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An annual festival of contemporary music, multimedia art, experimental film, installation, sound art, and related areas, which takes place in Prague each May. It was started in 2011 by Dan Senn, an American composer and the organizer and co-founder of Roulette Intermedium.

The first four editions took place in the post-industrial Trafačka Aréna; in 2014, the festival moved to the much more cosmopolitan Paralelní Polis. The festival aims to disrupt the usual division of artists into cliques, and to provoke interaction between artists from different backgrounds. The organizers’ outsider position allows them to do so non-institutionally, without an established position on the scene, but still employing collaborations with various other institutions: the Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU (the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), the Agosto Foundation, the 4+4 Days in Motion Festival, and others.

The programming is a mixture of Czech and international performers. International guests have included Jaap Blonk, Phill Niblock and Katherine Liberovskaya, Bob Ostertag, Yves Degoyan, and Joanna Hoffman. Over the years, the festival has gradually mapped several art scenes in the Czech Republic: contemporary composed music (Lucie Vítková, Michal Rataj, David Danel, and the Fama Quartet); sound art (Marek Hlaváč and Michal Cáb); contemporary art (Michal Cimala and Martin Janíček); and experimental video (Martin Blažíček and Michal Kindernay). In addition, the festival organizes open calls for fixed-media and live works from aspiring artists....

[Elektronmusikstudion] (Swed.: ‘electronic music studio’)

The Swedish national centre for electronic music and sound art, in Stockholm. It was preceded by a smaller studio run by the Worker’s Society of Education from 1960. EMS was established by Swedish Radio in 1964 under music director and composer Karl Birger Blomdahl (1916–68), who hired the composer and performer Knut Wiggen (b 1927) to take charge of creating the studios. In 1965 an old radio theatre studio called the klangverstan (‘sound workshop’) opened for composers. Construction of a new facility was begun, but after Blomdahl’s death EMS became independent, funded only in small part by Swedish Radio, and otherwise by Fylkingen (a society for experimental music and arts) and the Swedish Royal Academy of Music.

Wiggen envisioned EMS as both a place to produce electro-acoustic music and a research institution that would give the composer ‘the possibility of describing sounds in psychological terms’. The studio was equipped accordingly. The sound sculpture ...

Many encoding formats exist today to represent music, such as DARMS, NIFF, and MusicXML for score typing and publishing, Csound, MIDI, and SASL/SAOL for computer-generated performances, and AAC, MP3, and MPEG for audio and video recordings. These formats capture specific aspects of music but are unable to encode all of these aspects together.

First proposed in 2001, the IEEE Standard 1599 has been developed to allow interaction with music, such as notes and sounds in video applications, and in ad hoc interactive devices by providing a technological framework that makes prerecorded music and related media content navigable and interactive. This is achieved by the use of layers that combine encodings of music with structural and logical representations to allow alternative versions and random access within the piece. These layers are logically organized and synchronized by XML files consisting of symbols that represent an event, referring and pointing to different instances of the same event in the various layers....

(b Plzeň, 19 April 1940). Czech artist. He studied at the Pedagogical Faculty, Preliminary Art School, Academy of Fine Arts, and Mathematical Faculty of Charles University, none of which he finished. His career began in the 1960s and has included painting, happenings, performances, musical compositions, collages, and objects. Between 1999 and 2011, he was director at the National Gallery in Prague, and in 1990 started leading an intermedia class at the Academy of Visual Arts. He is the recipient of a number of grants and prizes, including DAAD, Schloss Bleckede, Design Werkstatt, and Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Best known as a controversial artist working in a variety of disciplines, Knížák has engaged with music in many ways throughout his career. In his early teens, he began composing popular songs under the influence of Jaroslav Ježek and the popular music of the day. In 1965 he began making a series titled ‘Destroyed Music’, in which he scratched, broke, painted over, or burnt vinyl records, and then played them back, the final artifact being either a new record or an installation. He also applied this method to written music, creating a number of diverse collages using both his own and other people’s music, and making use of photographs and press clippings in addition to printed and handwritten scores....

(Augustus)

(b Nashua, NH, May 14, 1931; d Middletown, CT, Dec 1, 2021). American composer and educator.

He was educated at Yale (BA 1954) and Brandeis (MFA 1960), where his teachers included Howard Boatwright, Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, and Shapero; he also studied under Copland and Foss at the Berkshire Music Center (1958, 1959). After two years in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship, Lucier joined the Brandeis faculty in 1963 as director of the choral union; later he was head of the electronic music studio. He was a cofounder of the Sonic Arts Union, music director of the Viola Farber Dance Company (1972–7), and a fellow of the DAAD Kunstlerprogramm in Berlin (1990). He received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the NEA. In 1970 he moved to Wesleyan University, where he was later appointed John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. At Wesleyan, he trained a number of prominent experimental composers before his retirement in ...

(Swed.: ‘Music Machine I’)

Sound sculpture constructed in Stockholm in 1961 by Knut Wiggen and Per-Olof Strömberg, with Öyvind Fahlström. This automated electronic sound machine produced randomized musical structures over 20 loudspeaker channels. It was designed as a prototype for Musikmaskin II, which was the initial, conceptual stage in the development of the Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm....

A biannual festival of new and experimental music held in Ostrava, Czech Republic, since 2001, founded by petr kotík and Renata Spisarová.

The performers include guest ensembles and soloists, as well as a core of both international and Czech soloists specializing in contemporary music, who coalesce into the resident ensemble, Ostravská banda. Since its conception, the festival has established strong relations with other local arts organizations, including Bludný Kámen, the National Moravian-Silesian Theater, the Janáček Philharmonic, the Canticum Ostrava choir, and, more recently, the PLATO art gallery and the multi-arts space Provoz Hlubina. The festival also features dance and opera, as well as performance, multimedia, and installation work.

The 9-day festival at the end of August is the finale of a three-week-long ‘Institute’ for aspiring composers from around the world. Some ten established composers are invited as instructors for master classes, lectures, workshops, and one-to-one lessons at the Institute. The festival then features music by the invited composers, as well as one piece by each of the 35 composer-students....

Environmental sound sculpture devised in 1973 by the American pianist and composer David Tudor. It was based on the concept of the ‘instrumental loudspeaker’, which Tudor developed in 1966 and used in all four works in the Rainforest series, starting in 1968. The first instrumental loudspeakers consisted of containers into one end of which electronic or other sounds were fed through small loudspeakers. The sounds were picked up by microphones at the other end and passed to a conventional sound system. The containers in these early examples were metal boxes into which various materials were introduced to filter the signals acoustically as they passed between loudspeaker and microphone. In Rainforest IV the boxes are replaced by a great variety of objects, many of them in everyday use or scrap materials, to which loudspeaker-like transducers are attached; together these create an elaborate sound environment, which is operated by members of the group Composers Inside Electronics (founded by Tudor)....

Concert venue and gallery, focusing at first on visual art, but soon becoming one of the key locations in the Czech Republic for contemporary and improvised music, sound art, and intermedia work.

Housed in the courtyard of an 1888 neo-Renaissance building in the centre of Prague, the former galvanizing workshop was reconstructed in 1999 by the Linhart Foundation and opened to the public in 2000.

The gallery has offered a regular programme of two monthly concerts, always featuring a local act opening for a foreign guest. Performers have included Thomas Lehn, Franz Hautzinger, Dieb13, and Jim Denley, as well as most musicians on the Czech improvised music scene, and many composer-performers, including Peter Graham, Lucie Vítková, and Miro Tóth[1]. Artists working with sound at the gallery in an installation context have included Jacob Kirkegaard, Phill Niblock, Peter Cusack, and John Grzinich.

Apart from regular exhibitions and concerts, the gallery has also organized long-term residencies for artists, artistic workshops, and discussions. Since ...