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Brera Design Days 2019

October 7, 2019

The event is organized by the Brera Design Disctrict, and incude a talk and the screenig of the documentary Vjesh/Singing, by Rossella Schillaci. The film tells the passage between different generation of women of the repertoire of polyphonic song in the arbëresh villages of S. Costantino and S. Paolo, in Basilicata; beside the presence of the singers, there is the presence of historical recording and old amateur videos embedded in the plot of the story, that focus on daily life, including rituals and religious festivals, a wedding, and accounts of emigrants story.

After the screening, a conversation between the filmmaker and Nicola Scaldaferri, who collaborated for the musical and ethnographic research.

 

Program

Trailer

Lines of Sounding Bodies

September 1, 2019

#URLA. Sonic Meta Parade took place on September 1st in Matera, as the closing event of the Open Sound Festival. More than 250 performers, who followed a “geographical score” by composer Yuval Avital, engaged the audience in a two-hour procession through the Sassi district where traditional performers, folkloric masks and modern instruments blended in an engaging sonic dialogue. (More here)

To capture his firsthand experience of the event, Giovanni Cestino realized an immersive audiovisual recording, wearing an action camera on his head, and DSM microphones as earphones. (The same gear has already been used in another recent documentary, Evening in the Old Town.)

He thus captured a protean performance from different points of observation – sometimes admiring it from afar, sometimes merging with it. The result will be a highly-subjective audiovisual product which aims to highlight both the sonic complexity and the incredible visual and cultural variety of that artistic project.

 

 

Official program notes

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Photographs by Monkeys VideoLab, Alida Guatri, and Giovanni Cestino.

Viaggio in Italia. Ethnomusic Video Mapping

September 14, 2019

The videotaping is realized by Karmachina with the musical research by Nicola Scaldaferri, and projected in Perugia on the facade of the cathedral, from 14 to 21 September 2019. It is inspired by the research of the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax who, together with Diego Carpitella, traveled through Italy to discover the extraordinary variety of traditional music in Italy, a country that is one of the most important areas of ethnomusicology, in terms of extension and variety.

Divided into five sacred movements and five profane interludes, it crosses the different geographical areas of Italy, from Sicily and Sardinia to the Alps.

The patrimony of sacred visual art preserved in Umbria illustrates the sacred polyphonic traditions; the work songs have as visual counterpoint the photographic and film repertoire of the 50s and 60s.

 

Program

Sagra Musicale Umbra Perugia videomapping

 

Link

 

Trailer

 

Music and Genocides

September 10, 2019

As part of an event organized by the association Nomus, Nicola Scaldaferri will held a conference on the relationship between music and genocides in the Ottoman Empire area. The conference will delve into some lesser-known (or completely unknown) cases, in which tragical historical events affected entire populations, discriminated against religious or ethnic basis. Musical practices bear traces of those stories, still echoing over the centuries in diasporic contexts. Visual and audio documentation – partly from the LEAV archives –  will help contextualising those cultural phenomena.
During the conference, an excerpt of Radio Genocide by Yuval Avital will be presented for the first time. In this work, the composer reworked archival sound and visual materials and propaganda broadcastings related to cases of genocide.

The event will take place in the Sala Conferenze of the Museo del Novecento at 5pm. A concert of rebetiko music will follow, featuring Emanuele Skoufas (tsouras, voice), Laura Pronestì (guitar), and Matteo Concina (percussions).

More

Artistic Paths around Enzo Schillizzi

August 7, 2019

As part of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019, the Arbërësh village of San Costantino Albanese (PZ) becomes “Capital for a day” with a special event dedicated to its local artworks. In addition to street art events and exhibits, private houses and public spaces with works by Enzo Schillizzi and Carlo Levi open their doors to visitors. The event will culminate in the meeting “San Costantino Albanese as a spread art museum”. An official welcome by the authorities will be followed by two talks by Carlotta Ghiretti (LEAV, University of Milan) and Lorenzo Ferrarini (University of Manchester). A discussion with testimonials on Levi’s and Schillizzi’s activity in San Costantino  will be coordinated by Nicola Scaldaferri.

The event will start at the Casa Parco at 6pm. Free visits to public and private spaces will last from August 6th to 8th, each day from 10am to 7pm. More here.

More (Official website)

 

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The Craft of an Affective Space

March 19, 2019

As part of the course in Anthropology of Music, Giulia Accornero (Harvard University) will hold a lecture on the effects of certain audio-visual stimuli as perceived and shaped both by the web community and by the academic discourse. The lecture will take place at the Department of Cultural Heritage and Environment, University of Milan (via Noto 8, aula K32), at 16:30.

Abstract

Search for “ASMR” on Google Videos right now and you will get an astonishing forty million results; check again a minute from now, and you may get even more. ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, labels the effect that a certain category of audio-visual stimuli produces on their listeners: a “pleasurable, tingly sensation that begins in the head and scalp and moves throughout the limbs of the body, causing them to relax” (Young, 2015.)
An international, internet-based community meets and grows mainly around You Tube videos whose audio-visual content is designed to trigger the ASMR. But Wikipedia pages, websites, blogs, Facebook groups, podcasts, and iPhone applications also proliferate, sustaining a community that is not only ‘consuming’ but also inquiring, giving feedback, learning, and promoting. They provide us with what I would call a ‘vernacular theory’ of its peculiar sounds.
At the same time, the ASMR community has triggered an academic response, particularly in neuropsychology. The focus of this field on the mind-body effects that audio-visual stimuli can elicit ultimately narrows down a complex phenomenon to an automatic bodily response.
In this paper I focus primarily on the community and the academic response, concentrating on their agency in shaping this phenomenon. I ask: is ASMR a truly new feeling? How can the discourse and vocabulary around a certain sensation determines it? How has the online content given rise to a particular ASMR aesthetic that is now characteristic of a certain sonic quality? How do the visual and auditory components work together to determine how we hear?
I argue that we cannot fully account for the affective space crafted around the ASMR, as both a bodily sensation and sonic quality—and how the two might interact, unless we reconsider how the community “vernacular theories” work with academic discourse to inform the ways in which we hear and feel sound.

 

Born in 1987, Giulia Accornero graduated in Economics (BA, Università “L. Bocconi”, Milano, 2010),  Musicology (BA, Conservatorio “G. Verdi”, Milano, 2013), and Discipline Storiche Critiche e Analitiche della Musica (MA, Conservatorio “G. Verdi”, Milano 2016). She is a doctoral candidate in Music Theory at Harvard University. Her dissertation situates the developments in measured music witnessed in Italy and France in the late Middle Ages within the broader history of mathematics. Her secondary research area focuses on the technology and aesthetics of sound amplification in ASMR and Contemporary Music. Her articles are published by Pisa University Press (forthcoming), Edizioni ETS and Edizioni del Teatro alla Scala. In 2014 she founded Sound of Wander, a contemporary music season in Milan. In 2018 she founded the GEM Lab, a workshop in which Harvard GSAS students meet regularly to sing and study early musical notations.