vancouver new music Tag

AFFECT FLOW

AFFECT FLOW (2022)
Premiere performance at Orpheum Annex, Vancouver, with Vancouver New Music.
Photography by Garnet Hertz.

2022

AFFECT FLOW is a music performance work of approximately 50 minutes that initiates listeners into a state of “non-naturalist emotion”: emotional manufacture as a technology for survival or pleasure. It consists of ASMRtronica, guided meditation, live biofedback created by hardware synthesisers, and song.

In the first part of the work I perform in a strategically manipulative, first-person address, suspending the listener into a dream state inspired by Tara Rodgers’ feminist description of sonic waves, using aesthetics borrowed from ASMR roleplay in my electroacoustic music. 

In the last half I introduce seven biofeedback performers, who I refer to as surrogates, inviting the audience to participate with us in guided visualization/hypnosis. Each surrogate is equipped with a BioSynth: a hardware musical instrument of my own design controlled by physiological markers of emotion: cardiac activity, respiration, and skin conductance. The mapping of the BioSynths is explained plainly so listeners can listen to how mood shifts in the room during the performance. It is through the assemblage of bodies that affect emerges as an ecological relation rather than a state of individual subjecthood. A light illuminates in front of biofeedback performers when their signals are amplified, allowing for solos, duets, trios, and full ensemble moments. 

Expanding the field of biofeedback music beyond quantification and sonification, I use folk hypnosis, verbal suggestion, clinical psychology methods, roleplay, song, and textural sounds that approximate haptic experience to create biofeedback work inspired by feminist thought. 

Credits

Affect Flow (2022)
Premiered November 2022 at Vancouver New Music.
Music composition and performance by Erin Gee.

Dramaturgy and text by Jena McLean. Poetry by Andrew C. Wenaus.

BioSynth affective hardware synthesizers are an open-source project by Erin Gee. Programming for this iteration by Etienne Montenegro with sonification programming by Erin Gee. PCB design by Grégory Perrin.

Click here for the BioSynth GitHub.

AFFECT FLOW (2022) Premiere at Vancouver New Music, Vancouver.

Echo Grey

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)

Sounds

Echo Grey (2016)