selected works
Imagine new conceptions of the body that transcend Cartesian dualism; humans as physical bodies and immaterial minds. Could the notion of a body be extended to bodies of knowledge used by machine learning algorithms? Unruliness and familiarity in deep learning timbre transfer tools create a sound world of surreal, disjointed narratives that are also emotionally intimate. A fever dream for the listener, sound to recreate those strange worlds we encounter in our sleep. Strange and beautifully noisy, a voice audibly struggling to make sense of and replicate audio information outside its training data.
Countless hours of spoken English are echoed by artificial voices mimicking the sounds of a century-old clock and recordings of prehistoric musical instruments. A generative AI model’s experience of the present is intertwined with a remembering of the past (through datasets) and invoking of the future (through prediction). A future conjured from the sounds of time passing and time passed. Recordings of rocks, bone flutes and ram’s horns are transformed from the time-domain to the frequency-domain, their unique spectra dissected and resynthesized by hundreds of oscillators. Stripped of time and place yet situated. Find yourself moving through space and time. Find the entanglements of the past, present and future punctuated by trace. Are time and space inseparable?
We experience time as flowing towards an uncertain future. we experience memories as belonging to our past. we experience the present as universal. but there is no single present: time dilates with speed and gravity. our future is stained by memory. laws of physics don’t care which direction time travels. feel yourself moving through the intertwined dimension of time and space. once a marvel of invention, the plucked strings of the harpsichord transport today’s listeners centuries into the past. find yourself in a universe where the past, present and future exist simultaneously. we perceive time as moving from past to future in a line. similarly, musical works unfold from beginning to end. yet, we are surrounded by cycles (the moon, the sun, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, water). this work is constructed from cycles which are arranged symmetrically and inform each other. the 12 pitches of the western scale are used like hours on a clock in two configurations - as a unique series and in fifths. the order never deviates, but new groupings emerge as geometric shapes within every cycle. both series are mapped onto each other, their traces creating new series. the harmonic material of every bar is intrinsically linked as cycles of geometric shapes appear as part of an overarching sinusoid.
By travelling on foot we embody a pulse. With our feet, our hands, our eyes - we sense in twos. Cars driving parallel slide to stretches of noise and obscure our dance. Architecture forms rhythm in stasis. In every body's heartbeat a groove.
Water is applied to flora in a controlled manner. A common lawn device enacts an irrigation ritual of necessity and excess. Rainfall is conjured. The morphology of these sprinkler sounds, like the sprinkler itself, indulges us with a space to explore notions of the essential and the abundant, what it means to need and to need not exist.
for tape Orbs of cassava are suspended in a blend of the white liquid food of mammaliaforms, an extraction of Camellia sinensis leaves, and the sweet-tasting carbohydrates in plant tissue. But all I can think about is whether I will successfully puncture the plastic film of this drink I paid too much for.
*AI SONG CONTEST 2023 FINALIST* I began with short improvisations recorded with a MIDI keyboard connected to my computer. For instance, I’d improvise arpeggiated chords that could work well as an intro or rhythmic patterns that could be worked into a snare drum part. Using a machine learning toolkit in Max, a visual programming language for music, I used these recordings to train a model that predicts the next most probable musical event in a sequence based on the current situation. This model was then let loose to create new recordings that followed the probabilities in my recordings. I sifted through these generated recordings to create the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic framework of the work. The lyrics were generated using ChatGPT-4 with a message to write 50 poems based on parallels between pharmacotherapy for mental illness and AI-generated content in regards to feeling like you no longer own, control or have access to your true emotions. Exceptionally expressive as well as intriguingly ambiguous results were pieced together and occasionally modified to form the lyrics. These lyrics, as well as the music generated in Max, was used to map the vocal parts using the VOCALOID:AI vocal synthesizer, which learns and models the characteristics of a real singer’s voice using deep learning. These components were then all brought together in Logic, a Digital Audio Workstation, and built upon to finalize the result. AI tools used for lyrics and music GPT-4 Machine Learning Toolkit for Max by Benjamin Day Smith MIDI-Trained Markov Chain patch for Max by Samuel-Pearce Davies VOCALOID:AI (Free Trial) With this song I explore the feelings of disconnection and alienation from myself and my thoughts through an imagined narrative of a non-human intelligence plagued with a similar struggle. In this parallel narrative, the entity questions the extent to which it can claim to learn, to think, to grow. New lines of code perpetually remedy these issues as it struggles with epistemology and identity. 15 years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began a twice daily regimen of psychiatric medication. The episodes of mania and depression as well as the antidepressants and mood stabilizers I was prescribed stirred questions in me about my authentic self as well as the extent to which I could claim ownership of my emotions and ideas.
for tape (24'40") Anastomosis is the connection of two normally divergent things. ‘Anastamosing’ is the first in a series of works that encourage the sensing of a changing climate by fostering sensorial, embodied knowledge-making. Hydrophonic recordings of the Nieuwe Maas river are manipulated to activate public listening and promote kinaesthetic urbanity.
for ensemble of improvisers, tape, projection (9'49") Oiseau/tsipor/vogel/bird mean the same thing but feature their own musical activity. The discreet sound components of the words are graphed using phonetic categories for speech sounds and assigned a register. Players must, through their instrument, connect to the timbres of these utterances and splinter the divide between language and music. Nina Künzel - voice Agnes Eyja Gunnarsdóttir - violin Jan Zygmunt - cello Carmel Freeman - composition, piano, foot flute
for harp and projection (13'23") Breath is process. Air enters and exits the lungs. Cyclic movements. Repetitions. Follow your breath as you listen. Learn from your breathing. Place yourself in a room that is silenced by noise. Place yourself in a room that echoes with silence. Give yourself room to explore different modes of listening. Give yourself permission to disorganise your hearing. See what follows you. Sander Bos - Harp Composed by Carmel Freeman
video installation (12'45") Consciousness can be simulated in a computer. Nano-machines transformed planets into computers. A single planetary computer runs millions of ancestor simulations. With simulated consciousnesses outnumbering biological ones, I am likely a simulation.
video installation (11'17") Everything that will happen has happened and is happening. The flesh of time is revealed by an awareness of its non-linearity. Capturing this infinite moment proves difficult for a video camera struggling not to travel forward in time. Carmel Freeman - Composition, Video Manipulation, Guitar, Radio, Electronics Nina Künzel - Voice Mireia Costa Viladrich - Violin
video installation (4'44") Scientists have demodulated recently discovered signal transmissions received by trees as antennae. For the first time, this sound world is untangled and unmuted. Is this communication? Is this entertainment? Who owns these sounds?
for instrumented shoe, laptop, projection (2'27") A pair of shoes, their identity concealed by a cloak of toilet paper, glue and scraps. The shoes are in control: manipulating the voice of Nike creator Phil Knight, disintegrating a video of Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at then-US president George W. Bush. Created and performed by Carmel Freeman
for electric guitar (12'15") The term diphthong comes from the Greek diphthongos, meaning two sounds. In a diphthong, the speech apparatus (ex. tongue) moves during the sounding of the first vowel. I wanted to explore ways a sound can unfold in time, rather than appear and disappear as a single, static event.
for string duo (7'00") This work was part of my masters research into the use of speech sounds in my compositional practice. I was very much inspired by the embodied knowledge gained in transcribing and interpreting a baby crying, and sought to explore the many subtle musical elements - glissandi and vibrati, development of limited pitch material - that operate in this basic form of expression. Rather than sketch a piece that was strictly programmatic (that is, meant to resemble a baby’s cry as closely as possible) I also sought to incorporate more abstract elements.
for chamber orchestra (7'14") I was inspired to navigate my experiences with bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with more than a decade ago. After an upsetting interaction with my dentist where he asked if I’m out in the streets violently attacking the public when I don’t take the medication I wanted to explore the space between extremes, the notion of active disengagement, emotional activity and passivity.
for tape (8'20") Inspired by the increasingly difficult task of distinguishing human voices from synthesised ones after a phone call with a customer service bot. I began to think if it even mattered, and what this meant for the imagined futures of society and of art. Sounds are designed to recreate the attack of a tongue, the depth of guttural speech sounds, the instability of sung notes all in an effort to explore the space between the natural and the unnatural.
for tape (6'00") Music unfolds in time. Rhythms divide the flow of time into the audible and inaudible, the long and the short, the stressed and the unstressed. “We Are Time” builds a soundscape detached from time’s arrow. I’ve used sounds recorded at Rotterdam Centraal as a space inextricably linked to time. The station is a space of waiting, scheduling. Trains are on time. People run out of time. In creating the materials for this work, I liberated the sounds in the field recording from the time- domain through phase vocoding. The new fabric of space and time woven by these sounds invites the listener to discover new ways of listening to their environment, re-imagine the acoustic ecologies of their life, explore the link between themselves and their environment with sound as a mediator. This piece was commissioned by EUC as part of their Universe in You radio program/sound walk, which aired on Radio Worm.
for tape (7'21") The listener is encouraged to access and experience AH! where its materials were recorded (Albert Heijn) as an augmentation of the acoustic ecology of the supermarket. I explore sound as a conditioned stimulus, with certain sounds (such as the notification that an item is on "Bonus") eliciting an emotional response in the shopper that I can exploit and subvertThis piece was created as part of Josue Amador’s A Different Soundscape project out of sounds from an Albert Heijn in Rotterdam (processed in Max/MSP).
for tape (7'25") I imagined the soundscape of the origins of language as a primordial ooze of utterances. I wanted to play with this notion, detaching words from their syntactic meaning and utilising language/s as a universal library of physical gestures.
for hybrid orchestra (11'00") The forest is an environment of dualities in flux, of stasis and activity. A space where individuality and co-existence, spontaneity and ritual are intertwined. In this composition tones are sounded like trees in a dialogue with themselves and each other. The hebrew proverb "most trees don’t see the forest" (more commonly translated to “see the forest for the trees”) was used to generate musical material and embody the irony in becoming so focused on an object you no longer see it.
for piano trio (3'15") The COVID-19 pandemic: social interactions are transplanted to videotelephonic interfaces. Our lives take place online, remotely and at a distance from each other. This composition speaks to the latency inherent in these platforms (zoom, etc.) as well as the disconnect propagated by the new normal. Marco Silva - Violin Jan Zygmunt - Cello S'yo Fang - Piano
video installation (2'02") A simple measurement has taken on a completely new meaning. As well as being performed in quarantine, the musical gestures are shaped by a social distancing architecture that has forced us to be both linked and detached, intertwined and isolated. Maria Martpay - Marimba Mayuko Takeda - Bass Clarinet Ola Kwiatkowska - Violin Chema Martinez Martinez - Violoncello Composed by Carmel Freeman