Aki Ito
.Biography
Aki Ito is a Japanese composer, born in Kyoto. Her thinking about time is influenced by orbital resonance. By uniting it with slowness, which is her fundamental aesthetic, her music develops in different forms. In accordance with her interest in astronomical phenomena, she developed the Astérismes project in collaboration with Jean-Philippe Lambert to explore flexible sound space and a type of participatory concert combining social and compositional aspects. She also leads the Parrakas Madonna project (The Bearded Madonna) for voice, cello, electronics and puppets, inspired by the Bunraku form. She is co-founder of Libratio.
After her studies at the CNSMDP, she carried out her creative projects and research on perception during residencies supported by the Casa de Velázquez, the Institut français, and the Kone Foundation. Her works have been premiered and performed by the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, defunensemble, Smash ensemble, Tuuli Lindeberg, Élodie Soulard. She has also worked on interdisciplinary projects with Richard Siegal, Frédéric Bevilacqua, and Eira Stenberg.
.2020.21 Artistic Research Residency
Astérismes
Research Theme:
Distributed system for sound diffusion via musical agents for a participatory concert in the audience.
Summary:
Participative concert in the middle of the audience that can be mobile, without a stage in the front of the concert hall, with distributed sound diffusion.
In collaboration with IRCAM-STMS Sound Music Movement Interaction team
Astérismes is a kind of cooperative concert, without a frontal stage, allowing the audience's active listening to develop by making it the focus of the experience. The project is based on a distributed diffusion of sound in space with a large number of loudspeakers (Raspberry Pi system, participants' phones or other). The participants can be mobile or not, as they please, in order to develop their listening experience within the concert space. Each participant is unique while being part of a bigger movement, like stars connected in constellations. In this way, we create a common space that is both immersive and expandable.
Developing the social aspect of the concert, we propose to occupy alternative venues. The technical structure is based on web technologies and a WiFi network is simple and non-intrusive. To achieve musical coherence, the composer explores a compositional approach using combinable modules allowing both a focused listening of one module and a listening of the whole. This is important in enabling participants to navigate from an intimate field to a broader field, open to others, both sonically and socially. The project therefore requires a convergence between the development of the technological system and the compositional elements, in order to make the concepts evolve seamlessly with the creation of new possibilities but also their constraints.
