| Artist | Barbara Ellison |
| Duration | 165 min |
| Part of | Musical Utopias |
After a two-year absence, Musical Utopias (the 5th edition!) is finally back to be experienced live at Korzo.
This year's festival revolves around Voices & Machines: human computer voices, computer-like human voices, voices that move from written text to speech to singing, the optimisation of the self, modesty and grandeur, the breaking down of the self, development and impermanence, the superiority of nature, performances without performers but also performances overflowing with performers and pure abundance.
Barbara Ellison (Nathalie Smoor & Ensemble Klang)
A brand new two hour multimedia work from Barbara Ellison’s world of CyberSongs. Ellison describes the new work as ‘a transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices and computer-like human voice, silent movies and live band’. Performed by Nathalie Smoor and Ensemble Klang, the work features lighting and staging by Pavla Beranova, and a series of silent movie projections.
This live show extends and adds to the series of CyberSongs released to great acclaim on Unsounds in 2021. About the album: “[Ellison] delves in this work into the sonic intricacies of voice avatars and the ‘musicalisation’ of TTS (Text-to-speech), a type of speech synthesis application that is used to create a spoken sound version of raw text in a computer document. […] she creates hypnotic textures of vocal utterances through the intensive and extensive use of repetition, as tools and materials to give rise to surprising audible phenomena of a fascinating and odd musicality.
Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings, turning into the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns of the obsessively phantasmatic trans-human song cycle of the ‘CyberSongs’. [The sound environment] references real-world instruments, that can be described as having an off-kilter jazz or pop aesthetic.”
Passe-partout
Tickets for Musical Utopias are always day tickets. Want to experience the full three days of the festival? Then you're in luck, as a passe-partout costs just €45.
Korzo Zaal