The Pulse of The Sunrise: The Voice of Santur with Audience Participation

Born in Shiraz, Iran, Peyman Heydarian is an award-winning music scientist and santur virtuoso. He developed a unique performance style and adopted innovative tuning systems and performance techniques to play a multi-ethnic repertoire on the santur. Peyman started music at the age of four, and studied with Mojtaba Mirzadeh, and Pashang Kamkar. Since 2001, he has taught music, electronic engineering and computer science courses in Iran, Britain and New Zealand. Peyman established musical societies and bands, including The Voice of Santur. Since 1982, he has performed in Iran, USA, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hong Kong, Poland, New Zealand, and the UK. During his BSc, MSc, MPhil and PhD, at Shiraz and Tarbiat Modarres Universities, Queen Mary, University of London, and London Metropolitan University he developed algorithms for music transcription and maqàm/mode recognition. He was highly commended at SSMS 2007 for Analysis and Classification of Persian Musical Modes, and his performance with audience participation won the first prize in AudioMostly 2017. He also makes music for films and Radio and TV channels. Peyman has been researching the possibilities of pushing the boundaries of the Persian music and santur performance. He is currently developing a content-based personal music recommender system.

The pulse of the sunrise, is a result of fusing the music played on the santur, the Persian hammered dulcimer and the daf, the Kurdish frame drum, accompanied by altered live samples of the same music, through audio participation, using Grainfield system. The piece was partly composed and partly improvised in Mahur, Homayun and Chahargah, three of the seven main modes in Iranian music. Innovatory composition and performance techniques were coupled with the cutting edge audio technologies. The members of the audience participated in the live performance, by tilting their mobiles horizontally, and vertically, which played parts of the live performance in different ways through the speakers of their mobile phones. The performance won the prize for the best performance at Audio Mostly conference 2017.