The Center For Deep Listening

LET YOUR HANDS SING, by Anna Luyten

Anna Luyten (B) holds the masters in Philosophy, Applied Literature Science and Theatre Studies. She is writer, performer , radio- and television maker. She is lecturer in Philosophy, Aesthetics, artist writing and Dramaturgy of banality at the Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts (NL) and School of Arts, University College Ghent (B). She co-founded the researchgroup ’Wandering as a discipline. An investigation into the function of attention and participation in performance art, pedagogy, writing and thinking practices’ at School Of Arts Ghent and is preparing her Phd.

VERBS, by Erin Demastes

Erin Demastes is an experimental composer, performer, and instrument maker whose research combines sound and technology with humor, drama, and absurdity. She uses everyday, household objects and hacked electronics for her installations and performances and subverts their use and perception with play and experimentation. In addition to her interest in physical materials, Erin also experiments with instruction and interaction design by playing with the boundaries of her scores, performances, and installations to find a balance between structure and uncertainty.

WHEN A TRAIN IS TOO LATE (AGAIN?), by JANA DE TROYER

Composer-Performer Jana De Troyer positions herself at the dynamic borders between styles and disciplines. Concurrently, she deftly switches between her roles of composer, free improviser, instrumentalist, human, sound artist and programmer. Coming from a background as a contemporary saxophonist, Jana has always been curious about further exploring and fusing various modes of expression. This “Experimentierfreude” has brought about a myriad of creative collaborations with composers, musicians and artists from other disciplines such as visual arts, dance and coding.

MICROHOCKET, by Henry Lowengard

Have fun!
I am 6 microns tall and live in the eye of a needle. I was born in 1823 and lie about my age. https://jhhl.net/

LANGUAGE IS MUSIC, by Nick Chite

Nick is a student studying Computer & Systems Engineering and Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is interested in combining computer programming and machine learning with music technology, particularly within glitch music, live coding, and musical games.

FOR WALKING PAST DOORS, by Nina Isabelle

Nina Isabelle is a process based artist working with perception, action, language, and phenomena. Her practice is a method to sort and solve the inconsistencies of language, memory, and form. She makes paintings, drawings, photographs, video, sculpture, sound, performance and writing as inquiries into how sensory perception functions as the impetus for action, reaction, response, sense-making and choice making in art and life. Through merging disciplines, she explores how sense data compels actions, informs concepts, and the unconscious and conscious impacts these variables have on decision making processes used to construct meaning and worlds.

FEEDBACK LOOP OF A FEEDBACK LOOP…, by Spencer Bambrick

Feedback Loop… is a deep listening memory game about listening and playing. Anyone, musical or non-musical, performer or audience member, can play and enjoy it. Throughout the performance players will improvise short musical ideas or “loops.” One at a time players will enter, playing loops together. As each player enters, they then add a new idea to the end of the loop. Over time, the resulting texture becomes more intricate and cacophonous, like the structure of a feedback loop.

Spencer Bambrick is a composer, author, educator, and electronic artist. His creative practice is rooted in videogames where player agency is used as a means of generating structure and deriving meaning in his work. Spa{ce}ialization is a recent interactive videogame, premiered at Berklee College of Music in a multi-channel performance space, that explores this theme. Spencer often infuses social and political issues in his concert work. These themes of interactivity and social impact are crucial aspects of the work Spencer continues to create.

INSTRUCTION FOR NON-HUMAN LISTENING NO. 11, By John Timney

BE THE SEA is a collaboration between artist Louise Mackenzie, composer Hayley Jenkins, Durham Wildlife Trust and a growing community of participants based along the coast between the rivers Tyne and Tees in the North East of England, UK. BE THE SEA foregrounds listening strategies to ask how we can live with the coast in ways that are mutually sustainable. 

FOR VOICES IN DISTANT LANDSCAPES, by Gretchen Jude

How can we lift our voices together in a fundamental human response to pandemic isolation and anthropogenic climate change? This piece invites participants to connect through embodied, vibratory engagement with their proximal ecologies. Let us heal our loneliness by opening to the richly sounding world, cultivating awareness of our inescapable commonality with the more-than-human.

Gretchen Jude is an experimental performer, improviser and award-winning composer for film, dance and theater. Born and raised in the wild state of Idaho, Jude is engaged with the complex interactions between nature and technology. Jude holds an M.F.A. in Electronic Music & Recording Media from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies (with a Designated Emphasis in Sonic Practice as Research) from the University of California, Davis, along with certification from the Sawai Koto Institute and the Deep Listening Institute.

57 BUZZARDS, by Pamela Madsen

Fifty-seven buzzards, one on each of fifty-seven fence posts at the rancho El Tejon, on a mirage-breeding September morning, sat solemnly while the white tilted travelers’ vans lumbered down the Canada de los Uvas. After three hours they had only clapped their wings, or exchanged posts. The season’s end in the vast dim valley of the San Joaquin is palpitatingly hot, and the air breathes like cotton wool. Through it all the buzzards sit on the fences and low hummocks, with wings spread fanwise for air. There is no end to them, and they smell to heaven. Their heads droop, and all their communication is a rare, horrid croak. From The Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin (1903)

57 Buzzards: Water Trails of the Ceriso is from my opera Why Women Went West about the life of American pioneer, mystic and author, Mary Hunter Austin and her book The Land of Little Rain (1903). This work explores the 20th century fascination for utopian salvation in California, the need for water and the meaning of rain. In these works the sounds of water and fluidity of performance of the duo in Water Trails of the Ceriso are juxtaposed against the dry, rigid, inactive silence and scarcity of sound of the desert landscape of 57 Buzzards.

Pamela Madsen is a composer, theorist and curator of new music. From landscape inspired projects, chamber music to multi-media opera collaborations her work focuses on deep listening, text and the environment. With a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UCSD, Deep Listening Certificate with Pauline Oliveros, her works have been commissioned and premiered world-wide. With awards from Opera America, National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, American Scandinavian Foundation, she is Professor of Music Composition at Cal State Fullerton.
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