Electroacoustic music festival at Northeastern set to begin

By Johanna Kaiser, Town Correspondent

Young musicians from across North America are set to showcase how technology can make, alter, and push the limits of music at a three-day festival celebrating electroacoustic music.

The musicians will join top French and German composers Thursday through Saturday to perform and discuss the music that uses technology to reshape sound and how listeners here it at Northeastern University’s Sound in SPACE: The Art of Electroacoustic Music Interpretation.

“It’s not pretty melodies and major and minor keys,” said Mike Frengal, a music technology professor at Northeastern and a festival organizer. “It’s making music with sounds of the environment and processing these sounds so they sound very electronic.”

Electroacoustic music, which began separately in France and Germany in the 1950’s, often does not have the melody, traditional rhythm, or harmony of the tunes on popular radio, and a large part of the listening experience is how the sounds are heard in a particular place.

A total of 32 electronic speakers have been strategically placed throughout the Fenway Center at Northeastern where the shows will be performed to create a speaker-orchestras. The system creates more dramatic sound an ensures every concert is different and person’s interpretation of the music unique.

“It’s using technology to expand the musical process and what we think music is,” Frengal said.

The festival, which is sponsored by the Goethe Institut of Boston, includes performances by six students who produced original works and works by Daniel Teruggi, director of the Groupe de Recherche Musicale in France, and Ludger Brümmer, director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe, German.

There will also be panels and workshops discussing the genre.

All performances and discussions are free and open to the public and take place at Northeastern’s Fenway Center at 77 St. Stephen Street. A full schedule of events can be found here.