Generative Sibelius

Juan Carlos Vasquez (www.jcvasquez.com) is an award-winning composer, sound artist, and researcher. His electroacoustic music works are performed constantly around the world and to date have premiered in 29 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Vasquez has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions, including the ZKM, the International Computer Music Association, the Nokia Research Center, the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, the Arts Promotion Centre in Finland, the Finnish National Gallery, and CW+ in partnership with the Royal College of Music in London, UK. Some of the events and venues that have featured Vasquez’s works include Ars Electronica (AU), the Ateneum Art Museum (FI), The New York City Library for Performing Arts (Lincoln Center, NY, USA), the Berklee College of Music, Matera Intermedia Festival (IT), Sonorities Festival Belfast (UK), BEAST FEaST (UK) and the New Music Miami ISCM Festival (USA) along with a large number of academic events held by universities across the globe. As a researcher, Vasquez’s writings can be found in the Computer Music Journal, Leonardo Music Journal, and the proceedings of all the standard conferences of the field. Vasquez received his education at the Sibelius Academy (FI), Aalto University (FI), and the University of Virginia (US). Vasquez’s music is distributed by Naxos, MIT Press (US), Important Records (US), and Phasma Music (Poland).

“Generative Sibelius” is an experimental video piece featuring an audiovisual transformation of a 1950’s film of composer Jean Sibelius in his home in Finland, recreating his everyday life in self-imposed isolation. The final video was exported from a custom piece of generative software that performs audio manipulations of Sibelius’ Op. 75 No. 5, a piece for solo piano known as “The Spruce”. The audio is analyzed with a number of spectral descriptors related to the level of noise, and the resulting data used as control parameters for a series of complex visual transformations of the film. This piece is part of a research project that investigates art appropriation and digital fragmentation as a bridge between music technology and the classical tradition, by performing extensive digital alterations on music from the common practice period.