillier, Birdfoot Festival, New Music on the Bayou, Stephanie Lamprea, Will Yager, Jamie Monck, the San Francisco Choral Artists, and Longleash. James was one of 12 recipients of the 2018-19 George J. Mitchell Scholarship, funding an MA in Experimental Sound Practice at University College Cork; prior, he earned an MM in Composition from the University of Louisville, and a BMus in Theory & Composition and a BA in English from The College of Wooster.

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound artist whose compositions have been heralded as “immersive non-visual films” (The Guardian).  A Los Angeles native, Jackson was introduced to the world of tape splicing, analog synthesis, and computer music at the historic Columbia Computer Music Center in New York before designing sound for theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area where she was awarded the first Theatre Bay Area Eric Landisman Fellowship for Designers and the Dean Goodman Choice Award for Sound Design for The Shape of Things.  She blends these experiences into her own aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition dubbed “radio opera.” 

Jackson’s electroacoustic, chamber, and orchestral compositions have been commissioned internationally for concert, theatre, installation, and screen.  Jackson’s projects often draw from history to examine relevant social issues.  She has collaborated with historian of science and author Naomi Oreskes on Doubt for the Artivism for Earth Initiative featured at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.  Her album Freedom is described as “one of the most unique releases to chronicle the Black American experience” (The Wire).  She has composed for Elisa New’s PBS series Poetry in America and Barclay DeVeau’s The Cassandra Project short film trilogy. Recent projects include Hello, Tomorrow! for orchestra and electronics co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and American Composers Orchestra; T-Minus, A Radio Opera commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble; and Extant, an interactive composition for bass clarinet, cello, and game engine at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her permanent installations Underground (Codes) and Destination Freedom can be experienced at Wave Farm in Acra, New York, and the International African American Museum in Charleston. 

Jackson performs modular synthesizers as a solo artist and formed Radio Opera Workshop to perform her compositions, debuting at the Venice Music Biennale in 2022.  The collective has featured Tommy Babin, Amy Cimini, Tia Fuller, Joy Guidry, Judith Hamann, Dawn Norfleet, Jonathan Piper, Davindar Singh, Esperanza Spalding, Rajna Swaminathan, Malesha Jessie Taylor, and Taiga Ultan.
yvettejackson.com
@yvettejaninejackson

Jessica Shand is a performer-composer and researcher driven by the belief that music can expand our sensibilities. While her early love for dance eventually led her to pick up her primary instrument, the flute, her original solo and ensemble music now calls on an eclectic set of influences—from classical and jazz to electronic music and the avant-garde—to combine flutes, electronics, vocals, and more. She holds an M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2024) and a B.A. in Mathematics and Music from Harvard University (2022).