International Seminar on Sonic Design

Introduction

The seminar is set up to celebrate the achievements of Professor Rolf Inge God?y and continue discussing some of the topics he has contributed to throughout his career. After studying musicology, philosophy, and the history of ideas at the University of Oslo, Professor God?y moved on to obtain diplomas in music theory and composition from the Norwegian Academy of Music. He then worked as a freelance composer for several years before returning to academia for a PhD in musicology. As a professor of music theory at the University of Oslo for almost 30 years, he has taught and supervised several generations of students in a broad range of musicological sub-disciplines.

During most of his academic career, Professor God?y has developed Pierre Schaeffer's concept of the sonic object into his own embodied sound and music theory. During the last decades, he has also been central in establishing the fourMs Lab as a world-leading infrastructure for research into music-related body motion. He is a principal investigator at RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence, until his retirement.

Sonic Design

Over the years, Professor God?y has proposed sonic design as an amalgam between artistic and scientific approaches to the creation and study of (musical) sound. On one side, sonic design includes the practices of synthesising entirely new sounds or recording, editing and mixing acoustic sounds. Over the years, these practices have merged with composition, orchestration techniques, and various music production methods to allow for previously unheard-of sonic results. In addition to such creative applications, sonic design can also encompass different sonification strategies to create ¡°objective¡± data representations through sound.

Underlying all the practical approaches to the creation of sounds for various purposes are several basic research perspectives, including music theory, music perception, embodied cognition, phenomenology, acoustics, cognitive neuroscience, and digital signal processing, to mention just a few. As such, sonic design can be seen as a meeting point between basic and applied research, "soft" and "hard" approaches, and creative and analytic perspectives.

As a longtime practitioner, researcher, teacher, and supervisor, Professor God?y has been central in developing a holistic approach to sonic design, from theory to practice. While much of his early work focused on sound as sound, he has extended his approach to considering the embodied aspects of both the performance and perception of music over the last decades. He is particularly known for his work on Musical Imagery (2001) and Musical Gestures (2010) and has, over the last decade, focused his attention on sonic and bodily (co)articulations.

Photos

Programme

Abstracts and bios

Please refer to the abstracts of presentations and bios of presenters.

Artistic program

There will be one performance and two installations during the seminar.

Contact

If you have any questions, please get in touch with:

• Professor Alexander Refsum Jensenius

• Higher Executive Officer Julie ?derud Danielsen