Pattern Portraits: Cork (excerpt)

Jeffrey Weeter: Composition, instrument design and programming, real-time visuals.

CAVE: Cork Audio Visual Ensemble: Performers on the Possibility Box featured on the audio of this recording are CAVE members: Arran Bradstock, Caleb Hall, James May and Fiona Sheil

Invited performance after peer-reviewed selection at the conferences of Sound and Music Computing, Malaga, Spain, and The Irish Science, Sound, and Technology Association (ISSTA), Cork, IE, 2019.

Pattern Portrait: Cork is composed for an ensemble of four Possibility Box performers. The Possibility Box is a newly designed real-time instrument in a wooden box featuring potentiometers, switches and distance sensors with a Raspberry Pi at its core. There is one performer per box. Each box plugs into its own speaker onstage. The output can also be mixed to a stereo feed for the PA system.

Pattern Portrait: Cork is an audio-visual composition continuously developing its form through the musical and visual exploration of the rhythmic cycles and patterns generated by the traffic data of a Cork City motorway and the water levels of the River Lee. Each automobile on the highway at a given time is represented by both a note and an image. The river levels determine the drone volume. This data is sent to each Possibility Box where the performers improvise with synthesis, timbre and real-time video.

CAVE – Cork Audio Visual Ensemble is a music technology based ensemble at University College Cork focused on performing and creating contemporary audio-visual compositions. Through both performance and creative practice, CAVE seeks to explore the relationship between the physical (carbon-based) and the digital (silicon-based) worlds. Everyday we are surrounded by noise and image. Part of CAVE’s mission is to seek out the challenging intersections of data, art, performance, and our environment. Out of these intersections emerges an aesthetic leaning toward a better understanding of how we shape our world. This is accomplished through both visualizing and sonifying the data and audio-visual media collected and musically manipulated by the ensemble. CAVE challenges what is known and relates its findings to the world through creative expression.

Pattern Portrait: Cork was originally an installation commissioned in 2018 by the Building City Data Project at Maynooth University

for more information, visit https://cave-art.com/