choir Tag

Toronto Biennial

30.09.2019 , News, Performances

November 16, 2019: 3pm-7pm

Toronto: (Check the web link here for updates)

I am please to be presenting my Larynx series (2015) compositions for live vocal quartet in the context of a  fantastic looking posthuman vocal concert curated by Myung-Sun Kim and Maiko Tanaka. The concert is included in the programming for the Toronto Biennial 2019.

Erin Gee - Larynx Series

Erin Gee – Larynx1. Epson UltraChrome K3 ink on acid-free paper.
Edition of 5.
86 x 112 cm.

TELLINGS—A Post-Human Vocal Concert seeks to challenge traditional conceptions of voice. Artists working experimentally with sound—live electronics, deep listening, sound art—perform compositions that explore new modes of vocal production. The experimental vocal compositions in solo and ensemble formats question the way we imagine the body of a voice and the “receiver” as well as the divisions made between nature and technology. Each composition performed in TELLINGS presents increasingly inter-species, inter-organ, feminist, and collaborative notions through the languages of plants, animals, and even human organs not normally associated with having authorship or intention.

Artists: Jeneen Frei Njootli, Erin Gee, Ts̱ēmā Igharas, Stephanie Loveless, and Miya Masaoka

Co-curated by Maiko Tanaka and Myung-Sun Kim.

Co-presented in partnership with Trinity Square Video and MVS Proseminar, University of Toronto—John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design

BIOS

ERIN GEE

Erin Gee (born in Regina, SK, Canada; lives in Montreal, QC, Canada) is an artist inspired by feminist, posthumanist approaches to ontology, consciousness, and the human body. Known for her work in choral composition, biodata-driven interfaces, robotics, and ASMR, she uses art to explore the autonomous nature of sensory cognition, emotion, and empathy in humans and non-human assemblages. Her work has shown internationally at venues such as: Ars Electronica, Linz; NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. In 2020 she has a solo exhibition at MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.

JENEEN FREI NJOOTLI

Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, born in Whitehorse, YK, Canada; lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada) is a Vuntut Gwitchinartist working with mixed media, sound-based performances, textiles, and installation to explore Indigeneity in politics, community engagement, and history embedded in cultural materials. She was the 2017 recipient of the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver’s Artist Prize. In 2018 alone she had solo exhibitions in venues such as: Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; FIERMAN, New York City; and Artspace, Peterborough. Her work has appeared in numerous international exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Canada and Nottingham Contemporary among others.

MAIKO TANAKA

Maiko Tanaka (born in Toronto, ON, Canada; lives in Buffalo, NY, USA) is the Executive Director of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo NY. She holds a BFA from OCADU and MVS from the University of Toronto. She has curated projects in Canada and abroad, including for TSV, Nuit Blanche at OCADU, Onsite, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, InterAccess, Gendai, all in Toronto, as well as Casco, in Utrecht/NL. She co-edited The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook (Casco) and Model Minority (Gendai) and has written for Scapegoat, C Magazine, and Fuse as well as various artist publications.

MIYA MASAOKA

Miya Masaoka (born in Washington, USA; lives in New York City, NY, USA) is an American artist and composer. Her work explores bodily perception of vibration, movement, and time while foregrounding complex timbre relationships. Her work has been presented at the Venice Biennale; MoMA PS1, New York City; Kunstmuseum Bonn; and the Caramoor, NY. She is a 2019 Studio Artist for the Park Avenue Armory, and has previously received a Doris Duke Artist Award, Fulbright, and Alpert Award in the Arts. She teaches at Columbia University, New York City where she is the Director of the Sound Art Program.

STEPHANIE LOVELESS

Stephanie Loveless (born in Montreal, Canada; lives in New York, USA) is a sound and media artist whose research centres on listening and vocal embodiment. Her recent projects include a mobile web-app for geo-located listening and sound works that channel the voices of plants, animals, and musical divas. She holds MFAs from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Bard College, both in upstate New York, and a certification in Deep Listening from composer Pauline Oliveros. She teaches courses on Deep Listening and ecologically-oriented sound art at RPI.

View participant page

TS̱ĒMĀ IGHARAS

Ts̱ēmā Igharas (Tahltan First Nation, born in Smithers, BC, Canada; lives in San Francisco, USA) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and a member of the Tahltan First Nation. Igharas is influenced by Potlatch methodology, teachings from her mentorship in Northwest Coast Formline Design at K’saan, her studies in visual culture, and time in the mountains. Igharas has shown and performed in various places in Canada and internationally, presenting her work that connects materials to mine sites and bodies to the land.

Echo Grey

21.11.2016 , Music Composition, News, Performances, Portfolio

Echo Grey (2016)

2016

Echo Grey is a composition for four voices, feedback musical instruments, and tape part (which features the sounds of a broken image file).

Movement between words or utterance, the echo’s voice exceeds the signal itself and speaks to a deeper engagement with materiality.  In Echo Grey, I composed a series of vocal patterns that emerge directly with breath as raw material, the movement of intake and exhalation made audible. The choir’s engagement with the mechanistic, impossible repetition eventually negates the signal: all that is left is the lungs and vocal vibrations of the individual who gasps, cries in defeat, and whoops in ecstasy.  These human voices are simultaneously punctuated by the feedback of microphone and amplified instruments, and a tape track composed through process – a bouncing of data back and forth between visual and aural softwares that eventually results in nothing but glitched statements.  This tape track is analogous to the squealing proximity of the sender to the receiver in the scored feedback parts.  The colour grey in the work’s title is inspired by the back and forth motion of a 2HB pencil stroking endlessly across an empty pad of paper.

Performance history

World premiere at Vancouver New Music with Andrea Young, Marina Hasselberg, Sharon Chohi Kim, Micaela Tobin, Michael Day, Braden Diotte, and Erin Gee in November 2016.

It has also been performed at Open Space Gallery (Victoria), and Neworks (Calgary).

Scores

Echo Grey 2016

Echo Grey (2016)

Sounds

Echo Grey (2016)

Fall Commission for Exo/Endo and Ilk

04.08.2016 , News, Performances

This fall 2016 the performing groups Exo/Endo and Ilk will premiere a new music composition by Erin Gee in three Canadian venues in Vancouver, Victoria and Calgary.  This new work is intended to be an extension of Gee’s work Voice of Echo (2011).  Stemming from a solo performance of this work in 2015 in Toronto at Trinity Square Video (What can a Vocaloid Do?), Gee will newly re-create materials based on vocaloid creatures, artificial intelligence, electronic voices in human bodies, authorship, subjectivity, embodiment, voice and agency telematically using a system developed by Michael Palumbo.  This work will employ five singers, and an experimental turntableist and extended bass player.

Exo/Endo is Andrea Young (voice and electronics), Michael Day (prepared turntables/percussion) Braden Diotte (multi-instrumentalist, agitated electric bass and electronics)

Ilk is Sara Sinclair Gomez, Sharon Kim, Micaela Tobin, and Andrea Young

Song of Seven

03.08.2016 , Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

Song of Seven (2016)

2016 / 2022

A composition for seven soloists, biofeedback music, and piano.

In this song, young performers contemplate an emotional time in their lives, and recount this memory as an improvised vocal solo.The choir is instructed to enter into a meditative state during these emotional solos, deeply listening to the tale and empathizing with the soloist, using imagination to recreate the scene.  Choir members are attached to a musical instrument I call the BioSynth a small synthesizer that sonifies heartbeats and sweat release for each individual member to pre-programmed tones. Sweat release, often acknowledged as a robust measure of emotional engagement, is signaled by overtones that appear and reappear over a drone; meanwhile the heartbeats of each chorister are sounded according to blood flow, providing a light percussion.

The musical score combines traditional music notation with vocal games and rhythms determined not necessarily by the conductor or score but by beatings of the heart and bursts of sweat. Discreet flashing lights on the synthesizer boxes in front of the choristers allowed the singers to discern the rhythms and patterns of their heart and sweat glands, which therefore permits compositions to incorporate the rhythms of the body into the final score as markers that trigger sonic events.

Song of Seven (2022) for SSAATBB singers, adapted from the original for high voice /children’s choir (2016).

The text in this song is completely improvised from the sung childhood memories of the choir members. Each choir’s interpretation is totally original and could be performed in any language. The seven emotional vignettes are framed by textless song, accompanied by piano and Erin Gee’s original musical instruments the BioSynths. Gee first created the BioSynths in 2016 to measure the empathetic reactions of the choir singers to one another’s song, allowing for shifting intensities in harmonic notes in response to the sung memories. Composing not only notes, but composing physiological states for the biofeedback-enhanced choir, empathy is generated through personal narrative to activate the emotional resonance of the choir members. This performance strategy is one many Gee develops for her “music for alienated emotion”.

Credits

Piano accompanist: Daniel Àñez

Hardware design: Martin Peach

Software design: Erin Gee

Performance history

In 2022 a version of Song of Seven for adult voices was premiered at Orpheum Annex (Vancouver) with Vancouver New Music, featuring members of musica intima choir.

This choral composition was first workshopped for children’s voices over a one-week residency at the LIVELab (McMaster University) with members of the Hamilton Children’s Choir. This residency was hosted by Hamilton Artists Inc. with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Links

Hamilton Children's Choir
Daniel Àñez (Spanish biography)
Hamilton Artists' Inc
LIVElab
Canada Council for the Arts

Video

Song of Seven
Premiere for children’s choir: Hamilton Children’s Choir (2016)

Song of Seven
Premiere for adult choir: Musica Intima (2022)

Scores

Partitions1

Song of Seven (2016)

Gallery

Song of Seven (2016)

New Work for Hamilton Children’s Choir

25.04.2016 , News, Performances, Research

 

On June 25th 2016 I will be premiering new biosensor-driven work created especially for members of the Hamilton Children’s Choir.  This performance work will be presented in conjunction with my solo exhibition Vocales Digitales at Hamilton Artists Inc, thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

The Hamilton Children’s Choir is a nationally competitive choir of youth  accompanied by pianist Daniel Añez.  Áñez is a renowned pianist in the musical milieu of Canada and Latin America, an active performer of contemporary and experimental music, a touring soloist, and a chamber musician.

This new work will allow me to explore a highly personal composition process with the choir, featuring the sonification of group empathy as seen through physiological markers of emotion such as heartrate, respiration and sweat release.

For more information

Hamilton Children’s Choir

Daniel Añez (Spanish Biography)

Hamilton Artists Inc

Canada Council for the Arts

 

 

Erin Gee - Larynx Series

Larynx Series

29.01.2016 , Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Gallery Artwork, Music Composition, Performance, Physical Media, Portfolio, Print

Larynx1, Larynx2, Larynx3, Larynx4 (2014)
Epson UltraChrome K3 ink on acid-free paper.
Edition of 5.
86 x 112 cm.

2014

What we consider our voice in a technologically mediated environment is a visual-vocal-technological assemblage that implicates amplification, scale, human and digital bodies and networks. The multiplication and proliferation of voice on someone else’s device happens in asynchronous ways, much the same as a vocal score is a vocal performance that lay crystalized and dormant until activated by human action.

This series of printed works is a set of vocal quartets created from the original material of the human voice, the larynx, which was amplified/reproduced/echoed through visual perception processes in machine and human cognizers and re-performed by multiple human singers. In endoscopic photography the flesh material of the larynx is extended through the sensory mechanisms of a machine. Light bounces off the flesh of the larynx and is interpreted by a camera as pixel data. This digital image is made of raster pixels faithful to their fleshy origins but limited in detail. If one amplifies the raster image of the voice (zoom) the image reveals its materiality as a technical assemblage. I transformed the raster image into a vector in order to continue playing with bouncing machine processes off one another to “voice” how a machine might perceive this human larynx. While the rasterization process I used eliminated the fleshy details of the original larynx, the image emphasized original architectural structures of the larynx, which now more closely resembled a topographical map, or circuit board. This technologically processed version of the larynx could be infinitely amplified or diminished without loss or distortion. At this point I detected an unexpected feature: my associative, human perception could see markings that resembled Western notation at the edges of this transformed image of the human voice, complete with staves, bar lines and notes. My transcription process included dividing each bar into four equal parts, and then transcribing rhythms in a linear relationship to where the small note-like marks were present horizontally in common 4/4 time.  Pitches were interpreted as they appeared vertically on the abstracted staves.

Since there exist four sides to each two-dimensional image, there were four staves for each representation of the larynx in the series. I set this music into four separate vocal partitions for choral song: returning this technologically amplified process of voicing back into multiple human throats.

Exhibition/Performance history

MacKenzie Art Gallery January 2020.

Toronto Bienniale November 2019.

Vocales Digitales – Solo exhibition. March 26 – May 14 2016, Hamilton Artists’ Inc.: Hamilton, Canada. Curated by Caitlin Sutherland.

Rhubarb, rhubarb, peas and carrots, 2015. Dunlop Art Gallery. Regina, Canada. Curated by Blair Fornwald. Larynx Songs premiered with singers Erin Gee, Carrie Smith, Kristen Smith, and Kaitlin Semple.

(Premiere Performance) Rhubarb, Rhubarb, peas and carrots. July 17-September 5, 2015. Dunlop Art Gallery: Regina, Canada. Curated by Blair Fornwald.

Erin Gee and Kelly Andres. August 25 – October 24, 2014. Cirque du Soleil Headquarters: Montreal, Canada. Curated by Eliane Elbogen.

Voice of Echo (Solo Exhibition), 2014. Gallerywest. Toronto, Canada. Curated by Evan Tyler.

(Performance) Tellings: A Posthuman Vocal Concert. Toronto Biennial. Curated by Myung-Sun Kim and Maiko Tanaka.

Collections

Larynx3 (edition 1/5) was purchased by the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their permanent collection in 2019.

Gallery

Photo Credits
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Anim.OS

26.01.2016 , Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Gallery Artwork, Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

Anim.OS (2012)

2012

Inspired by exerpts of Elizabeth Grosz’s book “Architecture from the Outside”, I made recordings of myself singing text that made reference to insideness, outsideness, and flexible structures. These recordings were arranged by composer Oliver Bown into a networked choral software.

Anim.OS is a networked computer choir developed by Oliver Bown (Sydney) and Erin Gee (Montreal) in 2012. Videography and sound recording by Shane Turner (Montreal).

This is documentation of one of the first tests for improvisation and control of the choir at the University of Sydney.

Credits

Generative software choir installation in collaboration with Oliver Bown

Video

Anim.OS – Development – Lab Improvisation with Oliver Bown and Erin Gee

Orpheux Larnyx

23.01.2016 , Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio, Robotics, Sound Art

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

2011

Vocal work for three artificial voices and soprano, feat. Stelarc.
Music by Erin Gee, text by Margaret Atwood.

I made Orpheux Larynx while in residence at the MARCs Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney, Australia in the summer of 2011. I was invited by Stelarc to create a performance work with an intriguing device he was developing there called the Prosthetic Head, a computerized conversational agent that responds to keyboard-based chat-input with an 8-bit baritone voice. I worked from the idea of creating a choir of Stelarcs, and developed music for three voices by digitally manipulating the avatar’s voice. Eventually Stelarc’s avatar voices were given the bodies of three robots: a mechanical arm, a modified segueway, and a commercially available device called a PPLbot. I sang along with this avatar-choir, while carrying my own silent avatar with me on a djgital screen.

It is said that after Orpheus’ head was ripped from his body, he continued singing as his head floated down a river. He was rescued by two nymphs, who lifted his head to the heavens, to become a star. In this performance, all the characters (Stelarc’s, my voice, Orpheus, Euridice, the nymphs) are blended into intersubjective robotic shells that speak and sing on our behalf. The flexibility of the avatar facilitates a pluratity of voices to emerge from relatively few physical bodies, blending past subjects into present but also possible future subjects. Orpheus is tripled to become a multi-headed Orpheux, simultaneously disembodied head, humanoid nymph, deceased Euridice. The meaning of the work is in the dissonant proximity between the past and present characters, as well as my own identity inhabiting the bodies and voices of Stelarc’s prosthetic self.

Credits

Music, video and performance by Erin Gee. Lyrics “Orpheus (1)” and “Orpheus (2)” by Margaret Atwood. Robotics by Damith Herath. Technical Support by Zhenzhi Zhang (MARCs Robotics Lab, University of Western Sydney). Choreography coaching by Staci Parlato-Harris.

Special thanks to Stelarc and Garth Paine for their support in the creation of the project.

This research project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and MARCS Auditory Labs at the University of Western Sydney. The Thinking Head project is funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Music: Orpheux Larynx © 2011 . Lyrics are the poems by Margaret Atwood: “Orpheus (1)” and “Orpheus (2)”, from the poetry collection Selected Poems, 1966 – 1984 currently published by Oxford University Press © 1990 by Margaret Atwood. In the United States, the poems appear in Selected Poems II, 1976 – 1986currently published by Houghton Mifflin © 1987 by Margaret Atwood. In the UK, these poems appear in Eating Fire, Selected Poetry 1965 – 1995 currently published by Virago Press, ©1998 by Margaret Atwood. All rights reserved.

Video

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

Gallery

Orpheux Larnyx (2011)

BodyRadio

22.01.2016 , Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

BodyRadio (2011)

2011

Four-part score for electronic voices in organic bodies debuted as part of New Adventure in Sound Art’s Deep Wireless Festival of Transmission Art, Toronto, Canada.

Body Radio is a composition for four performers that reverses the interiority/exteriority of a radio, which is a human voice in an electronic body. Small wireless microphones are placed directly in the mouths of the performers, who are each facing a guitar amplifier. The performers control the sensitivity of both the amplifier’s receiving function and the microphone’s sending function in accordance with the score. The final sounds are a combination of inner mouth noises, breathing, and varying pitches feedback controlled by the opening and closing of mouths.

Exhibition/Performance history

New Adventure in Sound Art’s Deep Wireless Festival of Transmission Art, Toronto, Canada

Video

BodyRadio (2011)