Stefano Gervasoni, Marco Liuni, Francesco Cretti and Benjamin Matuszewski
Biographies
eAr collective is composed by Stefano Gervasoni, Francesco Cretti, Benjamin Matuszewski and Marco Liuni. They met around the idea of designing high quality listening experiences leading participants to inedit relations with the art work.
With commissions from prestigious institutions, Stefano Gervasoni has established himself as one of the most important Italian composers of his generation. His catalogue – which includes chamber and vocal music, concertos, works for orchestra, for ensemble and an opera (Limbus-Limbo), commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Percussions de Strasbourg (2012) – is published by Ricordi and by Suvini Zerboni.
Marco Liuni is a researcher and computer music designer at IRCAM, Paris. After a Ph.D in the Analysis/Synthesis team, his specialties are audio analysis/synthesis, automatic adaptive algorithms, and audio processing applications to cognitive neuroscience.
Francesco Cretti got a Master’s Degree in Media Engineering at Polytechnic University of Turin. Passionate about music, art and multimedia, to work in projects that include technology and creativity is a natural fit. In addition to his current activity as a web developer, he took part in the development of several artistic installations. As a musician, he studied jazz guitar and he’s a member of an instrumental music project started in 2014, with which plays regularly live shows and publishes original music.
Benjamin Matuszewski is researcher and developer in the Sound-Music-Movement Interaction team at IRCAM in Paris. Since 2014, he has conducted research in the design and implementation of web-based tools to support research and artistic creation in the context of several French and EU projects (Wave, CoSiMa, Rapid-Mix).
2019.20 Artistic Research Residency
4 eArs - ecological audio-augmented reality.
In collaboration with the Sound-Music-Movement Interaction IRCAM-STMS Team.
The core of the eAr project is a collective listening experience based on two continuously overlapping dimensions: a personal one, the close-field perspective, and a collective one, the shared space. Their research explores the compositional possibilities at the frontiers between these two dimensions.
The sound projection system is based on a network of smart agents, defining a new model for the design of interactive auditory scenes. Two kinds of smart agents are involved: bone conduction headsets connected to a mobile device (smartphone, tablet) and speakers connected to a Raspberry Pi integrated in the environment. All of the deployed sources are part of a same communication network and integrated in a common software environment. Such setup allows for the design of complex and stratified sonic and musical relations within ecological audio scenes composed of a large number of simple sources.
The principal artistic outcome will consist in a sound installation engaging people to explore a given space, where various sound sources (including loudspeakers, instruments and potentially musicians playing them) are distributed. The listening device provides a high quality experience while being transparent, creating an auditory scene where proximity and shared space interact, overlap, fuse.