Robert Henke Symposium Spring 2015
Symposium Title: A totally subjective knowledge dump about sound, performance, reverb, the beauty of repetition and the never ending battle against technology and a lack of inspiration.
Description: The expected result of this week is seeding ideas, which can be used for creating music, audiovisual artworks, or for building the next big thing in music software. This class is the opposite of a DSP course. Almost nothing I am going to talk about has a valid checksum, and theory is used as a method to get as quickly as possible to practical results. The essential question is not if the algorithm is correct, it is: do we like what it does? And if so, why? And who is we?
REGISTER HERE (requires current SU ID): http://goo.gl/forms/8JOoNHbxq3
Symposium Session 1
Title: Great Moments and Great Failures
Tuesday, Mar 31, 6-9p
Description: A critical review of some of my works, installations and performances with a special focus on the interaction between technology and result. We are also going to discuss the topic of expectations and how to deal with them. And before all that we start with a very basic question: what is a good idea?
Symposium Session 2
Title: The perfect tool, or why orange sliders sound better.
Thursday, April 2, 6-9p
Description: Using some of my favorite hardware synthesizers as starting point, we figure out why some instruments are 'classics' and others are forgotten. What does it take to make a good synthesizer? What's the role of the interface? How do you figure out what you need to be creative? This lecture also deals with building interfaces and the role of haptic access.
Symposium Session 3
Title: Spaces
Tuesday, April 7, 6-9p
Description: From algorithmic reverb via the cathedrals of techno to strange usage of totally wrong impulse responses in one go.
Symposium Session 4
Title: Audiovisual Endeavors
Thursday, April 9, 6-9p
Description: About the desire to add sound to moving images and vice versa. Technical, conceptual and artistic aspects of the creation of audiovisual performances or installations.
Additional opics which will sneak in on those four days: multichannel sound, wave field synthesis, sound pressure level and loudness war, the role of empty spaces and cheap drinks for the evolution of club music and eleven things you should not do if you want a contract with a record label.
Artist Bio:
Robert Henke, born 1969 in Munich, Germany, builds and operates machines that create sounds, shapes and structures.
Coming from a strong engineering background, Henke is fascinated by the beauty of technical objects, and developing his own instruments and algorithms is an integral part of his creative process. His material is computer generated sound and images, field recordings, photography and light; transformed, re-arranged and modulated by mathematical rules, real time interaction and controlled random operations. Robert Henke's work has a particular focus on the exploration of spaces, both virtual and physical. Many of his works use multiple channels of audio or are specifically conceived for unique locations and their individual spatial properties.
The results include music on the edge of contemporary club culture, surround sound concerts, compositions in the tradition of academic computer music, photography, audiovisual installations, site-specific sound art and publicly available software. His long term musical project Monolake, founded in 1995, became one of the key icons of a new electronic club music culture emerging in Berlin after the fall of the german wall. Robert Henke is also one of the main creators of the music software 'Ableton Live', which since its invention in 1999 became the standard tool for electronic music production and completely redefined the performance practice of electronic music.
He writes and lectures about sound and the creative use of computers, and held teaching positions at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, and the Studio National des Arts Contemporains - Le Fresnoy in Lille, France. His installations, performances and concerts have been presented at Tate Modern London, the Centre Pompidou Paris, Le Lieu Unique Nantes, PS-1 New York, MUDAM Luxembourg, MAK Vienna, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and on countless festivals.